Hello, and welcome to stories from India, a podcast where we talk about myths, legends, and folktales from India. I’m your host Narada Muni, and I’m a mythological character myself.
I have the gift of eternal life, and knowledge of the past, the present, and the future. By profession, I’m a traveling musician and storyteller, so the way I’m doing my job is by podcast.
I have changed the format of the show a little, in accordance with your preferences. These mid-week episodes will no longer be doing characters of the week. We’ll instead do a story so that I don’t sound as boring as a Wikipedia article.
And this starts today! We’re going to see why building castles in the air and counting your chickens before they are hatched is not a good idea.
Our story starts in a little village in Ancient India. In that village, there lived a man. Let’s call him Aatur.
His profession was that of a singer combination holy man combination beggar. In what is probably the earliest example of busking, he would perform in the street, singing praises of God. At the end of that, he would pass around his hat and collect money. Usually, that was enough to buy dinner.
One day he lucked out. A lady gave him a big pot of rice pudding!
It’s not that his singing had been particularly good that day. The lady just had a lot of leftovers when some guests unexpectedly did not show up.
Regardless, Aatur was excited. He had no fridge at home obviously given how poor he was so. So he couldn’t possibly survive on this for a week. But he could consume some and sell the rest. That is what he decided to do.
It’d been a long day though. So he hung the pot next to his bed and drifted off to sleep thinking about all the possibilities.
The next day, he sold the remaining porridge to a farmer, who desperately needed a packed lunch that day. And the farmer gave him a couple of goat kids in exchange.
You might wonder how poor Aatur could afford to care for the goats. We’ll come to that bit later.
He cared for the goats, and raised them, and then the goats had kids of their own. He sold the goats and upgraded to a pair of cows. The cows had calves, but until then Aatur managed to sell milk, butter and cheese and make a second income with that. This continued and he had a good bit saved up, with which he bought even more cows.
Ultimately, he was rich enough to upgrade from his tiny hut into a huge mansion!
His social circle expanded and he married the daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Many years passed and the couple had a son. The son was not at all a quiet child and mischievous besides.
Aatur would work hard all day and when he tried to sleep in the evenings, his son’s noise keep Aatur awake. One such day, when he was particularly tired, he was extra annoyed by the noise. In a fit of rage, Aatur lashed out at his wife whom he saw responsible for controlling their child. Patriarchal society obviously.
Anyway, when he lashed out, he did so by kicking her. And his wife reacted by making the exact sound that a pot makes when it is broken! Huh? He thought and suddenly he opened his eyes.
He had been dreaming the whole time. Everything that had happened since the day he received the pot of porridge was just part of his dream.
Aatur looked towards where he’d hung the pot, and then looked down. He had kicked the pot and the pot had fallen and shattered into hundreds of pieces. All the porridge, which could have been his seed capital was now gone.
That’s all for now
The moral of that story is obviously to not count your chickens before they are hatched. But another perhaps more important moral is to not hang pots of porridge within kicking distance of the bed!
Some notes on the show
The story is from the Panchatantra. We’ve previously covered a couple of Panchatantra stories in Episode 4 – Hare-y Tales and Episode 29 – Act Now, Think Later. Thanks to Tourism and Trade, the Panchatantra tales are well known in other parts of the world.
The name Aatur refers to a Hindi word that means hasty, or eager. It also means ferocious in some contexts, but it’s hasty that I had in mind when naming him Aatur.
There are many other versions of this tale. In a European version, it’s about a milkmaid and her pail. It’s also in the 1001 Arabian nights, and there is a Jewish version with honey which makes a little bit more sense than grain.
The Panchatantra was written by Vishnu Sharma, as a challenge. A King was having a hard time managing his sons. They just didn’t have the aptitude to read dozens of textbooks and turn in homework assignments and sit through 3-hour exams.
Vishnu Sharma took on the challenge of making the boys wise! And to do this, he thought of a revolutionary new idea. At least, it was revolutionary 2 or 3 thousand years ago. He wrote and then told them stories that could help them absorb important ideas from lectures. So the Panchatantra was a bit like The For Dummies or the Idiot’s guide book series – “Wisdom for Princes – a storybook for the rest of us”
The stories in the Panchatantra are actually chains of stories. At the conclusion of each incident, one of the characters narrates a new story. A little bit like in the 1001 tales from the Arabian Nights, but without all the cliffhangers.
That’s all for this week.
Next Time
In the next episode, we’ll talk about me again! You might have heard that I am the greatest Vishnu devotee out there. Well, that’s what I thought as well. What made me change my mind? Let’s find out this weekend!