Arjuna and the Bird's Eye
The great teacher Drona sets his young princes a simple test. A wooden bird sits high in a tree. Before they shoot, he asks each of them one question. Only one gives the answer he is waiting for.
The great teacher Drona sets his young princes a simple test. A wooden bird sits high in a tree. Before they shoot, he asks each of them one question. Only one gives the answer he is waiting for.
A boy from a forest tribe is turned away by the great teacher Drona. So he makes a clay statue of Drona and teaches himself, until he is a better archer than the princes. Then his teacher asks for a terrible fee.
A schoolteacher's son from a Gujarat fishing village went to work as a clerk in a hot foreign port. He came home with a little money, a rented room and an idea. What he built changed how ordinary Indians thought about owning a share of a company.
Anna Mary Moses spent her life on farms, raising a family and doing endless chores. In her late seventies she picked up a paintbrush. The world came to know her as Grandma Moses.
In 1981, seven young engineers in Pune started a software company with ten thousand rupees, borrowed from one founder's wife. For years they had no money, few clients and endless government paperwork. This is how Infosys began.
At an age when most people retire, Harland Sanders lost the roadside restaurant he had spent twenty-five years building. He had a pension cheque, an old car and a recipe for fried chicken. So he started again.
All summer long, Grasshopper sings while Ant carries grain. Then the first cold wind blows across the field.
A farmer's son from a village in Haryana was taken to a stadium to lose a little weight. There he picked up a javelin, and years later he threw it to India's first Olympic gold in athletics.
Louis Braille lost his sight as a small child in a French village. At fifteen, working late at night with a stylus and a sheet of paper, he invented a way for blind people to read with their fingertips.
Henry Ford was a farm boy who loved taking watches apart. His first two car companies failed. On his third try, he built a simple black car that ordinary families could afford, and the world began to move differently.
On a spring evening in Vienna in 1824, a packed theatre heard a new symphony for the first time. The man who wrote it could not hear a single note.
A government chemist in Ahmedabad began mixing washing powder in his backyard and selling it door to door from his bicycle, before and after work. He named it after the daughter he had lost.
Sarah Breedlove was born to parents who had been enslaved, orphaned at seven and widowed by twenty. She washed other people's laundry for a living. Then she found a problem she understood better than anyone, and built a business to solve it.
A boy who lost almost everything in the Partition of India found his way to an army running track, and then to the fastest races in the world.
As a teenager in Assam, Jadav Payeng found a bare sandbank in the Brahmaputra river, scorched by the sun. He began planting trees on it. Decades later, tigers and elephants walk through his forest.
As a child in Manipur, she lifted a bundle of firewood her older brother could not. Years later, after a painful failure at the Olympics, she lifted India's first medal of the Tokyo Games.
A young soldier who practised hockey after duty, by the light of the moon, led India to three Olympic gold medals and became a legend of the game.
In a poor village in Bihar, a labourer picked up a hammer and a chisel and began to cut a path through a rocky hill. Everyone laughed. He kept going for twenty-two years.
In 1905, a 26-year-old clerk in a Swiss patent office, with no university job and no laboratory, wrote four papers in his spare time. Together they changed how we understand light, atoms, space and time.
Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son who fell in love with engines. His first real product failed almost every test. Then the war destroyed his factory, and an earthquake finished what the bombs began.
In the winter of 1925, a deadly illness broke out in a small town in Alaska, cut off by snow and ice. The medicine that could stop it was nearly a thousand kilometres away. Only dogs could bring it.
A poor boy in Brazil, who played barefoot with a ball made of socks, once saw his father cry over a lost World Cup. Eight years later, aged seventeen, he kept a promise.
For fourteen hundred years, nobody on Earth could read the writing of ancient Egypt. Then soldiers digging near the Nile found a broken slab of dark stone, and a young Frenchman made it speak.
On the hottest day of the year, a tired crow finds a pitcher with a little water at the very bottom. Her beak can't reach it. So she thinks.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam delivered newspapers as a boy on a small island town in South India. He grew up to lead India's space and missile programmes, and became its most loved President.
Marie Curie studied in secret as a girl in Warsaw, worked in a leaky Paris shed and discovered two new elements. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
As a child, Wilma Rudolph wore a metal brace on her leg after polio. At twenty, she became the fastest woman in the world.
The fastest animal in the meadow is so sure of winning that he stops for a nap. The slowest one simply keeps going.
Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop failed again and again to fly. So they went back to the beginning, built their own wind tunnel and checked everything for themselves.
Helen Keller could not see or hear, and had no words for anything, until a determined young teacher spelled into her hand at a water pump in Alabama.
In 2011, Arunima Sinha lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train. Two years later she stood on the summit of Mount Everest.
Defeated, hunted and hiding in a cave, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland was ready to give up. Then he watched a spider try, and fail, and try again.
Srinivasa Ramanujan failed his college exams and worked as a clerk, yet his notebooks were full of mathematics nobody had seen before. One letter changed everything.