Episode 14 – Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men -Jataka tales.

Today’s story is from the Jataka tales.

Of Mice and Men is a story that may read off as an inspiration for the success story of the biggest retailer in the world. It’s about what you can achieve with very little. All it takes is a bit of determination and planning. And it doesn’t hurt to have luck on your side.

The character this week is the goddess of Bees, Wasps, and Hornets!

The story begins in medieval India in an ordinary kingdom. 

One day, one of the king’s advisers was strolling through the streets with his drinking buddies. Maybe they were just on a pub crawl, but they were sober enough to spot what lay in the street in front of them. Some of them.

“Gold! It looks like gold” said the adviser.

“Not quite,” said the designated chariot driver in the group. “It’s just a dead mouse”

“You mean the DJ?”

“Not quite”

The adviser found it hard to believe there was a real dead mouse. He tried to focus his eyes, it was a hard task, but as he got closer he realized his buddy was right. It was a dead mouse. He stepped away immediately because his survival instincts kicked in – even when drunk, people were scared of the bubonic plague back then, and a mouse lying dead might quite possibly be a plague carrier.

He tried to twist his way out of his earlier assertion.

“Of course I knew physically that it’s a dead mouse – I saw it right away.”
His buddy rolled his eyes as the adviser continued “When I say gold, I mean it figuratively. Any enterprising person could make their fortune out of that dead mouse”.

Obviously there was no way to prove or disprove this hypothesis objectively. The group moved onto the next pub.

But meanwhile, there was an enterprising young man passing by, who by chance had overheard the conversation, and had recognized the adviser, and took his assertion seriously.

By the way, let’s call the young man Jeff, given the parallels with the other success story.

“He’s the king’s advisor,” thought Jeff, “he surely knows what he’s talking about”

Jeff picked up the mouse. He had nothing to lose. If he did get the plague today he at least wouldn’t have to worry about earning money to feed himself tomorrow. 

He walked around with the mouse for a while.

Until a cat approached him, followed soon after by its master. The cat wasn’t interested in Jeff, its focus was entirely on the mouse.

When the cat’s owner found the cat wasn’t following him home but was looking intently at the mouse, he decided he no longer had to go to the pet store to buy cat food. Here was a better solution, a lot cheaper and he could avoid the long checkout queue at PetSmart.

“Hey, can I have the mouse? I’ll give you two copper coins for it” asked the cat’s owner.

“Deal!” said Jeff though he didn’t really know what the going rate for dead mice was.

Two copper coins aren’t much in today’s world and nor was it a lot in those days, but it was enough for Jeff to buy some sweets. He wasn’t going to eat them himself, he had grand plans! Instead, Jeff took the sweets and a pitcher of water and went to the edge of the town, near the forest. He waited there all day until he found the people he had been waiting for. It was a bunch of florists, who would go look for wildflowers in the forest every day and sell them by the temple in the evening. It was hard work on long days in the hot sun. The flower pickers or florists were more than happy to buy sweets and water from Jeff. But they didn’t have any money going back towards town, they hadn’t sold their flowers yet. 

It may sound like a bad idea, but Jeff gladly accepted payment in flowers. He got a bunch of flowers from each flower picker in exchange for the sweets and water.

When he had sold all the sweets and was left with a huge bunch of flowers, he took them into town and sold them. This time for money.

As the flower pickers had shown up with fewer flowers than normal, and demand was still the same, he had no problems selling his bunches. 

The money he made was more than enough to buy sweets the next day and repeat his sales routine, first the sweets and water and then the flowers.

He had found a latent requirement and was exploiting it.

One day as he bought sweets and was headed to his usual place by the edge of town, he passed by the king’s garden. There had been a major storm the night before, and there were a lot of fallen branches and twigs all over the garden giving it a bad appearance.

Sensing an opportunity he immediately rushed to the king’s gardener.

“How’s it going?” he asked

“Bad!” replied the gardener “the king is visiting in an hour, and all my months of hard work on the garden means nothing with the storm damage. I am certain to get demoted now. I can’t clean up everything in an hour!”

“No worries, I got you,” said Jeff. “I can clear up everything before the king arrives”

“Will you really?” Asked the gardener “I’ll give a 20% of my bonus”

“Done!” said Jeff and bounded out, into the street.

“Umm, the garden is the other way if you want to earn your err… 10%”

But Jeff had meant to go into the street. Pretty soon he found what he was looking for – a group of children playing in the street. Because these were medieval times, they readily accepted sweets from a complete stranger in exchange for…. “what was it again? Just pick up fallen sticks from the garden? Yeah no problem” they said and in no time all the sticks were gathered up.

“About your err… 5%” the gardener started to say but just then he was interrupted. It was the royal potter who was passing by and noticed the neatly arranged piles of branches and sticks. “That’s just what I need for my oven,” he told Jeff. “Can you bring it all to my shop? I’ll pay you a gold coin for each bundle”

“Sure thing,” said Jeff, for this was a very good deal. 

When Jeff delivered the bundles, the Potter thanked him and also threw in a few extra pots he had lying around. 

Together with the profits from selling flowers, Jeff now had enough capital to set up a refreshment stall again at the edge of town. Again he sold sweets and provided water but not just to the flower pickers.

One day several grass cutters passed by. It had been a long hot day and seeing the sweaty and exhausted grass cutters Jeff offered them sweets and water on the house. Feeling thoroughly refreshed they expressed their gratitude and asked Jeff to let them know if they could help him at any time. 

Well, that time soon came. Jeff got word from one of his customers that a horse merchant was soon arriving in town with 500 horses to sell.

This was the perfect opportunity to corner the grass market because grass, not oats were staple horse food in those times. He contacted his friends, the grass cutters and bought their entire inventory for a reasonable price, and on credit meaning, he would pay them back later.

Soon he sold all the grass to the horse merchant for an insane profit.

Next, he did the same thing with a trading ship. He had advanced intelligence about the land the ship had arrived from. They were short on rubies and prized those highly. So he bought out all the rubies at the local jewelers. He was first on the dock to greet the ship when it arrived. He immediately made a deal with the traders and bought their entire cargo.

When people started trickling into the docks expecting to trade with the people from the faraway land, they were surprised that they were instead trading with their local refreshment stall guy.

But Jeff’s prices were reasonable – not too big of a markup, and Jeff was willing to accept payments in goods and services and not just money.

Jeff repeated this with a few more ships and pretty soon became the richest person in town. Not unlike his namesake. 

At this point, he decided to climb the social ladder further. On the pretext of thanking the king’s advisor for inspiring him at the start of the story, Jeff made his acquaintance. The adviser could not recall the incident with the dead mouse given his intoxication at the time but had to pretend that the advice was well thought out and deliberate. 

Soon they got to know each other better, Jeff got to know the adviser’s daughter even better, to the point of marriage. Eventually, Jeff rose to be the king’s advisor himself.

This is a story from the Jataka meant to illustrate how much can be accomplished with the smallest or even apparently worthless investment.

A number of business practices have been illustrated here many that are in successful use today – for example, the way Amazon interfaces with other sellers for you and makes money acting as a broker. 

Character of the week

The character this week is Brahmari. She’s the goddess of bees, hornets, and wasps. And they cling to her body. She has some other traditional weapons as well, like a sword an ax.

This story goes like many others – has my dad messing up again. Basically it’s very similar to others you’ve heard before, in episodes 1, 2. In this case, the demon was called Arunasura, who hated all gods.

He did what others including Ravana, Mahishasura, Hiranyakhsa, and others had done before him. He went deep into the Himalayas to where the river Ganga flowed out and prayed there to Brahma, the creator, who also happens to be my dad.

For the first 10000 years, Arunasura survived on dry leaves. It’s not like dry leaves are easily available there so that essentially meant he had a dry leaf or two every alternate Tuesday.

In the next 10000 years, he survived on drops of water and the following 10000 on air alone.

In the next 10000 years, he survived on nothing, just prayer. Brahma finally showed up.

He had finally learned something from other such incidents, and he had to play hard to get, which is why Arunasura had to wait so long. When he did show up, again Arunasara asked for immortality and to be all-powerful. 

I’ve been through that, not doing it anymore. I’ve been bitten a hundred times, I’m finally shy. But but but 40000 years of praying and that diet of nothing, what do I get out of it?

Brahma offered, alright let me give you some superpowers and make you invulnerable to all 2 legged and 4 legged creatures. That’s the best I can do.

That’s only birds and most mammals. What about spiders? I hate spiders! And snakes?

But Brahma had already gone.

Arunasura was an optimist and decided to try out his powers. By attacking Mount Kailash, which is the home of Shiva the destroyer. Check Episode 6.5 for some tales about this.

Shiva the destroyer being two-legged could not destroy Arunasura. Parvati, who was an avatar of Shakti decided to jump into the fight. She put on her superhero costume…. And became Brahmari! Her costume? It was made of bees, hornets, wasps and all other kinds of insects that are not two-legged and not four-legged.

She didn’t need to do anything to Arunasura herself, she simply unleashed the insects on him. In no time they were all over Arunasura and soon, Arunasura was all over the place in pieces.

That’s one more score for Shakti against a Brahma-blessed demon

That’s all for this week.

Next week

Next week we’re back to the Ramayana where we’ll talk about a clash between two titans. One of them – everyone around him is desperately trying to avoid making him angry. The other one has a magical object that can help him fight anything. And no, this isn’t the Incredible Hulk against Thor. 

The character next week is a disease. Yes, I’m speaking literally, not figuratively. He’s a disease. Thankfully not an untreatable one.