Arjuna and the Bird's Eye
The great teacher Drona sets his young princes a simple test. A wooden bird sits high in a tree. Before they shoot, he asks each of them one question. Only one gives the answer he is waiting for.
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130 stories
The great teacher Drona sets his young princes a simple test. A wooden bird sits high in a tree. Before they shoot, he asks each of them one question. Only one gives the answer he is waiting for.
On the morning of a great battle, the warrior Arjuna looks across the field, sees his own family and teachers on the other side, and puts down his bow. What his friend and charioteer Krishna tells him next became the Bhagavad Gita.
Prince Bharata comes home to find that his mother has sent his beloved brother Rama into exile so that Bharata can be king. He does not want the throne. So he walks into the forest to bring Rama back.
A boy from a forest tribe is turned away by the great teacher Drona. So he makes a clay statue of Drona and teaches himself, until he is a better archer than the princes. Then his teacher asks for a terrible fee.
Lakshmana lies badly wounded on the battlefield, and only a healing herb from a far-off mountain can save him before sunrise. Hanuman flies north to fetch it. But when he gets there, he can't tell which herb is the right one.
Karna was born wearing golden armour and earrings that kept him safe from any weapon. He also made a promise never to refuse anyone who asked him for a gift at midday. One day, a visitor comes to test that promise.
Two boys share everything at school. Years later, one is a king in a golden city and the other is so poor his family often goes hungry. Sudama walks to the palace with a small bundle of flattened rice. Will his old friend even remember him?
For years an old woman in the forest waits for Rama, sweeping the path and gathering fruit each morning in case today is the day. When he finally comes, she has only berries to give him. What she does with them surprises everyone.
An army is building a bridge of rocks across the sea. The bears and monkeys carry huge boulders. And one tiny squirrel keeps rolling in the sand and running to the shore. Is that really helping?
Four thirsty brothers drink from a beautiful lake and fall to the ground. When the fifth, Yudhishthira, arrives, a voice tells him he may drink only after answering its questions. His life, and theirs, depends on his answers.
In 1942, a young ship's steward named Poon Lim found himself alone on a tiny raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He would stay there for more than four months.
Two young friends in New York promise to meet in the same doorway exactly twenty years later. One of them keeps the appointment. O. Henry's story of loyalty and duty.
A runaway slave hiding in a desert cave meets a lion with a wounded paw. Years later, in a roaring arena in Rome, they meet again.
A shepherd's son from Ethiopia was added to his Olympic team at the last minute. On a torchlit night in Rome in 1960, he ran the marathon with no shoes on.
A poor man stands all night in an icy lake to win a reward from Emperor Akbar. But the court says a far-away lamp kept him warm, and he gets nothing. Then Birbal starts cooking his khichdi.
Emperor Akbar asks his court a question nobody could possibly answer. How many crows live in the city? Birbal answers at once.
At sixteen, Sudha Chandran was a rising young classical dancer. Then an accident on the road took her leg. Everyone assumed her dancing days were over. She did not.
The grandson of enslaved people, born to a poor farming family in Alabama, went to the 1936 Olympic Games in Hitler's Germany and won four gold medals.
A schoolteacher's son from a Gujarat fishing village went to work as a clerk in a hot foreign port. He came home with a little money, a rented room and an idea. What he built changed how ordinary Indians thought about owning a share of a company.
Anna Mary Moses spent her life on farms, raising a family and doing endless chores. In her late seventies she picked up a paintbrush. The world came to know her as Grandma Moses.
In July 1969, three men rode a giant rocket towards the Moon. With alarms sounding and fuel running low, two of them flew a fragile craft down to its grey surface, while the world held its breath.
In 1981, seven young engineers in Pune started a software company with ten thousand rupees, borrowed from one founder's wife. For years they had no money, few clients and endless government paperwork. This is how Infosys began.
In 1893, a young Indian monk with no invitation, no money and no friends in America stood up in a crowded hall in Chicago. His first five words brought thousands of people to their feet.
At an age when most people retire, Harland Sanders lost the roadside restaurant he had spent twenty-five years building. He had a pension cheque, an old car and a recipe for fried chicken. So he started again.
One hot summer night, clever Tenali Rama spots two thieves hiding in his garden. Instead of shouting for help, he has a quiet chat with his wife, loudly enough for the thieves to hear.
All summer long, Grasshopper sings while Ant carries grain. Then the first cold wind blows across the field.
A hungry jackal falls into a tub of blue dye and comes out a colour no animal has ever seen. The whole forest bows to him. But can he keep his secret?
The daughter of poor farmers in the hills of Manipur hid her boxing from her own father. She went on to become a world champion again and again, even after becoming a mother of three.
A farmer's son from a village in Haryana was taken to a stadium to lose a little weight. There he picked up a javelin, and years later he threw it to India's first Olympic gold in athletics.
A bored young shepherd finds a funny way to bring the whole village running up the hill. It works once. It works twice.
Louis Braille lost his sight as a small child in a French village. At fifteen, working late at night with a stylus and a sheet of paper, he invented a way for blind people to read with their fingertips.
Henry Ford was a farm boy who loved taking watches apart. His first two car companies failed. On his third try, he built a simple black car that ordinary families could afford, and the world began to move differently.
A greedy lion makes the animals of the forest send him one of them every day for his dinner. When it is the little rabbit's turn, he walks very, very slowly, because he has a plan.
On a spring evening in Vienna in 1824, a packed theatre heard a new symphony for the first time. The man who wrote it could not hear a single note.
A government chemist in Ahmedabad began mixing washing powder in his backyard and selling it door to door from his bicycle, before and after work. He named it after the daughter he had lost.
A rice farmer's daughter from a village in Assam used to play football in the paddy fields. In 2018, she became the first Indian to win a world title on the running track.
Every evening, a big white dog waited at Shibuya Station in Tokyo for his master's train. One day his master did not come home. The dog kept waiting, for almost ten years.
A poor shoemaker has leather left for just one more pair of shoes. He cuts it out, goes to bed, and in the morning, something wonderful is waiting on his workbench.
An old emperor gives every child in the land a single seed. Whoever grows the finest flower, he says, will rule after him. One boy's seed will not grow.
Sarah Breedlove was born to parents who had been enslaved, orphaned at seven and widowed by twenty. She washed other people's laundry for a living. Then she found a problem she understood better than anyone, and built a business to solve it.
In 1848, a young woman in Pune walked to school every morning while people on the street threw mud and stones at her. Savitribai Phule kept walking, and opened the door to education for the girls of India.
A boy who lost almost everything in the Partition of India found his way to an army running track, and then to the fastest races in the world.
As a teenager in Assam, Jadav Payeng found a bare sandbank in the Brahmaputra river, scorched by the sun. He began planting trees on it. Decades later, tigers and elephants walk through his forest.
A hungry fox spots a bunch of shining purple grapes, high up on a vine. He jumps and jumps. Then he says something very interesting.
As a child in Manipur, she lifted a bundle of firewood her older brother could not. Years later, after a painful failure at the Olympics, she lifted India's first medal of the Tokyo Games.
A god offers King Midas any wish he likes, and the king already loves gold more than anything. By the next morning, everything he touches shines.
A poor farmer and his wife find a golden egg in their goose's nest. Then another. Then another. One golden egg a day should be plenty, shouldn't it?
In June 1215, in a riverside meadow in England, an unpopular king was forced to accept a list of promises. It failed within weeks, yet its ideas have outlived every king since.
A young soldier who practised hockey after duty, by the light of the moon, led India to three Olympic gold medals and became a legend of the game.
More than two thousand years ago, the most powerful ruler in India won a terrible war, and then did something almost no conqueror has ever done. He had his sorrow carved into stone for everyone to read.
Florence Nightingale was expected to marry well and live a quiet, comfortable life. Instead she walked the wards of a filthy army hospital at night, and then used numbers to change how the world cares for the sick.
A young painter lies ill in a New York studio, counting the leaves on an ivy vine outside her window. When the last one falls, she says, she will go too.
A little red hen finds some grains of wheat and asks her friends to help her plant them. "Not I," says the cat. "Not I," says the dog. "Not I," says the duck. But at the end, everyone wants a slice of bread.
In 1940, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were trapped on the beaches of northern France. To help bring them home, an extraordinary fleet set out across the Channel, of fishing boats, ferries, yachts and pleasure launches.
After supper one evening, a comfortable husband and wife discover that their lottery ticket might have won a fortune. Before they even check the number, things begin to change. Chekhov's sharp, funny story.
Jamsetji Tata dreamed of steel mills, power stations and a great institute of science for a country that was not yet free. He did not live to see most of them built. This is the story of how he planted them anyway.
Country people in England said that milkmaids never caught smallpox. In 1796, a village doctor decided to find out whether they were right, and began the story of vaccines.
Verghese Kurien was sent to a small Gujarat town against his wishes and planned to leave as soon as he could. He stayed for the rest of his life, and helped millions of village farmers turn their milk into a livelihood.
Thrown out of her home at twenty with a newborn baby, Sindhutai Sapkal survived by singing for food at railway stations. Then she began to take in other people's abandoned children.
In a poor village in Bihar, a labourer picked up a hammer and a chisel and began to cut a path through a rocky hill. Everyone laughed. He kept going for twenty-two years.
Walt Disney's first studio went bankrupt. His second lost its star character and nearly all its artists in a single meeting. On the long train ride home, he needed a new idea, and fast.
In 1905, a 26-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office, with no university job and no laboratory, wrote four papers in his spare time. Together they changed how we understand light, atoms, space and time.
Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son who fell in love with engines. His first real product failed almost every test. Then the war destroyed his factory, and an earthquake finished what the bombs began.
A young man from Calcutta is posted to a lonely village post office, where an orphan girl keeps house for him. Tagore's tender story of a bond that means far more to one than to the other.
On a stormy night, a dripping-wet girl knocks at the palace gate and says she is a real princess. The queen has a clever, rather strange way to find out.
In the winter of 1925, a deadly illness broke out in a small town in Alaska, cut off by snow and ice. The medicine that could stop it was nearly a thousand kilometres away. Only dogs could bring it.
In 1947, six men lashed nine balsa logs together and pushed off from the coast of Peru, heading for islands thousands of kilometres across the Pacific. Experts said the raft would sink within weeks.
An old sage sees a scorpion struggling in the river and reaches in to save it. It stings him. He reaches in again.
A poor boy in Brazil, who played barefoot with a ball made of socks, once saw his father cry over a lost World Cup. Eight years later, aged seventeen, he kept a promise.
Emperor Akbar draws a line on the floor and sets his court a puzzle. Make it shorter, he says, without touching it.
A twelve-year-old boy in Louisville lost his new bicycle and walked, furious, into a basement boxing gym. He became Muhammad Ali, and one day he risked everything for what he believed.
For fourteen hundred years, nobody on Earth could read the writing of ancient Egypt. Then soldiers digging near the Nile found a broken slab of dark stone, and a young Frenchman made it speak.
On the hottest day of the year, a tired crow finds a pitcher with a little water at the very bottom. Her beak can't reach it. So she thinks.
A plain little country mouse visits her grand cousin in the big town, where the food is fancy and the plates are silver. But there is something the town mouse forgot to mention.
One egg in the mother duck's nest is bigger than the rest, and the chick that hatches from it looks nothing like his brothers and sisters. Nobody wants him. Not yet.
During the Second World War, the people of a poor mountain village in France opened their doors to strangers on the run. They hid thousands, and hardly ever spoke of it afterwards.
In the summer of 1940, a crowd of desperate refugees gathered at the gate of a small Japanese consulate in Lithuania. The diplomat inside had to choose between his orders and his conscience.
Two monks bound by strict vows come to a flooded river, where a young woman is waiting, unable to cross. One of them does something the other cannot forget.
Two old friends set off on foot on the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Only one of them gets there. Tolstoy's story of what it really means to keep a promise to God.
A lonely old cobbler hears a voice in the night promising a visitor tomorrow. All day he watches the street from his basement window, waiting. Tolstoy's gentle story.
In 1915, Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic ice. Twenty-eight men were stranded at the bottom of the world. Every one of them came home.
Six men who have never seen an elephant each touch a different part of one, and each is certain he knows exactly what it is. An ancient parable from India.
A young couple with almost no money each secretly give up their greatest treasure to buy the other a Christmas present. O. Henry's most loved story.
A golden statue who can see all the sorrow of his city asks a little swallow to give away his jewels and gold, one piece at a time. Oscar Wilde's tender fairy tale.
A mighty lion laughs when a tiny mouse promises to repay his kindness one day. Then the hunters' net falls.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam delivered newspapers as a boy on a small island town in South India. He grew up to lead India's space and missile programmes, and became its most loved President.
In December 1914, a fire tore through Thomas Edison's laboratory and factories. He was 67, and much of his life's work was in flames. What he did next is the story.
In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi set out on foot to walk 385 kilometres to the sea, to break an unjust law by picking up salt. The whole world watched.
A peasant is offered all the land he can walk around in a single day, for one small price. Tolstoy's famous parable about wanting more.
Marie Curie studied in secret as a girl in Warsaw, worked in a leaky Paris shed and discovered two new elements. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
In August 2010, a mine collapsed in Chile's Atacama Desert, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground. For seventeen days, nobody knew if they were alive.
As a child, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her leg after polio. At twenty, she became the fastest woman in the world.
In 1938 a young London stockbroker cancelled a skiing holiday and went to Prague instead. He told almost nobody what he did there, for fifty years.
For 28 years, a wall divided Berlin. On 9 November 1989, a confused answer at a press conference sent thousands of people to the border, and history changed overnight.
His horse runs away, and the neighbours say what bad luck. The old man only says, "Who knows?" An ancient Chinese story about good fortune and bad.
The fastest animal in the meadow is so sure of winning that he stops for a nap. The slowest one simply keeps going.
At a party, a rich banker bets a young lawyer two million roubles that he cannot survive fifteen years alone in a room. Chekhov's story of what the lawyer learns.
In June 2018, twelve boys from a Thai football team and their coach were trapped by floodwater deep inside a cave. The world came together to bring them out.
A clever monkey shares sweet fruit with a crocodile every day. But one afternoon, halfway across the river, his friend tells him a terrible secret.
In occupied Warsaw, social worker Irena Sendler helped smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto, and buried their real names in jars so they could one day be found.
Around 1450, in the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg found a way to print books quickly. Within fifty years, Europe was transformed.
A king believes he would never fail if he knew three things - the right time, the right people and the right thing to do. Tolstoy's quiet parable about the answers.
Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop failed again and again to fly. So they went back to the beginning, built their own wind tunnel and checked everything for themselves.
Helen Keller could not see or hear, and had no words for anything, until a determined young teacher spelled into her hand at a water pump in Alabama.
In 2011, Arunima Sinha lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train. Two years later she stood on the summit of Mount Everest.
The most powerful man in the world offered a poor philosopher anything he wanted. His answer has been remembered for more than two thousand years.
Two tricksters sell a vain emperor cloth that only clever people can see. Everyone pretends, until one child says what they all can see.
In January 2009, a passenger jet lost both engines minutes after take-off from New York. The pilots had about three and a half minutes to decide what to do.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find mould growing on a dish of bacteria. It took another twelve years, and a team in Oxford, to turn his discovery into a medicine.
Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace for one glittering night at a ball. When it disappears, she and her husband pay for it with ten years of their lives.
A giant builds a wall to keep the children out of his beautiful garden. Then spring refuses to come. Oscar Wilde's fairy tale about a heart that opens.
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for opposing apartheid. He came out not seeking revenge, but determined to build a country for everyone.
A proud professor visits a Zen master to learn about Zen, and talks the whole time. The master quietly pours him some tea, and keeps on pouring.
A five-year-old girl in Calcutta becomes best friends with a tall Afghan fruit-seller. Years later he returns, and her father understands what they shared. Tagore's beloved story.
A hungry traveller arrives in a village where nobody will share. All he asks for is a pot of water and a fire, because he knows how to make soup from a stone.
A hungry ex-convict, turned away by every inn, is welcomed by a kind old bishop, and repays him by stealing his silver. The famous scene from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
As a girl in a small town in Haryana, Kalpana Chawla watched planes and drew spaceships. She became the first woman born in India to go to space.
On Christmas Eve 1971, a plane broke apart over the Amazon rainforest. Seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell three kilometres, still strapped to her seat, and survived.
Defeated, hunted and hiding in a cave, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland was ready to give up. Then he watched a spider try, and fail, and try again.
On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. Her quiet "no" sparked a year-long boycott that helped change America.
Anaya had planned her whole future around one letter. When it said no, she discovered that the door she'd been staring at was not the only one in the room.
On 11 September 2001, dozens of airliners were ordered out of the sky and sent to a small town in Newfoundland. For several days its people looked after thousands of stranded strangers as if they were family.
Mira's seeds were supposed to grow faster with music. When nothing happened, she thought she had failed, until her grandfather showed her what a real scientist does next.
Tavi didn't mean to break his sister's kite. Hiding it seemed easy, but keeping a secret turned out to be much heavier than telling the truth.
A summer washing dishes in a busy restaurant kitchen taught more about work, respect and pride than any classroom did.
Srinivasa Ramanujan failed his college exams and worked as a clerk, yet his notebooks were full of mathematics nobody had seen before. One letter changed everything.
In April 1970, an explosion left three astronauts nearly 200,000 miles from Earth in a damaged spacecraft. What followed was one of the greatest problem-solving efforts in history.
At Christmas 1914, in the first winter of the First World War, soldiers on opposite sides of the trenches laid down their weapons and met as human beings, if only for a little while.
One rainy morning, an old man left a spare umbrella at a station with a handwritten note. He had no idea what it would start.
A reflection on hurry, attention and the quiet details of an ordinary day, and on what we might be missing while we rush towards the next thing.