A Very Short Story By Osho For Kids

Vide Jaishankar Ramachandran

There was this man who had no means of earning a living. He went out every morning into the village and sought biksha (alms) from the houses therein.

So it was this morning too as he stepped out with his joli (actually a piece of cloth folded like a pouch to hold small stuff). It held at its bottom some grains of rice put in by his wife. There was a reason for it. The householder offering biksha would be satisfied on seeing the rice he/she was not being fooled, safe in the thought someone else too saw it fit to offer it to him.

As he began his morning round, he saw a cloud of dust kicked up at a distance and also heard the rumble of wheels on the road.  It was the Raja’s chariot, royal flag with the insignia fluttering atop. He was at once delighted. Finally today was his chance to seek alms from the Raja himself. So far he was always thrown out whenever he tried to gain admittance to the palace. He thought furiously about what he would ask of the Raja…this, no, that…

In a few moments, the chariot reached the point where the man was standing and, what more, it conveniently stopped by his side. Providentially his job was made easier now.

Just as he was ready to get going on his act, to his utter surprise, the Raja himself sought him out and held out a joli, his, in front of the man!

Raja: ‘Today I decided to ask and receive something from the first man I meet. It’s you. Please give me something you have!’

Well, the man just stood there in a daze for he had nothing on his person to give. Also he had only known about receiving all along. Here was the Raja of the land standing before him asking him for alms!

‘Come on, you must have something…what about the joli you’re carrying? Surely…’

He remembered he had some rice grains left in there by his wife. So he put his hand into the joli and managed to collect a handful.Then he thought it was too much. He dropped half of it back into the joli. Then again he felt he was still giving away a lot more than he should. So some more grains dropped back into the joli.

Becoming impatient, the Raja ordered him to expedite.

The man finally parted with one grain, just one.

The Raja without a demur thanked him for it and drove away.

The man was sad at what had happened. Not only he did not receive any dhaan from the Raja, he had to give away a grain of his own.

He completed his usual round and returned home.

‘Why, what happened, you look distraught?’ the wife asked him as she relieved him of the joli.

‘You know I lost a grain today…’

Wife said: ‘Why, you’re joli feels full…in fact today you seem to have collected far more than usual and you’re sad for losing a grain?’

‘But I lost a grain…’

As she ran her hands through the collected grain, she suddenly whooped in glee:

‘Look, what we got here…a grain of gold!!’

The man cried inconsolably leaving his wife nonplussed.

End

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Sometimes It Pays To Pay…

no attention to…

Women in the village were heading to the river for a bath.

As they were crossing a field, there upon a ridge laid a sadhu reclining with his head on a brick for height. 

One of the women exclaimed, ‘Hey this sadhu is a maha gyani. Let us do pranam and seek his blessings.’

And so they did and as they went river-wards, one of the women remarked loudly: ‘You say he’s a maha gyani, yet he needed the comfort of a pillow!’

After finishing their bath, they returned the same away.

They saw the same sadhu now lying with his head resting on bare ground – he had thrown away the brick.

As they passed by, seeing this, another woman remarked: ‘You say he’s a maha gyani, yet he has an ego that gets pricked?’

The sadhu burst laughing. He got up to get back the brick lying some feet away! The lesson he had learnt early on had come back to him: ‘Let the world say what it wants, do yours.’

End

Based on a pravachan by Shri Vittaldas Maharaj

Miracles Do Occur And How!

This anecdote – not sure if this happened for real – is very readable for its strong and never-truer message:

***

A certain company had a tradition of holding a party beginning with a lottery every Christmas Eve.

The rules of the lottery draw were: each employee pays ten dollars as a fund. There were three hundred people in the company. In other words, a total of three thousand dollars could be raised.  The winner takes all the money home.

On the day of the lottery draw, the office was filled with a lively atmosphere. Everyone wrote their nomination on the slips of paper and put them in the lottery box.

However, a young man hesitated when he wrote – he thought of the company’s cleaning lady, her sickly son needed a surgical procedure soon after the dawn of New Year and she had not yet raised the required funds for the hospitalization.

He knew the chance of winning was slim, a miniscule 0.3% percent. Yet he couldn’t help but write the name of the cleaner lady on the note.

The tense moment came. The boss gave the lottery box a vigorous shake and finally drew out a note. The man also kept praying in his heart: hoping against hope the cleaning lady wins the prize…When the winner was announced, the miracle had happened!

Yes, the winner turned out to be the cleaning lady. Cheers broke out in the office, and she hurriedly rushed to the stage to accept the award, almost breaking down in tears.

As the party kicked off, while thinking about this “Christmas miracle”, the man paced to the lottery box. He took out a piece of paper and opened it casually. The name on it was the name of the Cleaning lady!  The man was very surprised. He took out several pieces of paper one after another. Although the handwriting on them was different, the names were all the same – it was the lady’s! The man’s eyes were filled with tears with the thought there was indeed a Christmas miracle in the world, but *the miracle will not fall from the sky – the people were required to create it by themselves!

***

Curiously enough this is also the message carried in our Sanatana Dharma. Here it is said: in this Kali Yuga, in observance of the yuga dharma, divinity presents itself always through an agency, human or otherwise, never ever manifesting directly.

End

In Celebration Of Life…

Forwarding few lines that I enjoyed reading, lightly edited subjectively:

Sometimes I feel I want to go back in time… Not to change things, but to feel a couple of things twice…

Sometimes I wish I was a baby for a while… Not to be walked in the pram but to see my mother’s smile!

Some times I wish I could go back to school… Not to become a child but to spend  more time with those friends I never met after school!

Sometimes I wish I could be back in college… Not to be a rebel but to really understand what I studied!

Sometimes I wish I was a fresher at my work… Not to do less work but to recall the joy of making myself useful and being paid for it!

Sometimes I wish I could marry again all over… Not to change the partner but to enjoy her companionship more deeply!

Sometimes I wish my kids were younger…. Not because they grew fast but to tell them more stories…

Sometimes I wish I was more expressive…Not to pursue prose or poetry but to to say thanks to my kith and kin.

Sometimes I feel I still had some more time to live… Not to have a longer life but to know and do things differently…

Since the times that are gone can never come back, let’s enjoy the moments as we live them from now on, to the fullest…doing what we could and celebrate our everyday life*

🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁

Unlike The Elephant In The Room, Donkeys Roam Free

Watch out! I have already lost a couple to these Donkeys:-(

Vide T R Subramanian

**

“A donkey was tied to a tree. One night a ghost cut the rope and released the donkey.

The donkey went and destroyed the crops in a farmer’s land. Infuriated, the farmer’s wife shot the donkey and killed it.

The donkey’s owner was devastated at the loss. In reply, he shot dead the farmer’s wife.

Angered by his wife’s death, the farmer took a sickle and killed the donkey’s owner.

The wife of the donkey’s owner got so angry that she and her sons set the farmer’s house on fire.

The farmer, looking at his house turned into ashes, went ahead and killed both the wife and children of that donkey’s owner.

Finally, when the farmer was full of regret, he asked the ghost as to why did it kill them all?

The ghost replied, “I killed nobody. I just released a donkey that was tied to a rope. It is all of you who released the devil within you which resulted into everything bad that happened.”

Today the media has become like the ghost. It keeps releasing donkeys on a daily basis. 

The people foolishly take a stance and argue with one another endlessly. They end up ruining relationships, even when they know that their opinion is of little or no consequence. 

Be responsible and do not react to every donkey released by media and preserve your relationship with your friends and relatives. They are too precious to lose over the donkeys released by the crooked media and politicians.“

End

When We Lose Our Love(d)…

Possibly apocryphal, as received from Rahul Mehta:

When he was 40, the renowned Bohemian novelist and short story writer FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin, when he chanced upon a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. 

She and Kafka looked for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again.

The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll that said,

“Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”  

Thus began a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life. 

When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. “This does not look at all like my doll,” she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, “My trips, they have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her.  

A year later, Kafka died.

Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said,

“Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way….”

End

A paradox of community, belief and reality

Seth Godin writes:

“Belief happens when we combine community with emotion. It’s a way for us to see and understand the world, at the same time that we engage with some of the people around us. Belief is a symptom of shared connection, and community makes us human.

Reality, on the other hand, is widely experienced and consistent. Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not, it’s still here. And that jar of jelly beans has the same number of beans in it, no matter how many times we count them.

When belief doesn’t match our experience of reality, stress occurs.

This stress can surprisingly make community stronger. There’s very little community among people who believe that the Earth is a sphere, no meetings or conventions of the round Earth people. That’s because you don’t need belief to know that the Earth is round.

There is a long history of building community cohesion by encouraging members to ignore the facts of the world around them.

The disconnect between what’s out there and the emotions that lead us to believe something that isn’t real can actually make a community tighter. Sometimes, the disconnect between belief and reality is precisely the point. When the disconnect gets really large and the community becomes more insulated, cults arise.

But in our modern age, this stressful disconnect between belief and reality also makes it difficult to spread the word. The outsider may be hesitant to sign up for the stress that belief in non-real things can cause…“

End

How She Lived On For Another Day!

Source: trendingtalks.com/author/lulia/

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A Connected World And It’s Not Internet!

End

The Story About A Cup Of Tea – Building Enduring Relationships

Time was running out. There was no option – my wife decided she would go to the bank (public-sector) to get the Tax Deduction Statement (TDS) needed for income-tax computation. She would not let me go because of my suspected friendly leanings towards Covid.

Expectedly there were few customers in the branch. She asked for S, an officer, and when he walked up, she identified herself. The magic words ‘TXX’ spoken ‘opened the doors’!

‘Yes, M’m, come in,’ S was all deference. One would have thought she was some high officer from the HO on a sudden field-visit.  ‘TXX spoke a while ago. If you’ll kindly be seated here…I’ll get it in a couple of minutes. It’s all printed and ready.’

As she sat down, a cup of hot tea was served with sugar to add!! A feat far beyond you to equal. Forget tea, I challenge you to get for yourself a glass of water – you would be politely directed to a watercooler standing in the hall. And rightly so, after all a bank’s charter of customer services does not include…

In all my years of regularly visiting the bank, I was always politely ignored by the friendly staff, never rude, envied for the attention by the young lizard lounging in the ceiling, despite trusting them with all my life savings – not a huge pile though being a salaried employee all my life. Strictly not true – I distinctly remember the occasion I was on the center-stage, very briefly though, drawing looks from everyone around when I had sent the glass crashing on the floor at the watercooler. Apologies for a little flippancy there, I couldn’t resist.

I was surprised when the lady of the house returned so soon, mission accomplished.

Ah, there were hardly any customers, so the quick turnaround – explains it.  

But the part about tea, that was still intriguing.

May be S was related to TXX or a close friend – simple as that.

When TXX called to follow up if everything went off ok at the bank – incidentally therein lies the subject of this post, you’ll find out soon – I told him about the service-with-a-smile-and-tea-to-go-with-it and everything was fine.  S was neither a friend nor a relative of his, I learnt. TXX was not even a customer of the bank.

It made it all clear as mud in rain.

So, why the tea, I persisted.

It emerged TXX knew the bank’s regional HR manager.

Ah…so that was it.

Well, it was like this: Until recently TXX was the big honcho in a diagnostic-services company. And the bank was his client sending its employees for annual medical check-up covered under various plans.  When it was the HR manager’s turn, at the request of his office, TXX expedited the matters cutting down the wait for him. Simply said, but not simply done – needed TXX, located elsewhere, to call up the testing lab many times to ensure the manager was not unduly held up at any test station.

That was the beginning of the relationship that endures till date, also the moving force for the service-with-a-smile-and-tea-to-go-with-it. Not a favors-done-favors-asked kind of relationship. It continues though TXX has retired from service since and is no longer in a position to help in ways he did during employment. Yes, the two have never met so far!

Many of us in our employment and outside are in a position to help or do favors and we do. Setting him apart is the sincerity and thoroughness of the process, winning the day and setting relationships in concrete for TXX. He doggedly pursues and pushes the problem-owner into action until the intended end result is achieved. In the above bank episode, offering to help, he calls the bank up ahead and tells them what was needed to cut out the wait for my wife and then calls her up later to check if we got what we needed without hassle or anything more had to be done.

This ownership, often far more than the problem-owner’s, endears him to those who seek his help!

It is not limited to those who go to him – he extends himself to any situation he thinks he could be of some help. Comes to him naturally. An engineer first, puts in place solutions not obvious to many, including the grunt work entailed.

Our own experiences of this kind are too numerous to recount here.

And, finally, I have no problems confessing I fall way too short by this standard.

End