A beggar used to beg from one station to another in a train every day and then return by the same train. One day he asks a suit-wearing businessman for money. The businessman refuses saying ‘Being a businessman, I give something only if I get something in return’. The beggar replies: ‘What can a beggar like me can give you sir’? The businessman ignores his reply and leaves. This incident leaves a profound effect on the beggar, which makes him think the whole night: ‘what can I give in return?’ Next morning he picks some flowers from the station and starts giving them to whomsoever gives him money or food. Gradually it becomes his daily habit and he starts getting known as ‘the Phoolwala Beggar’. After a long time, he meets the same businessman. When he gives flowers to him also, he astonishingly says, “Oh! You have become a businessman like me! I like your attitude.” Listening to it, while getting down from the train on the station nearby his house, the beggar happily and loudly says: ‘From today, I have become a businessman. I am not a beggar anymore’. Those listening to him think that he has gone mad. After that day, the beggar was not to be seen for many years. After 5 years, in the same compartment of the train, a young businessman shakes hands with an old businessman asking, “Do you recognize me?” The old businessman replies, “I am probably meeting you for the first time.” The young one gives him his business card saying, “No sir, we have met twice before. Now, I am a florist businessman and am going out of town for a business deal. The credit for this goes to you. When I met you for the first time, you taught me what to do in life and in the second meeting you told me who I am. Both these encounters changed my thinking process. I understood that as long as I considered myself a beggar, I would be living the life of a beggar. As soon as you called me a businessman, I became a businessman. It only took a few years.” Like the beggar, we have been begging for the fulfillment of one desire or another from the God since Copper age. Finally, God descends on the earth during the confluence of the Golden and the Iron Age and says ‘If anyone wants my imperishable treasures of happiness, peace, bliss, love, knowledge, purity, and powers, then he also needs to give me something in return. Because if I give something to someone in particular and not to the rest of the world, then that would be an example of being biased. And if I give it to everyone without any reason, then everyone will lose their creativity and become dependent upon me for everything. Sorrow is the outcome of sin. If I remove sorrows of everyone in every situation, then they will become worse sinners. So, the true businessman God says that the formula to get everything from me is ‘first, stop considering yourselves to be devotees, who keep asking for one thing or another and develop the intoxication of being my heir and second devote time and energy in remembering me and in distributing my treasures selflessly amongst the sad, the disturbed and the troubled souls; spend some portion of your wealth in giving the message to the whole world about my arrival; use your mind and intellect in churning my knowledge and in imparting it to others etc. In this way do a true business with me’. As long as you keep thinking of yourself as a beggar, you will continue to lead the life like a beggar.
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