(a) "Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them." - Napoleon Bonaparte. Stating examples mention the rulers (i) who have harmed society and country, (ii) who worked for the development of society and country. (150 Words, 10) (b) "If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are father, mother and teacher." - A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Analyse. (150 Words, 10).

(a) Ambition, principles, and two kinds of rulers

• Ambition is a strong desire to achieve and to matter. In a ruler it can build a canal or empty a prison into a grave.
• Napoleon is right that character without principle is power looking for a use. Principle here means a public ethic: the people are not fuel.
• Harmful ambition treats the country as a private stage. Developmental ambition treats the office as a trust.

Rulers who harmed society and country

• Adolf Hitler turned ambition and a racial principle into genocide and a world war; Germany and Europe paid in corpses and ruin.
• Joseph Stalin industrialised with terror, famine and camps; the State's strength was real and so was the mass death.
• Pol Pot's Cambodia showed how a "pure" political principle can murder a society.
• In Indian memory, colonial extraction under the British Raj subordinated Indian welfare to metropolitan gain; famines and de-industrialisation were not accidents of weather alone.
• Among Indian political failures, Emergency excesses of 1975–77 — detention without the usual safeguards, press curbs, and forced programmes in some places — showed how even an elected ambition can injure constitutional morality.
• Local tyrannies — a landlord-politician who runs a district as a pocket borough — are the same pattern at a smaller scale.

Rulers and leaders who worked for development of society and country

• Ashoka after Kalinga turned conquest toward dhamma, welfare and a public ethic of restraint, which Indian political thought still cites.
• Akbar's attempt at a broader imperial ethic, including sulh-i-kul, sought a political community that was not only one sect's property.
• Abraham Lincoln held a union together against slavery's expansion; the cost was terrible, the principle was a wider freedom.
• Nelson Mandela used power after prison to restrain revenge and to build a constitutional order, which is development of a moral kind, not only of roads.
• In India, Jawaharlal Nehru's stress on science, institutions, adult franchise and a non-aligned dignity set a developmental frame, with flaws that later generations must name.
• Lal Bahadur Shastri's call for discipline in food and his simple life tied ambition to restraint.
• A. P. J. Abdul Kalam as President modelled a teacher-scientist in the highest ceremonial office, linking technology to a decent national self-respect.
• The test for a serving officer is the same as Napoleon's: a strong will to finish a dam or a raid is good only if law, rights and the weakest person still count.

(b) Father, mother and teacher

• Kalam is not cancelling police, CAG or the Lokpal. He is naming the first factory of conscience.
• A child who sees a parent buy a marksheet or beat a queue learns that the State is a shop. A child who sees a parent refuse a short-cut learns a cost.
• The mother, in Kalam's triad, is often the first instructor in care and in shame at a stolen rupee; the point is parenting, not a law that only women must be moral while men buy the ticket.
• The teacher is the first public officer the child meets. A teacher who sells grades or humiliates a caste produces both corruption and ugly minds.
• Beautiful minds, for Kalam, meant curiosity, integrity and compassion, not only high marks. Science without ethics is a better weapon.
• Schools that run only for board ranks and tuitions will not deliver his triad. Value education that is a weekly slogan also will not. The hidden curriculum — punctuality, no leaked paper, no fee for a seat — will.
• Limits of the quote: a clean home cannot defeat a dirty recruitment board alone. Institutions still matter. Kalam's claim is that without the three, institutions inherit already bent people.
• Policy that follows the quote: early childhood care, unpaid care recognised so parents have time, teacher training and status, and an end to political capture of school appointments.
• For a corruption-free country, father, mother and teacher are necessary and not sufficient. They are the seedbed. Law is the fence.