He didn't want to study; he wanted to count grains of rice in his father's shop, refusing to sell a single grain until a beggar asked for food. That refusal cost him his job and sent him wandering barefoot across continents for decades. He left behind the Langar, a massive free kitchen where everyone eats on the floor together, regardless of caste or creed. Now, that simple bowl of soup feeds over 100,000 people daily, proving that sharing a meal is the most radical act of all. Guru Nanak was born in 1469 in the village of Talwandi, now called Nankana Sahib in modern Pakistan. His father, a Hindu revenue official, tried repeatedly to direct his son toward business or government service, but young Nanak showed no interest in commerce, preferring instead to discuss theology with visiting holy men and disappear into meditative retreats. At 30, he experienced a spiritual awakening after immersing himself in a river and emerging three days later with the declaration "There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim." He spent the next 24 years on four major journeys, called Udasis, traveling to Mecca, Baghdad, Tibet, and throughout the Indian subcontinent, debating with priests, mullahs, yogis, and scholars. His teachings rejected the caste system, idol worship, ritualism, and the exclusion of women from religious life, ideas that were revolutionary in fifteenth-century South Asia. He established the first Sikh community at Kartarpur, where the Langar, the communal kitchen, became the physical expression of his theology: if all people are equal before God, they must eat together on the same floor. The Golden Temple in Amritsar now serves 50,000 to 100,000 free meals daily to anyone who enters, the world's largest free kitchen, and every Sikh gurdwara worldwide maintains a Langar as a fundamental obligation.