Why do rats have only one tail?

All rats have only one tail, but this was not always the case. Many years back, rats had different number of tails. Some had two, some three, and there has been news of a rat that even had twenty! So why did all that eventually change?

Once upon a time, there were two rats- Alice and Bob. Bob had two tails, while Alice had ten! Now ten tails were just too many, even back then. Consequently, other rats made fun of Alice. She was constantly ridiculed, and no rat wanted to be her friend.

One day Alice decides that she had had enough. She went to the butcher and asked him to cut-out one of her tails. The butcher gladly obliged. Alice was very happy with one less tail, but to her dismay the ridicule didn’t stop. Nine was still too large a number! So she went back to the butcher the next day, asking him to cut one more. The number of tails became eight. Unfortunately for Alice, the situation remained the same as before. She went to the butcher once again. Slowly, the number of Alice’s tail started reducing, till she was able to conform to the general rat population. But by this time, her act of going to the butcher had become a habit instead of a need. So she continued visiting the place even when she had just a single tail left. After that was cut-off, she had no tail at all!

Though they had different numbers of tails, not a single rat was without one! Now Alice was ridiculed for having no tail at all. As far as she was concerned, it was back to where it started- constantly ridiculed, without any real friends to call her own. She went back to the butcher, sobbing on her miserable fate. She wanted some of her tails back. The butcher sympathized with her but said that there was nothing that could be done as all the tails had been fed to a cat.

As luck would have it, Bob the two-tailed rat was passing that way. The butcher then had a brilliant idea. He summoned Bob, and pleaded with him to give away one of his tails in order to help a fellow rat. Bob, who was a large-hearted rat, gladly agreed. The butcher then cut one of Bob’s tails and put it on Alice. Now both Alice and Bob had one tail each. And both were happily accepted in the rat society, as the rats realized that their extra tails weren’t really of much use! From that day, all rats were born with only a single tail!

Life Skills

Life Skills- or what they do not teach you at school. Your teacher has never taught you to be good in bed! Or the odds of scoring different hands in a game of Poker. Or the extensive statistical analysis required before making a bet on a football match. But this post is not about these skills. Neither is it about skills like cooking and stitching, which incidentally are becoming increasingly common in school curriculum. Rather, this post talks about certain behavioural aspects that should be inculcated in everyone….but are overlooked because teachers themselves are unaware. Or even if they are aware, they do not pit it into practice.

Right from the beginning, the learning curriculum is focused on the external aspects of nature. We study Newton’s laws in middle school, differential equations in high school, and the working principle of a Field Effect Transistor in the University (I am from an Electronics and Communications Engineering background). Somewhere along the way, we also have Moral Science, Social Science, and Literature in the syllabus. These do go a long way in shaping our perception of the world, and in inculcating a set of beliefs through which we go about our daily lives. Unfortunately, none of it is sufficient to truly master the art of living (nothing to do with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s eponymous organization). Life skills are meant to be learned and practised by everyone, irrespective of their beliefs and socio-political ideology.

Life skills are a broad umbrella of concepts taken from eclectic fields of study like Psychology, Philosophy, Behavioural Economics, Knowledge Management, etc. As these concepts are not taught in high school or in college, most people simply sail through life in a semi-conscious haze. The result is the rise of the coaching/personality development industry, where so-called life coaches charge a bomb to teach the same to adults whose mental confusion matches that of a primary-school kid in a strip club! 

Let us talk about one or two these concepts. It is human frailty to bother about other people. How many of us are not flustered by what someone else did? The truth is that you can control no one but yourself. Whatever someone does, however twisted or wicked it may be; there is some reason to it. And one does not have to know the reason. That is why it makes a lot of sense to forgive. Here people mistake forgiveness as condoning unacceptable behaviour. That is not the case. It simply means letting go of the bitterness that steals happiness from your own life. The person responsible for one’s happiness is you yourself. No source of external pleasure can replace inner joy.

Over here I would like to talk about a corollary to the above point. The world is divided into different schools of thoughts in the religious, social, and political context. All of them have their proponents and each of them has a place. It would do the world tremendous good if people acknowledge their path is not the ‘only true way’, but one of the many roads that can be walked on. On a broad scale, this would lead to a cessation of extremism, and consequently terrorism.

Then there is the ‘Sunk Cost Fallacy’, which leads the best of us to take irrational financial decisions. A sunk cost is money that has already been paid and can never be recovered. And in order to justify the initial cost, one simply keeps paying in spite of the terrible nature of the product/service. Examples include continuing to watch a bad movie or TV show. Or keeping on dating someone unsuitable, because of the huge emotional investment. If only people are aware of this fallacy, they can behave more judiciously.

These are just some points to illustrate that the current crop of humanity is pathetically devoid of life skills. As an old story goes, when a boat starts sinking, all it matters is whether you can swim your way to safety. You may know to design a MOSFET that has a channel length reduced by 1 nanometer, and that simultaneously consumes 1 micro-watt less power. But at that time, that knowledge is not going to help you!