Story time!

   Today I was trying very hard to remember a story which I was frequently told as a child. It had a few words like "कुंजरी का रणभेरी...." stuck there I had no idea how to find it, so I used all my searching skills but finally surrendered myself. The Internet could not help me today and all my efforts were in vain. So at the end of the day, I called up my sister to ask about it.

   Well, it is rightly said, some things are just passed. She elaborated me the entire story then. Well, this was a Sanskrit story Aaji used to tell us in a dramatic tone. And as a little girl, I had just mugged up the climax, which now made no sense to me.

   So the story goes like, once a rabbit family moved to a new forest ruled by a wicked tiger. They stayed in the burrow for a few days to avoid an encounter with the tiger but then they realized this would not work forever. One day they will have to step out of the burrow to find food or they will die there of starvation. So the rabbit mommy and daddy come up with a brilliant plan. And the following day when the tiger was waiting outside their burrow they begin this conversation,
Daddy rabbit asks"कुंजरी... का रणभेरी? बाळ का रडत्याती?
Mommy rabbit replies,"वाघच मांस मागत्याती."
This was the Sanskrit dialogue.
In English it goes like this..the rabbit daddy asks "Hey huge elephant(read dear wife or something), what is this noise? Why are the kids crying?" To which the rabbit mom replies," They are really hungry and are asking for tiger's meat."
Tiger listening to this conversation begins to wonder what is this huge, bigger and dangerous animal who wants to eat tiger meat. Scared he runs off. We sisters are still struggling with exact details of the story but the memory of Aaji telling us that story is sufficient enough to make us happy. And I also don't know about the moral of the story but I just loved it.

   While my quest to track down this story, I came across all those Panchatantra and Aesop fables. And I terribly missed my pink, red, brown book of stories(Navneet). Hare and tortoise's race or the thirsty crow's wittiness, well it all taught those little morals and virtues.

   Stories always remain alive. Some are passed on through virtual word while some from people to people. There's this interesting quote that says, 'You can share knowledge in two ways...either push it into information or pull it into a story ' I'll say always prefer pulling it into a story because like a wonderful storyteller there's always a curious listener to make most of it!