One Bucket of Milk

Once, a deadly epidemic spread across a kingdom. People were dying everywhere. The king tried every possible remedy to stop it, but nothing worked—people kept dying. Saddened and helpless, the king turned to God and began to pray.

Suddenly, a divine voice (akashvani) echoed from the sky:

“O King! There is an old dry well in the center of your capital. If, on the night of Amavasya (new moon), every household in your kingdom pours one bucket of milk into that well, the epidemic will end by the next morning, and people will stop dying.”

The king immediately ordered this divine command to be announced across the kingdom—that on the night of Amavasya, every household must pour one bucket of milk into the well.

That night, one cunning and miserly old woman thought to herself:

“Everyone else will pour milk. If I secretly pour just one bucket of water instead, who will notice?”

So she quietly poured a bucket of water into the well.

The next morning, people were still dying. Nothing had changed. The epidemic had not ended.

When the king visited the well to understand what went wrong, he found that the well was completely filled with water, and not a single drop of milk was to be seen.

The king instantly realized what had happened—every citizen had thought the same way as that old woman, and so no one poured milk.

Moral:

Friends, what happened in this story often happens in real life too.

Whenever there’s a task that requires collective effort, many of us step back thinking, “Someone else will do it.”
But it’s exactly this mindset that causes no real change.

If we all stop worrying about what others are doing and take responsibility for our own part, then we, as citizens, can bring about the positive change our country so desperately needs.