বাংলা 
English 
Illiterate Fakir Yasin Shah is about 65 years old.
In his youth he played the role of Bibek (Conscience) in a jatra troupe.
With the jatra troupe, the itinerant Yasin wandered here and there.
One day Fakir Nizam Uddin Shah of the Akhra-bari called him and said “Baba, your voice is good; give up jatra and sing Lalon's songs”. Before one first-of-Kartik, it was Fakir Nizam himself who placed in his hands Lalon's first song —
Unless one has the nature of the chatak bird,
by words alone can it obtain the rain of the nectar cloud?
Hearing the song, Yasin came to his senses; he left the jatra troupe and began frequenting the Akhra-bari; he chose the Baul life. Absorbed in sadhana and bhajan, Yasin realised that to become a sage one must have the chatak's nature — one must sit waiting in the hope of when the nectar will come. His initiating guru's name was Fakir Aziz Shah; he worked as a gatekeeper on the railway; his home was Ruppur in Pabna. When Fakir Aziz asked Yasin to take khilafat, he said that guru, such a great burden he could not carry. Khilafat is something else —
Tying the mind's loincloth is fakiri; getting lost in the house of trust is verily theft.
In Yasin's words, “My core substance is a thing of trust; it is the fear that I might not be able to guard that trust that made me refuse khilafat”.
Later Yasin received rice and water from his guru as the first lesson. About his guru he said,
One on whom the guru bestows grace knows the guru's command; only by great fortune can one behold the moon (the guru). That is no moon of the new-moon night; its rays rise on the upper storey. My guru was a very good man. The old Baul Fakir Yasin Shah's home is in Cheuria itself. Song-mad Yasin can play nothing but the ektara; he comes to the Akhra-bari very early in the morning and returns at dusk. Fakir Yasin has bound night and day in song after song.
