{"id":3495,"date":"2003-09-13T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-09-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2003\/09\/13\/2003-09-13-the-holy-man-businessman\/"},"modified":"2003-09-13T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-09-13T12:00:00","slug":"2003-09-13-the-holy-man-businessman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2003\/09\/13\/2003-09-13-the-holy-man-businessman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Holy Man Businessman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/south_asia\/3094780.stm\">Source<\/a><\/P><P>TAMIL NADU, INDIA, September 11, 2003: He is a Hindu holy man who has renounced the material world, yet he is also a business tycoon who employs thousands of people. Christian Fabre, or Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta as he is now known, is a French citizen living in India. He became a Hindu holy man, or sadhu, some years ago and now runs an ashram in the south-western state of Tamil Nadu, according to this article on the BBC. He came to India in the 1970&#8217;s, and fell in love with its culture, faith and people. After losing his job and his family he was introduced to a Hindu Swami and discovered a renewed faith in himself. He bought four sewing machines and secured some orders from a major French clothing company. Today, his company, Fashion International, has 35 factories which employ 60,000 people. His guru eventually invited him to take up the sannyas &#8212; renounce all worldly attachments and focus on the search for enlightenment. Swami says, &#8220;My guru made me swear, that as a condition of taking up the sannyas, I must also maintain my business. He said that I should not leave behind my work.&#8221; Swami now lives in the ashram in the manner of the other sadhus in his holy order. He does not care for money. &#8220;I do not keep a single penny for myself. I divide all my profit between my workers.&#8221; HPI adds: This is an unusual report as normally a sadhu would not remain a businessman after taking up sannyas. Perhaps our readers have more information on the Swami.<BR><br \/>\n<\/P> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SourceTAMIL NADU, INDIA, September 11, 2003: He is a Hindu holy man who has renounced the material world, yet he,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}