#VishnuSharman

“An eighty-year-old teacher — possibly imaginary — bet his name that he could make three hopeless princes wise in six months, and won by telling them animal stories; those stories then travelled through Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin into nearly every language of Europe, so that a French child reading La Fontaine and a Punjabi child hearing her grandmother are, without knowing it, reading the same Indian book.”

“The unteachable can be taught, if the lesson wears fur. Wisdom that is refused as instruction is swallowed whole as story — and a story, once loose in the world, crosses every border on earth.”