In plain words
We must clean our clothes. We must keep our books clean. We must keep clean all our things, every article we use each day.
Students! You may not know this. I will tell you a small example from My life, that is, from the life of this body. It was studying in the eighth standard. Even then they used to give us great big books. They gave us a book called Geography. It was as big as the globe itself. If you put it under your head, sleep would come. It was like a big pillow. Another was the civics book. That civics book too was just as big. All those books, each one as big as this, cost a rupee or half a rupee. Today a book as thick as a chapāti costs twenty rupees. Prices have gone up so much. In those days all the tenth standard books filled a bag as big as this. All of them together cost eleven rupees. The way I used them was this: I kept them that clean. Children today write all sorts of names on the covers from top to bottom. They underline even in the pages inside. The underlining should be done within, not in the book. But I read everything. In some places two pages were stuck together. I left them as they were and read, for fear that if I tore them apart something in the pieces of paper would be lost. At the end of the year I got a first class. In those days, for every subject (I am not telling you this to exaggerate), they gave the answer papers back to us, and the teachers used to write all over them from top to bottom, “very, very… good”. That is how the teachers wrote on My papers and sent them back. I passed.
With My friends of childhood......
Three of us sat at My desk. I was in the centre, with a boy on this side and on that. As clever as I was, they were just as dull. As many marks as I got, they got just as many zeroes.