8. Singer takes the bull by its horns

The Greek King looked visibly shaken to see Harvi arriving aboard the muck fortress. This was clearly not going as per the aliens’ expectations. Harvi had performed far beyond their expectations. So it was time to apply Peter’s principle and try to discover Harvi’s level of incompetence. So this time the number of tasks was increased to three.

"In the next 2 days you shall return here with the Cretan Bull, the Mares of Diomedes and the cows of Geryon"

What the hell! This was Farmville or what? Cows, bulls, horses, eh? So many times he had laughed at the stupidity of people posting on face book about farm animals being given, taken, lost, found and stolen. Now he himself had to doing that stuff. What an irony of fate! He wished he had played Farmville. That would have given his some ideas. With a two day deadline it was too late to start playing now. He had to go by his gut feel and literally take the bull by its horns.

Harvi boarded his castle and zoomed off to Crete. There he was greeted by a most curious spectacle. An angry bull was wresting a ferocious bear along a river bank. The bull was trying to toss the bear up and the bear was trying to beat the bull down. A group of men were standing close to the bank and watching intently. Harvi noticed one of them nearby who looked wise and friendly. He approached him and accosted him thus, “Good, sir, can you please enlighten me on what is going on here.”

“Don’t you know?” He stared at Harvi incredulously as if he could not believe there would be someone so ignorant and continues, “This is the eternal battle between the the bull and the bear. The fate of the entire earth depends on the balance between these two opposing forces. There are a huge army of smartest people on various worlds with sophisticated computing tools closely observing and analyzing this battle. Pages and pages are written about every little movement. People bet fortunes on predictions related to the course of this battle. ”

“What happens if one of them wins?”

The man’s face turned pale as if he had said something extremely shocking “That would be catastrophic. The balance of the cosmos would be upset and the fabric of space time continuum would be torn apart. All worlds feel tremors of even small shifts in balance of power between the two. An outright victory for one over the other would mean end of this world”

Harvi notices the bear was having a slight advantage and was slowly cowing the bull down. No wonder the world was in recession and Greece was worst hit of all places.

“And who are those men standing there?” asked Harvi pointing to them men standing close to the bank watching the fight intently

“They are the bankers.” He pointed out to a man with thick golden chain, golden tooth filling and golden rings on every finger “That is the gold man” Then he pointed towards a weak battered looking man standing in a corner. “That is lay man (Lehman). He tried to get into the ring and manipulate the fight. He got mauled badly by the bear. He is now no more a (Nomura) top banker”

“Well friend. Let me get to the point. I am an adventurer and a client has given me an assignment to fetch the bull. Can you help me with the same?”

“Don’t even dream of going anywhere near the bear and the bull. You might end up endangering the entire world. I will tell you what to do. Do you see over there?” He was pointing to a place that looked like a shrine. He could see a long line of people in front of the shrine.

Harvi nodded his head. “What is that place?”

“They are distributing the bull’s manure there. That gives people solution to most of their problems. It may solve your problems too. But remember you need to make an offering to the divine bull in order to be bestowed with its divine manure”

He stood in the line thinking what to offer. Again his mobile phone came to his rescue. The phone gave him the latest stock market trends and stock tips that he offered at the shrine. The abbot at the temple, a man in pin stripe suit with red horns and a pointed tail was very happy with the offering and gave him a generous helping of bull manure.

He took some of it and applied on his forehead. Immediately his brain started working at top gear. It suddenly dawned on him that the manure was more important than the bull. He realized how the whole world ran on bovine excreta. It went by fancy names such as strategy, business consulting, vision etc. But it was all the same. All that mattered was a fancy external appearance.

All he had to do was to buy a life size hollow statue of the bull and fill it with the manure. He wondered where he could get such a bull. He decided to ask on Quora where he would get one in ancient Greece. 'Troy' was voted as the best answer. The Trojans were famous for their hollow horses. No reason why they could not make hollow bulls as well. He activated the GPS on his mobile phone and connected to his fortress. He found himself whizzing away towards Troy. He spoke with the Trojans and soon had a deal. But it costed him almost all the remaining bottles of snake oil. He mixed the remains of the snake oil with the manure and filled the bull. And Lo behold! It stood in front of him larger than life.

As he lead the bull away to his muck fortress, he noticed someone was waiting for him at the entrance of his fortress. The person looked kind of familiar. It was Mynakos!

Next Part of the Story       : Singer on his High Horse
Previous Part of the Story  : Singer does a Flying Sikh Act
First Part of the Story         : Singer on the Roof

Picture credit : Bull Picture