In plain words
It goes to its anthill. It says, ‘There is jaggery there, let us all go, come,’ and all of them eat that jaggery, sharing it evenly. Scatter grains of cooked rice anywhere and test it. First a crow comes and looks. It does not eat. It goes off, calls kāv, kāv, gathers them all together, comes back, and they all eat together. Truly, if this kind of evenness had been in man, how uplifted he would have been! When something comes his way, this man takes it quietly and tucks it away inside, in case anyone sees. We must develop in this feeling of Bhakti the evenness that says: ten people have a claim on this; only when ten people have eaten is it as if I too have eaten. That is why the ancient tradition, with a broad feeling, Lokāssamastā sukhinobhavantu, spread this Bhakti and surrender far and wide.
Our feelings are all becoming very impure. All of you know. At the Institute and in the hostel they keep you tightly at work. Every week some test or some quiz: in many ways they keep putting pressure on you. You finish this a little and, going there, you must go off to sports and games. Coming from there, they have no time even to bathe. There you must work in the kitchen. This is how you think. Abbā, Svāmī, we have no time at all in the hostel; they are giving us very tight work. You feel that study too is very hard. This is good for you. How so? A small example: brahmacārī śatamarkaṭaḥ, they said. Inside these young men, it seems, there are monkeys by the thousand. When there are feelings like that, it is very hard to hold them back. I shall tell one more small story and finish.
A young man living in a village, out of love for his country, thinking, ‘War has … in our land of Bhārata,’ and ‘I must join the army,’ went in with enthusiasm. For two or three days they kept him hard at work there. But unluckily, on the very fifth day after he went, the war stopped. Whether from some trouble at home, or from love of country, or for some other reason, wanting to go to war, he had given up his parents, his elder and younger sisters, everyone, and gone into the war. The war was over. The sepoys got rest. This fellow sat down under a tree. In the three days since he had come, he had had no time to think of anything: work, work. Drill here. Off from there to shooting: all of it work. They kept him working twenty-four hours. When this work stopped, he sat beneath a tree. Worry about home grew in him: ‘How much my parents must be suffering over me, how much my younger sisters must be suffering, how my younger brother is faring.’