- Lived:
- 1469–1539 · born at Rāi Bhoi dī Talwandī (Nankana Sahib, Pakistan) → an accountant's desk at Sultanpur (Sultanpur Lodhi), roads reaching from Assam to Arabia, and a farm at Kartarpur on the Rāvī
- Field:
- founder of Sikhism; poet of nearly a thousand hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib
- The Big Idea:
- Religion is not a label you are born with but a way you live — earn honestly, remember the One, share what you earn — and he built a village where all three were practiced daily, with a free kitchen at its centre where caste dissolved at the meal.
- In their words:
- "Truth is higher than everything; higher still is truthful living." (Sirī Rāgu, Guru Granth Sahib)
- If you remember one thing:
- A Punjabi accountant walked into a river, came out three days later saying "there is no Hindu, there is no Musalman" — and instead of founding a sect of hermits, founded a working farm with an open kitchen, which grew into a religion of some twenty-five to thirty million people who still cook for strangers first and pray second.