Power is lonely work, and loneliness makes rulers stupid. The most dangerous king is not the one surrounded by enemies but the one surrounded by silence — courtiers who nod, ministers who flatter, advisors who never say the word that makes the ear taste bile. Valluvar devotes an entire chapter to a single imperative: find the people who are bigger than you, and bind them close. Not subordinates. Not sycophants. Elders whose wisdom makes your own look thin, counselors who will thunder at you when you stray, allies whose presence alone makes enemies recalculate. The chapter opens with a careful prescription for how to choose such people, escalates through a series of claims about what they make possible, then executes a devastating reversal: the king who fails to secure such company does not merely lose an advantage — he collapses under his own weight, like an elephant without a mahout, wandering off the road and into ruin. The final kural delivers the arithmetic: losing the friendship of the great is not a setback. It is ten times worse than gaining the enmity of the many.