The Frogs Who Rode Snakeback appears in Book Three of the Panchatantra. Book Three describes an extended conflict between Crows and Owls. The crows hatch a plan to spy on their enemy. A crow poses as a traitor and joins the other side, when he returns his king praises him for his fortitude, but the […]

A jackdaw dresses itself in feathers borrowed from other birds. Two of Aesop’s fables are built around this action. They draw broadly the same moral. A condemnation of envy and pretension. But I don’t feel the actions of Jackdaw are entirely deserving of censure. Or in other words, is he really so bad? THE VAIN […]

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #14 My adventures in the land of fables have led me into the Himalyas, to Kasmir, and to the Panchatantra, a text first compiled in 350-400 CE by Vishnusharma, an octogenarian Brahmin. I did not literally venture into the mountains to retrieve this ancient literature, of course. I did […]

Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ cannot be improved. One of the rare fables to feature a single protagonist, it is concise, complete, and memorable, etched into our culture with the phrase ‘sour grapes.’ Fable as dialogue Typically, the substance of a fable is a dialogue—a negotiation, a trick, a contest, sometimes little more than […]

THE FROGS WHO DESIRED A KING Funny, surreal, and brutal, ‘The Frogs Who Desired a King‘ is one of the strongest and historically most popular of Aesop fables. At its core, there is a cautionary ‘careful what you wish for’ message, but it is the political applications that account for its longevity. This is the […]

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #11 Foxes, lions, sheep, frogs, jackdaws, snakes, monkeys talking to each other or to themselves. This has been the substance of a fable from the beginning, from the oral traditions of the Indian Subcontinent to the translators of Aesop and beyond. Why? Because the distance between us (as storyteller […]