Do not be a labor

Ask a laborer, “Why are you working?” Then you will understand what is the quality of that particular man’s activity. If you ask a man who is working, “why are you working” and the man answers, I am working so that I may get my wages.” The man who is thus working in society only for the sake of wages, only for the sake of pay, only for the sake of commission, the man who is working in the world only for profit is called a labourer. A minister may be a labourer, a chief justice may be a labourer, one of the greatest men of a country or a politician, may be a labourer, if he is putting forth his intelligence, mind and body to the society only with the idea “I will aggrandize more and more income”. You ask him, “why do you want wages?” He has no greater motive than “I may feather my house beautifully, for the sake of my wife and children; I want this income so that I may keep the wolf away from the doors; I want it only for my own pleasure.” The man who is self-centered is working only for the profit that comes to him; with that profit he is not thinking of starting a hospital or doing any good to the society but he wants only to aggrandize and give it intact to his wife and children at home. If that is the low ambition with which a man is pouring out his energy in the world outside, the sweating man falls under the classification of ‘labourer’.

In the same work that a labourer is doing and in the same field, there can be another man who is not a laborer at all. In a field where a great man of the stature of Mahatma Gandhi is gaining the greatest achievement, in the same political field there can be a man who is only a labor. I hope I have conveyed the idea. It is not the work that you do that matters. It may be a scavenging work, it may be the Chief Minister’s or Prime Minister’s job. It is not the work that gives you the dignity and glory in the society but it is how you do it, and if you are doing it with an idea, “I may get out of society something and with that I shall benefit myself and enjoy myself in society” – if this is the self-centered limited point of view, you may be a scientist, you may be a great thinker, you may be a poet, you may be a writer, you may be intellectually the greatest genius of the country, and yet you are only a laborer from the philosophical stand – point.