Birbal Outsmarts The Thieves

Akbar had received some intelligence that a group of thieves were planning to break in to the treasure room and steal his riches. He summoned his clever minister Birbal and asked for advice on what he should do.

“Your Majesty, I have heard that these thieves are very smart, so we will have to be smarter still. We will use the decoy effect.”

Akbar agreed to this and told him that he would leave it all to Birbal.

The first thing that Birbal did was put a decoy in a less guarded part of the palace. In the centre of the garden was a beautiful golden statue of an elephant. This was the decoy. It was so beautiful that no one wanted to touch it or move it, so they left it there, thinking that it would make a good deterrent against any potential robbers.

Birbal then took the real treasure and placed it in another part of the palace, under heavy guard with great security measures. The next day he went up to Akbar and told him about his plan and how everything was going according to plan.

“I have prepared an emergency escape route from your treasure room in case anything goes wrong” said Birbal. “If you hear anything strange, run down this corridor here, turn left at the end, run through the kitchen into another corridor and take the first left there into another corridor until you reach a door leading out into the garden.”

The next day came and went without any disturbance. Then one night, Birbal woke up as he felt something amiss. He looked out his window and saw two figures running through the corridors with three guards chasing after them with swords drawn. Not long after, he heard shouts from the treasury room where he had hidden the real treasure and went down there to see if things had gone wrong after all. When he got there he found three heavily armed guards standing over two unconscious thieves who seemed to have fallen asleep whilst trying to steal from Akbar's treasury. Everyone congratulated Birbal for his great idea but he just shrugged off their praise saying that nothing could have worked without Akbar's intelligence in putting together such a well planned security system in his palace.