Four fortune hunters

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. Four Fortune Hunters the fifth and final set of twelve stories in the Panchatantra, is about misguided perceptions, drawing the wrong conclusions and coming to hasty and devastating judgment as a result of misreading another creature?s situation. It is also about abject poverty, the bane of existence, and its consequences:  the very worth of virtue, bravery, even learning, dims with poverty and people go to great lengths to escape it.  But good or evil comes to good or bad people as Fate wills it and extravagant hope is an indulgence.  The book celebrates the crucial role of common sense triumphing over pretentious learning, personal vanity and preposterous ambition.  The greatest curse is that most dangerous ambition ? greed.