We
all know the famous story of ‘The Three Little pigs’. In short, it goes like this:
The three pigs build
three houses. The first house was built by straw, the second by sticks and the
third one by bricks. The first and the second house was blown away by a big bad
wolf and those two pigs run away to the third house made by bricks. End of it, they
are saved because the wolf could not blow away the third house.
Until
now, this is the story we have heard as told by pigs. And here is the story
from the wolf’s point of view which I’m sure you have never heard of:
Once there was a wolf (he was neither big nor bad). He was baking a cake
for his granny’s birthday. He ran out of sugar so he went to borrow some sugar.
First he went to the first pig’s house built by straws. While the pig was
getting sugar the wolf sneezed and the house was blown away. Since only the pig
was left (without a house), the wolf thought that the pig has no reason to live
and there is no harm in eating him. So he ate the pig. The same thing happened
with the second pig as well. End of it, the police arrested him even though the wolf
had no intention of eating the pigs, he had visited their homes only to borrow
some sugar.
This
was an exercise we did in our humanities class. We had to see how these
two stories were different. The aim was to learn that historical books or texts can
have different information depending on the perspective of the informer or the
sources For example: The information about a revered king such as Shivaji in
our history textbook will be about praising him as a great king. But if Mughals or
Shahs were to write the same book, they would consider Shivaji to be a menace.
The same could be true for a soldier and a terrorist. It could be the same person but what you name him/her will depend on where you are viewing that person from.
