India: 'What nourishes my soul can not harm others'

Kanpur: As mobile rings at intervals, he only takes the call but expresses his extreme inability to fulfil the client's request. He is a cardboard stockist running his business in the city of Allahabad (Prayagraj).

Being a regular visitor to the tannery town of Jajmau, he stays in this particular area for days or weeks or months. So, regular calls from his trusted and tested clients remain a chronic discomfort for him. To be precise, he does not irritate, he replies to them in a very polite way like a gentleman.

However, he anyhow manages free time at his older bungalow in the posh locality of Jajmau. He pointed out: "His precious time consumes in visiting relatives, offering prayers at a nearby mosque and also paying a visit to homes of those sick people who are acquainted with him.

During the informal conversation, he maintains if he has spare time he does not mind shovelling up the bushy grasses grown just outside his house entrance gate that looks badly rusted.

For him this, as he claims, remains a simple but candid way of keeping oneself busier. This does not compel him to think about what others would say. 

Despite being financially sound, he does not mind doing every work. He does not like taking the service of an attendant for any work. He takes a pride in doing whatever piece of work.

Feeling the distress of water supply problem in the absence of underground boring at his plac these humid days, he had to fetch drinking water from his nearest neighbour.

He says, "Since his stay remains irregular, he is least interested in entangling into very special arrangements."

Tall, energetic and a little bit straightforward person he remains relatively religious in his daily life. About his student days, he once disclosed: "How has he saved his tuition fee for the graduation class?"

He continued: "There were floods in his village during the first year and drought helped him not to pay an annual fee for the second year. Therefore, he passed out without depositing any amount of college fee."

As regards his school days he told that he usually got second-hand books from his peers in those yet-not-forgotten days.

"I think one of the most important things for me is to abide by the principles that suit me. This is what nourishes my soul. It is such a small, subtle thing that I always understand would not be harmful to any other people," he uttered.

Further, he added that "the people should contemplate over my nicer precept. I have been following the concept of simple life for the past several decades. Notwithstanding, it happens to be incredibly strengthening my existence upon this living planet," he explains.