Lion, Bull and Two Jackals: The Panchatantra Book One Retold - Softcover

The series TALL TALES OF OLD INDIA is a modern English retelling of The Panchatantra (literally five books), a collection of millennia old Indian morality tales.  Eighty five stories depict animals and humans struggling with thorny issues of friendship, collaboration, conflict and ambition.  Relentless in their unwillingness to whitewash or romanticize adult life, they describe the ignoble as well as the noble, cruelty and deceit as well as honor, foolishness as much as cunning, deception as rampant as honesty.

Lion, Bull and Two Jackals, the first collection of thirty three stories deals with friendship.  It shows how the close friendship between the Lion and the Bull was formed, grew and eventually was destroyed by a mean and conniving Jackal.  It highlights how friendship, indeed all relationships, needs tending.  Cultivating friendship, like cultivating a flower, needs careful fertilizing, feeding and pruning. But the lessons go beyond how to treasure and keep enduring friendships. They include how to treat others with respect, honesty and loyalty but be on guard when others are trying to do you harm. 

Author Narindar Uberoi Kelly was born in Lahore, then British India. Educated at Punjab and Lucknow Universities, she went to England and then on to the United States, where she received a PhD in South Asia regional studies at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on social demography, an experience that provided her a richer understanding of the sociocultural traditions of India. Her professional career has been that of a social demographer working in the fields of health, education, and finance. She lives in Baltimore, USA, with her husband, Michael Kelly.