The Money That Lets You Sleep

Avyaansh,

I have already written you one letter about money — about the bicycle, the fifty rupees, the three generations it took to build what little we have. That letter was about how money is made.

This one matters more. This one is about how it must be earned. Because a fortune built the wrong way is not a fortune at all. It is a curse with a number attached to it.

Your grandfather gave me two lines about this. I want to hand them to you exactly as he handed them to me — and then I want to tell you about a man I watched as a boy, whose life proved every word.

Shrapit money

Your grandfather's first line was this: tainted money — shrapit money — poisons the honest money lying beside it.

Picture a man who has worked cleanly for thirty years. Every rupee earned with sweat and a straight back. Then one day a shortcut appears — money through an unfair door, easy money, the kind that tempts almost everyone at least once. He takes it. And here is what your grandfather understood: that dirty money does not sit quietly in a corner of his wealth. It spreads. It contaminates the clean money he spent a lifetime building. All of it turns impure.

Think of how we place food before God. We would never offer Him an adulterated dish. If a single drop of spit fell into a basket of the finest, costliest food, the whole basket is finished — it cannot be offered, however much of it is pure. Money is exactly the same. One unfair rupee, and the whole offering of your life is no longer clean.

Our scriptures knew this long before I did. Bhishma — the mightiest and most righteous man in the Mahabharata — sat silent while Draupadi was shamed in open court. On his bed of arrows he finally confessed why: he had been living on the tainted food of the Kauravas, and that impure salt had clouded his viveka, his power to tell right from wrong. If tainted food could rot the judgment of the greatest man of his age, my son, do not imagine your mind will be the exception.

What that money does to a man

People will tell you the unfair path is worth it. Let me tell you what it truly costs, because the price is hidden, and it is enormous.

The moment a man takes that money, he begins to carry it like a stone. He lives in fear — fear of losing it, fear of being found out. He cannot even enjoy it. Because the whole shallow point of ill-gotten wealth is to show it off, and yet he must whisper shhh, no one must ever know how I really got rich. Sit with how absurd that is. Only a shallow man chases money to show off; only a shallow man takes the crooked road to get it — and then he cannot even show it, because the truth would destroy him.

That hidden weight does not stay in the mind. It leaks out. It weakens the man, and the weakening surfaces in ways he can no longer control. In everything I have seen, the body breaks first — the health goes. And then misfortune seems to hunt him down, one event after another, as though he were calling it toward himself.

I believe he is. Whatever a man carries in his mind, he broadcasts — and he draws the same frequency back to him. A mind full of guilt and fear pulls guilt- and fear-shaped things into a life. This is why every wise book ever written tells you to think positively. Beta, that is not a slogan for a greeting card. It is true. A clean mind attracts a clean life. A poisoned one attracts its own poison.

The man in Barigora

When I was a boy, we lived in Barigora, in Jamshedpur. It was barely a town then — more like a village. :) We ran barefoot down the lanes beating old cycle tyres along with sticks, flew kites and sprinted beneath them to give them more sky. It was an innocent, happy childhood, and I lacked for nothing.

Somewhere in those school years, a name began travelling through our locality. I will not write it here — he is gone, and his family is not. He was a man who rose as his political weight grew, and his weight grew because he got things done the unfair way. Money flowed to him. And his drinking swelled in exact proportion to the money.

This is what happens, Avyaansh, when a man with no skill and no vision is suddenly handed buckets of money: he loses his head. He starts to believe he is god. The man in Barigora came apart quickly. His health collapsed, and he left this world long before his time — leaving behind a small child, a wife, and a house, to stand and face the anger of every person he had cheated to raise his pile.

That is what shrapit money finally buys. Not a kingdom. A short, frightened life, and a family left behind to pay your debts after you are gone.

The test that never lies

Your grandfather's second line was the simplest and the truest of all: a man who has earned his money by fair means sleeps peacefully at night.

That is your whole audit, for the rest of your life. Not the size of your bank balance. Not what the world believes you are worth. Only this one question, asked of yourself in the dark: can I sleep?

All the money on earth cannot buy the sleep a clean conscience gives away for free. I have had very little in my life and slept like a stone. I have known men with crores who have not slept properly in years. It is not wealth that lets a man rest. It is clean hands.

What I want for you

So here is what I ask of you, my son, and it matters to me far more than any figure you will ever earn.

Earn it clean. Keep your money the kind you could, without flinching, place before God. Never take the unfair door — however small the amount looks, however easy it seems — because there is no small amount of poison, and it never stays where you put it.

I would far rather leave you less money that you can sleep beside, than a fortune that comes and sits on your chest at three in the morning. Stay light. Stay clean. Stay able to sleep.

And whatever you build, build it so that on the day you are finally gone, the people you leave behind meet gratitude at your door — never a mob.

— Your Dad

Har Har Mahadev. 🔱