The Eagle who thought he was a Chicken

IT IS ALL IN THE MIND

YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE

A Fable

By

VIKRAM KARVE

 

Here is one of my favourite fables:

 

The Eagle who thought he was a Chicken

 

There once was a chicken farmer who found an eagle’s egg. It was beautiful large egg.

He put it in the nest of his hen along with the other chicken eggs. 

That night the mother hen sat on the all the eggs, including the eagle egg and in due course an eaglet hatched along with a brood of chicks.

When the baby eagle opened his eyes for the first time it first saw the mother hen, thus identifying it the hen as his mother.

The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens. 

Whatever the chickens did, the eagle also did. 

He learned to cluck, cackle, scratch in the dirt for grits and worms.

The young eagle thought he was a chicken.

Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learned to fly just over a short distance. He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. And that was all he was able to do.

All his life he lived like a chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old.

One day the eagle saw a magnificent bird flying high above him. The old eagle looked up in awe as the majestic bird glided gracefully among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. 

He was very impressed and curious so he asked the hens around him, “Who is that magnificent creature who has so much power and grace and poetry in motion?"

“That is the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him, “He belongs to the sky and we belong to the earth because we are mere chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken because that is what he thought he was…

  

MORAL OF THE STORY:  

You are not what you actually are but you are what you think you are…

 

 

VIKRAM KARVE