Week 5: Storytelling: The Broken Pot

The Broken Pot 

There once was a man named Miser. This man was very greedy to say the least. He had started a collection of rice that he had acquired while begging over the last few months. This rice was in a beautiful pot that he decided to put next to the fireplace so that he could look at it all day and night and dream of what would come of the rice. In his day dream this is what he thought:

Miser thought that if there ever was to be a famine, he would sell all of his rice for a hundred rupees. This rice would make him enough money to do something great. With this money he would start a little restaurant on the poorest street in town. It would be something small, and only the poor would step foot inside. Here Miser would sell dishes such as vegetable soup, bread, and the scraps of meat that no one else wanted. After a year he would sell the small restaurant making just enough profit to buy something bigger and better.

With five hundred rupees, Miser could afford to buy a restaurant in the suburbs of town. This restaurant would be twice as big and twice as nice. This restaurant would attract a middle class clientele, and he would make double the profit. Here he would serve people such as doctors, soldiers, and priests.  The typical menu would be mushroom soup, two different types of bread, chicken, and trout. After a year, Miser would make enough profits to sell the restaurant and end up with twice as much money.

With one thousand rupees, Miser would buy a restaurant in the center of the city. His restaurant would be three times bigger and better than the last one. Here he would serve his food to only the richest people of the land. Kings and Queens would regularly stop at his beloved restaurant for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. After two years Miser would have made twice as much money on profits and twice as much on selling the restaurant.  All together he would now have four thousand rupees.

The Broken Pot

With these rupees he would buy a mansion with a stable and many horses. Then he will marry a woman who would give a large dowry to him. He dreamed that would have a son who he would name Sarmon. Sarmon would love his dad very much, and he would always love to play with their horses. One day Sarmon would get to0 close to a horse and Miser will call to his wife to go get him. However, his wife would not be listening because she was cleaning the house. So Miser would get up and give her a large kick to get her attention.

As Miser was thinking about kicking his wife, he gave out a large kick and kicked the pot of rice. He kicked so hard that it went into the fireplace. The pot broke into a million pieces and all of the rice went into the burning flames along with his greedy dreams.

Author's Note: For this unit I decided to keep the story the same, but change the details of it. In the original story Miser dreams about buying animals and selling them when they reproduce and keeps buying nicer and nicer animals and selling them until he buys a mansion with four separate wings. When he is daydreaming this is what he does in the future: he starts by selling the rice to buy goats, when the goats reproduce, he sells them for cows. When the cows have calves, he sells the calves and buys buffalo. When the buffalos reproduce, he sells them for horses and he eventually will sell them for gold. He did not really even have to work for his fortune in the original. He just sells animals, but in my version he actually hast to work in order to gain money. I did not want him to just sit back and not have to do anything since he was such a greedy man. He deserved to have to work. In the original, Misers name is actually Svabhavakripana which means "born miser" so I just changed it to Miser for convenience, and also because miser means greedy.  I kept everything about the wife and son the same except the son's name is actually Somasarmon. I also changed that for convenience. Since he really does kick his wife, I had to keep that in there since that was the reason for his lost dreams. If he kicked his wife, he deserved to lose the rice into the fire.

Bibliography:
Book: Indian Fairytales
Author: Joseph Jacobs
Year Published: 1912
Web Source: Un-Textbook