Where Is the Net?
There was a time when a mouse could negotiate a major security crisis without WhatsApp, X, Facebook, Substack or eight television experts shouting at one another while the anchor says, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please!” Apparently civilization has progressed.
The story of Palita the mouse and Lomaśa the cat, from the Śānti Parva of the Mahābhārata, is traditionally a lesson in nīti—prudence, statecraft, alliances and survival. Reading it today, however, I couldn’t help thinking that someone in ancient India had already understood social media. They just forgot to invent the “Share” button.
When the Cat Gets Caught
Palita lived in a burrow beneath a large banyan tree, while Lomaśa the cat lived above. Their relationship was refreshingly uncomplicated: the cat wanted to eat the mouse, and the mouse had reservations.
One day Lomaśa got caught in a snare laid by a hunter. This raises the first reasonable question: why would a hunter trap a cat? He probably wasn’t trying to. The snare was simply there and Lomaśa managed to walk into it—proving that cats, despite several thousand years of excellent publicity, occasionally do stupid things too.
Palita saw his principal enemy helpless in a net and became understandably cheerful, perhaps a little too cheerful. With the cat immobilised, he ventured out more freely looking for food and found the meat around the hunter’s trap rather tempting.
Which is usually how trouble begins—not with some grand act of stupidity, but with the quiet conviction that everything seems perfectly fine.
While Palita was enjoying his unexpected freedom, he noticed Harita the mongoose approaching from the ground. Then he looked up and saw Candraka the owl watching from the tree. His excellent morning had deteriorated rather quickly.
At this point another question naturally arises. Palita had survived perfectly well all this time despite having Lomaśa living upstairs, so why couldn’t he simply use his usual tactics and run back into his burrow?
Because he had wandered away from the security that normally protected him. The Mahābhārata describes Palita assessing his predicament carefully: descending exposed him to the mongoose, remaining where he was exposed him to the owl, and if Lomaśa somehow escaped, the cat remained another danger.
Palita’s problem, therefore, was not simply that there were suddenly more predators. His familiar danger had disappeared, he had relaxed his guard and, in doing so, had placed himself in a position where his usual escape strategy no longer worked.
There is probably an entire life lesson hiding in that. We often become careless not when danger increases, but when the danger we are accustomed to suddenly seems to disappear.
An Unlikely Alliance
Palita now did something wonderfully counter-intuitive. Instead of running away from the cat, he went towards him and proposed a deal: Lomaśa would protect him from the owl and mongoose, and Palita would gnaw through the net and free him.
Lomaśa agreed. Imminent death has a remarkable way of making ideological differences seem negotiable.
Palita then sheltered close to the trapped cat. Harita and Candraka knew nothing of the bargain that had produced this extraordinary arrangement. All they could see was their prospective lunch sitting beneath a much larger predator. Whatever the explanation, getting to Palita now meant getting dangerously close to Lomaśa, so they withdrew.
Had this happened today, someone would undoubtedly have taken a photograph and posted:
BREAKING: PALITA JOINS LOMAŚA CAMP
Within ten minutes there would be a hashtag; by lunchtime somebody would have discovered an old photograph of Palita standing suspiciously close to a saucer of milk; and by evening three geopolitical analysts who had never visited the forest would be explaining the implications of the new Cat-Mouse Axis for regional stability in the banyan tree.
The amusing thing is that the photograph would not have been fake. The cat and mouse were cooperating. What would have been false was the assumption that the photograph told the whole story.
And there, I think, lies the interesting part. Much of what misleads us today isn’t necessarily fabricated. Sometimes it is a perfectly genuine photograph, a ten-second video clip, one sentence from a much longer conversation or a single action separated from everything that preceded it. The event may be real while the story we construct around it may be complete fiction.
Nor is this confined to politics or social media. We are remarkably good at doing it in ordinary life too. We notice something, assume an intention behind it, and within minutes the mind has assembled a perfectly coherent explanation—with the minor inconvenience that it may have absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened.
The old story reminds us that what we see may be true while what we conclude from it may not be. We see the mouse and the cat; we don’t see the net.
Social-media algorithms merely industrialised something the human mind was already rather talented at. “Perhaps we need more context” rarely goes viral, while “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS MOUSE DID!” has considerably better prospects.
The Last Rope
Meanwhile, Palita starts gnawing through the net, but slowly enough for Lomaśa to become increasingly nervous as the hunter returns. The cat complains:
किं सौम्य नाभित्वरसे किं कृतार्थोऽवमन्यसे ।
छिन्धि पाशानमित्रघ्न पुरा श्वपच एति सः ॥
Why aren’t you hurrying? Cut the bonds before the hunter arrives.
Perfectly reasonable from the cat’s point of view. Palita, however, understands something very important: the remaining rope is his leverage.
If he frees Lomaśa too early, his useful strategic partner immediately becomes a free, hungry cat, and hungry cats are notoriously unreliable coalition partners.
So Palita gnaws through almost the entire net but deliberately leaves the final strand intact. His reasoning is beautifully practical: an action done at the wrong time can fail even if the action itself is correct. Timing matters.
Only when the hunter is close enough that Lomaśa’s overwhelming priority is escape does Palita bite through the final rope. The cat shoots up the tree, the mouse disappears into his burrow, and the hunter arrives to find a destroyed net and what I imagine was a fairly disappointing afternoon.
Then comes my favourite part of the story.
Once safely up the tree, Lomaśa calls down to Palita and invites him to come out. After everything they have been through together, surely they are friends now? Why not continue this beautiful new relationship?
Palita politely declines, because he understands something human beings repeatedly forget: a shared danger can create an alliance without necessarily creating a friendship.
The circumstances that made Lomaśa useful have disappeared. He is once again a cat, Palita is once again a mouse, and nothing fundamental has changed.
History, politics and business are full of this. Nations fight together against one enemy and become adversaries immediately afterward. Political parties describe each other as threats to civilization on Tuesday and form a coalition on Friday. Companies sue one another and six months later issue a press release announcing a “strategic partnership.”
Perhaps the old saying “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” simply needs a small addition: terms and conditions apply.
Where Is the Net?
This is where the story becomes particularly interesting today. A misleading narrative does not necessarily need to convince us forever; sometimes it only needs to survive long enough to damage someone’s reputation, influence an opinion, frighten people, move a market, affect an election or simply make the owl and mongoose run away.
The correction may arrive tomorrow. The explanation may be detailed, sourced and completely accurate. Unfortunately, everyone is now arguing about something else. The lie—or perhaps more accurately, the misleading interpretation—has already completed its assignment.
But I would be careful about turning Palita into some ancient master of propaganda. He doesn’t actually invent a falsehood. The alliance with Lomaśa is real. His intelligence is subtler: he understands that others will react to what they can see without necessarily understanding the circumstances underneath it.
That distinction matters, because otherwise we would be doing exactly what we accuse social media of doing: taking a complicated story and squeezing it into the narrative we wanted in the first place.
There is another little trap in reading stories like this. We naturally identify ourselves with the clever character. Of course I am Palita—calm, observant and strategic, seeing the entire chessboard while everybody else panics.
Really?
Perhaps most of the time we are the owl. We see something, assume something, become annoyed and form an opinion. Sometimes we even forward it, thereby generously making our incomplete understanding available to several hundred other people. Only later do we discover that there was a net underneath the cat.
So when the next sensational photograph, political outrage, ten-second video clip or breathless “BREAKING” message appears on our screens, perhaps the useful question isn’t merely whether it is true. There may be a better one:
Where is the net?
What happened before this? What am I not seeing? What assumption have I quietly inserted into the story? Would I understand it differently if I waited a little before deciding what it means?
Palita survived because he eventually saw the whole structure—the cat, the mongoose, the owl, the hunter, the net and, most importantly, that one final rope. Maybe wisdom isn’t knowing everything. Sometimes it is simply knowing when we don’t yet know enough.
Not bad for a mouse, especially one without Wi-Fi.
And I am curious. Have you ever been completely certain about someone’s action or intention, reacted accordingly, and discovered later that there was a “net” you hadn’t seen? Or perhaps you’ve been on the other side—judged by someone who had only part of the story.
Do share your experience in the comments. I suspect there are more owls among us than we would care to admit.
I certainly wouldn’t exclude myself.
Source: Śānti Parva of the Mahābhārata, the dialogue of Palita and Lomaśa in the Āpaddharmaparvan. The numbering varies between editions; the Kisari Mohan Ganguli translation commonly places the episode in Section 138, while scholarship using the Critical Edition refers to Mahābhārata 12.136.
Nalla Madras 