3 ideas
Akbar draws a line and asks his courtiers to make it shorter without touching it; Birbal draws a longer line beside it. The tale shows that 'short' is a relation, not a fixed property, so an unsolvable constraint on the object can often be met by changing its context or comparison point.
Birbal gives each suspect a stick of equal length and says the thief's stick will grow by a finger's length overnight; the guilty servant trims his own stick and is caught. The mechanism is to design a test whose only effect runs through the culprit's own belief, so that his defensive action becomes the evidence.
When guards demand a share of whatever reward Tenali Rama receives from the king, Tenali contrives to earn lashes instead and insists the guards take the portions they were promised. In this tale the guards' greed is turned back on them by making the shared outcome a punishment.