"Out of the box"...thinking....

"Out of the box"...thinking....
(Thanks to C A Shivanand for sharing this..)

Many hundreds of years ago in a small Italian town, a merchant had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to a moneylender. The moneylender, who was old & ugly, fancied the merchant’s beautiful daughter, so he proposed a bargain. He said he would forgo the merchant’s debt if he could marry the daughter. Both the merchant & his daughter were horrified by the proposal. The moneylender told them that he would put a black pebble & a white pebble into an empty bag. The girl would then have to pick one pebble from the bag.
* If she picked the black pebble, she would become the moneylender’s wife & her father’s debt would be forgiven.
* If she picked the white pebble, she need not marry him & her father’s debt would still be forgiven.
* If she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into jail.
They were standing on a pebble strewn path in the merchant’s garden. As they talked, the moneylender bent over to pick up two pebbles. As he picked them up, the sharp-eyed girl noticed that he had picked up two black pebbles & put them into the bag. He then asked the girl to pick her pebble from the bag.
What would you have done if you were the girl? If you had to advise her, what would you have told her? Careful analysis would produce three possibilities:
* The girl should refuse to take a pebble.
* The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the bag & expose the moneylender as a cheat.
* The girl should pick a black pebble & sacrifice herself, in order to save her father from his debt & imprisonment.
The above story is used with the hope, that it will make us appreciate the difference between "lateral" & "logical" thinking.
The girl put her hand into the moneybag & drew out a pebble. Without looking at it, she fumbled & let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles. “Oh, how clumsy of me,” she said, “but never mind, if you look into the bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked.”
Since the remaining pebble was black, it must be assumed that she had picked the white one & since the moneylender dared not admit his dishonesty, the girl changed what seemed an "impossible" situation, into an "advantageous" one.


Moral:
Most complex problems do have a solution, but sometimes we have to think about them in a different way.
If you think "differently", you might 'spark' a thought, inspire & possibly change a life forever!

Think "Out of the box".

Cheers...:)