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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Emperor Akbar draws a line on the floor and sets his court a puzzle. Make it shorter, he says, without touching it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
