Fables by Futurists

Pioneers of ideas and pioneers of practice are complementary Imaginers have to find collaborators—doers, organisers, regularisers—if their ideas are to be more than imaginary. The collaborators’ job is to turn poetry into prose; theology and prophecy into ritual; compassion into organised generosity; mercy into justice. It involves testing and

The term ‘folk-tale’ implies an adult audience; fairy-tale, a story for children. The distinction is familiar now, but in the past it scarcely existed.

Yet their power endures; and it does so, I believe, because for all their cargo of monsters and magic, these stories are entirely truthful about human nature (even when in the form of anthropomorphic animals). All human life is here, brave and cowardly, honorable and dishonorable, straight-talking and conniving, and the stories ask the greatest and

Myths and fairy tales are profound communicators of wisdom in very subtle ways.

In other words, ideas work best when they echo parts of this social or political unconscious—shared but hidden views of hope and fear.

As a migrant myself, I have always been fascinated by the migration of stories, and these jackal tales traveled almost as far as the Arabian Nights narratives, ending up in both Arabic and Persian versions, in which the jackals’ names have mutated into Kalila and Dimna. They also ended up in Hebrew and Latin and eventually, as The Fables of Bidpai,

when free speech was a perilous exercise, and when to declaim against vice and folly was to court personal risk, the fable was invented, or resorted to, by the moralist as a circuitous method of achieving the end he desired to reach—the

The ideas that travel furthest are the ones that find companions, partner ideas with which they resonate.