Passage 6

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In plain words

Money. Money. Money, whatever it may be. What is real wealth? Character alone is real wealth. So you must foster the wealth called character. We must strengthen devotion to the land in which we were born and grew up.

This is my motherland; this is my dear mother tongue; this is my faith: one who cannot speak so, having spoiled them, is he anything but a living corpse on this earth?

If we have no love for our own country, why should we trouble ourselves over a foreign land at all? Will a person who has forgotten the mother who bore him keep from forgetting his aunt? We must not turn into beggars like this merely for the sake of money. If you want to beg, do it in your own country. But rather than go abroad, take up a begging bowl and live by collecting money, death is better. So in serving our own country we must build up faith in our own country. We must take up such determination.

Students! Born in Bhārata, calling this my dear mother tongue, saying 'Jananī janmabhūmiś ca svargād api garīyasī': if we have no faith in our own birthplace, why should we take birth at all? So we must stay in our own country, serve our country, and bind ourselves by a vow to shape its people in the right way. Somebody passes as an engineer, somebody passes in medicine, and at once a passport for a foreign country: what is this? They are all not biggers but beggars. Serve your mother and father yourself. Serve the land that bore you. Support the people of your country in the right way. Do not use your strength and abilities for your own selfish ends and gain. So only when we develop such sacred feelings will your citta come to steadiness. Otherwise it will always keep swinging this way and that like the pendulum of a clock. So if you want steadiness, you must draw up a master plan at the very start. What must I do? You must inquire, 'In what kind of path must I walk, and how must I develop true humanness?' How many hardships my mother and father are bearing for my sake! My life, all of it, is theirs. Students! One thing alone you must not forget.