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How many sides does a coin have?

This is a chapter from my fourth book called When hunger yearns

A young and smart writer by the name of Idrees met a beggar one day. Idrees is an alternate transliteration of Idris. Some sources say that prophet Idris was the first man to write with a pen. The beggar's name was Ragheb. Ragheb is an Arabic name that refers to desire or want and often refers to someone who is willing or eager for something. The writer had just collected an award for his latest book and was returning to his car in the carpark. The beggar asks, "Hi sir. I beg of you. Can you give me money to buy something to eat? In return you get to ask me one question about life." The writer gave some money and asked his question and the beggar answered with the following story.

Two brothers were fighting over a bag of gold coins. A beggar passes by with a coin and proposes that he could resolve this dispute. Each person chooses a side of the coin. If the coin lands on their side of the coin then the bag of gold is theirs. The beggar then asks the brothers to grab opposite ends of a stick and together break the stick. Who has the longer half of the stick gets to flip the coin. The older brother gets to flip the coin, flips it and it lands perfectly balanced on the edge. Both brothers are shocked. Neither of them can lay claim to the bag of gold coins. The younger brother then asks the beggar, "Who gets to claim the coins now since neither of us can claim the coins?" The beggar then replies, "I will divide the coins into three equal parts. One part for you. One part for your brother. And one part for the orphanage." The older brother then asks, "What about yourself?" He replied, "My wealth resides in my heart and in the good that I can do for others. I have seen the many sides of life. The good, the bad and the ugly. I was once a rich man and it only brought me misery. Now I choose the side of peace and contentment. My wants and desires are with the simple things in life."

The writer felt enlightened by the story that the beggar gave. The writer then ponders that the word sides is contained in the word desires and that beggar spelt backwards closely resembles the name Ragheb and his name Idrees contains the letters of desire. That story became a chapter in his next book - The Beggar Picture of Life. Which side of his story will we choose to be on?

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