In plain words
Students! What you study has nothing whatever to do with the work you will do once you go out into the world. The MBA students today have tried to take in many things. You have tried hard to learn about the culture of our own country, not merely of America, not of Russia, not of Japan. You have been studying the teachings of the great souls of Bhārata. However much you have read, once you go into some factory or some industry and take up a job, there is no room at all to put any of this into practice. “Did you set out to bring in there what you studied? We want none of this nonsense. Get to work,” says the manager. There is no need to go as far as the manager. There is the workman. Go up to the workman at that machine and ask, “What are you doing? How are you doing it?”, and then: “Go away, sir! What do you know? I have twenty years of experience. You are people who read it in a book; what do you know more than I do?” he says. So you come to be scorned even by a worker. So what must we learn there? Calmly and patiently, even from those workers, we must try to understand how that machine works. life is awareness. We must know everything. If you say, “I have passed my MBA,” sit in an aircondition room, have the papers sent to you and do your work there, they will throw those very papers in your face and walk off. We must go into the factory and get to know in practice, thoroughly, what is being done where, how the little bolts, nuts and screws are being tightened.
Students! Understand what awareness means. Awareness is knowing a matter, or a person, or an object completely. To look at something more or less and say, “I know it all” is not awareness. Look at this; this is a big hand kerchief; if I keep all of it inside and ask what it is, can you say what it is?