Who can ignore the worldly wisdom of Aesop’s fables? When I was may be five years of age my father used to buy comics for me which had stories from all over. One of the editions had one of Aesop’s fables and I insisted that my dad get it for me. I have read the book a number of times that we as children normally do, it’s only when we grow up that we begin to discard books after we’ve read them once. However I still read it now and then and I can always take back some lesson from it every time I read it.

There are numerous fables ranging from that of how the beetle took his revenge on the eagle, to what happened when the frogs asked God Jupiter for another king. All of his tales, they say, were in response to some circumstances at that point of time. For e.g. the story of the frogs was for the people of Athens who were rebelling against their tyrannical ruler and by the story he meant to suggest that the new ruler might be worse or by the story of the boar who was sharpening his tusk in the absence of danger around he wanted his people to be prepared though there was no evident threat of an attack.

At that point in time his stories were fun and I could follow them because they were really short unlike the so called ‘short stories’ which run into dozens of pages. May be the truth and the wisdom in the stories did not really strike me then but I am sure it somehow unconsciously got imbibed. There is not a single book in the world which will leave you without having some amount of effect on you. A book of this caliber given to children at the impressionable age that they are in will surely shape the adults they become.