Make the Line Sorter

Birbal was jester, counsellor, and fool to the great Moghul emperor, Akbar.
The villagers loved to talk of Birbal's wisdom and cleverness,
and the emperor loved to try to outsmart him.
One day Akbar (emperor) drew a line across the floor.
"Birbal," he ordered, "you must make this line shorter, but you cannot erase any bit of it."
Everyone present thought the emperor had finally outsmarted Birbal.
It was clearly an impossible task.
Yet within moments the emperor and everyone else present had to agree that Birbal had made the line shorter without erasing any of it.
How could this be?




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A girl was sitting in her hotel room when she heard a knock on the door. She opened the door and found that a man was standing outside.
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What made her suspicious of that man? He might have been genuinely mistaken.

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These types of puzzles are known as charades. What you have to do is find two words that are referred to in the first stanza and the second stanza and put them together to form the third word in the third stanza.

Just for example, if my first refers to 'off' and my second refers to 'ice', then my whole will be office.

My first is present - future's past -
A time in which your lot is cast.

My second is my first of space
Defining people's present place.

My whole describes a lack of site -
A place without length, breadth, or height.

Asked by Neha on 08 Feb 2026

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Amazing Facts

Out of the Box

The phrase “thinking outside the box” was popularised from the solution to a topographical puzzle involving 9 dots in a box shape.