“He was a monster a tyrant a giant!
That was the call, the scream, the rant!
That is true! scream the owl and the bat!
Then asks the monkey, “but who will tell him that!?”
The best discussions of students and workers is about their teachers and bosses! The discussion is either how the homework is more but marks given is less which is similar to how the work is more but the salary is less! Then every other day it will be agreed that something must be done about it and every day they would reach a point when everyone will stare at everyone else thinking or saying, “All that is good but who will bell the cat!?”
From the time there have been two humans interacting, one would always think that he or she is getting a better deal but; Who will bell the cat!?
Do you remember the original story of the Bell and the Cat? It is often attributed to Aesop’s fables!
Yes…the bubble bursting needle arrives!
The two things we have realized now is that the story is not how we have read it and second is that it is actually not a part of Aesop’s fables!
Now, Belling the Cat is a fable also known under the titles The Bell and the Cat and The Mice in Council!
In the popular story which we all have heard or read, a group of mice are constantly tormented by a cat! So much so that one fine day they have a meeting and unanimously decide that the best solution would be to tie a bell around the cat so that they can hear the cat and be warned! Everyone agrees that it is the best solution ever! They even arrange for the bell! But then the Crore rupees question remains; “Who will bell the cat or which mouse would tie the bell to the neck of the cat?”
Naturally they would keep pondering on this and suddenly the cat would appear out of nowhere and the council of mice run away!
The term has become an idiom describing a group agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task! The story provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility!
The first irregularity is that this is not the original story!
The Greek version of the fable concerns a cat that pretends to be a sack hanging from a peg in order to deceive the chickens, but his disguise is seen through by a rooster! Later on the Rooster is replaced by mice and undergoes the modifications as the popular version!
Then there are actually man variations with many animals with the story! You can have you pick!
Now who is Aesop and what are these fables which actually are very similar to our Panchatantra and Jataka tales!
Aesop’s Fables, or the Aesopica, is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. Of varied and unclear origins, the stories associated with his name have descended to modern times through a number of sources and continue to be reinterpreted in different media!
The fables originally belonged to oral tradition and were not collected for some three centuries after Aesop’s death!
By that time, a variety of other stories, jokes and proverbs were being ascribed to him, although some of that material was from sources earlier than him or came from beyond the Greek cultural sphere. The process of inclusion has continued until the present, with some of the fables unrecorded before the Late Middle Ages and others arriving from outside Europe.
So the cat and mice story although attributed to Aesop, was not recorded before the Middle Ages! Which means that it is recent and historically not a part of the ‘Official Aesopica!’ or Official Aesop’s fables! Nevertheless, a story is good not because of who told or wrote the story but because the message it conveys is good! In that context the WHO WILL BELL THE CAT is a fabulous fable! Fabulous also was birthday celebrity Chalapathi Rao famous for his tiger personality and cat eyes!
Now BELL the alarm and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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