— Oliver Twist (1838), Chapter 2
About this quote
हिन्दी में
कृपया साहब, मुझे थोड़ा और चाहिए।
What it means
Nine words, and three of them are deference: please, sir, and the hedging some. Oliver asks in the exact register the institution has trained into him, and names no quantity — only more than nothing extra. There is no demand in the sentence for anyone to object to.
Worth keeping because of the verb. In 1838 English want still carried its older sense of lack, so the line is at once a polite request and a flat statement of destitution: I am in want. The offence is therefore neither rudeness nor greed but the act of saying a need aloud in a room organised around not hearing it.
What it teaches you
When someone asks you for more of something you control — a deadline, a budget line, a second helping of your attention — separate two reactions that arrive together: what the request would cost, and the irritation that it was made at all. The second is not information about the request. And if a person had to work themselves up to asking, what they asked for is almost certainly less than what they need.
अर्थ और सीख
ओलिवर बेहद विनम्र शब्दों में — ‘कृपया’, ‘साहब’ — बस थोड़ा और खाना माँगता है; न कोई ज़िद है, न कोई तय मात्रा। उस समय की अंग्रेज़ी में ‘want’ का अर्थ ‘अभाव’ भी था, इसलिए यह वाक्य माँग भी है और अपनी दरिद्रता का सीधा बयान भी। सीख यह है कि जब कोई आपसे कुछ और माँगे, तो माँग की क़ीमत और ‘माँगा ही क्यों’ वाली चिढ़ — इन दोनों को अलग-अलग करके देखें।
Where it comes from
Oliver, pushed forward by the other boys after they draw lots, asking for a second serving of gruel. The reaction it provokes — outrage, punishment, the offer of five pounds to anyone who will take him off the parish’s hands — is Dickens’s real subject.
The line survives as a punchline. In the book it is a child committing the crime of being visibly hungry in front of people paid to feed him.
