In plain words
Recognise the culture of Bhārata
However much learning man may gain, however rich he may be, however much authority he may hold, if he has no good qualities there is no use. Among all good qualities, only the quality joined with divine feelings for God makes humanness blossom. Those who recognised such divine feelings are the people of Bhārata. But today the people of Bhārata are forgetting their own culture.
“In the most holy land of Bhārata, to have forbearance is itself our beauty; the great virtue of Satya, higher than every vow, is itself the hard tapas. In our country what feeling is sweeter than the feeling of a mother? No one today makes any effort to recognise the principle of the divine culture of Bhārata, joined with such noble feelings. What misfortune can be greater than this? Burning to ashes the code of our own land, which taught that honour is greater than life itself, and seeking out the codes of foreign lands, our people of Bhārata have today got hold of the ‘open knife’ called a strange freedom. As the elephant did not know its own strength, so have our people of Bhārata become today.”
Unable to recognise our own strength, we take the strength of others alone as our support; and a life that leans on the legs of others is unsteady. The culture of the people of Bhārata rests on their own strength and on self-confidence. Self-confidence itself is the root cause of everything. Today, because the people of Bhārata have lost their self-confidence, they have had to fall into such a sorry state.
Develop self-confidence
Embodiments of the Divine Ātma! You yourselves are embodiments of the Ātma, and the root cause of your not believing in yourselves is just the weakness within you. Recognise your own true nature. Then alone will true strength and ability arise in you, show themselves, and give you Ānanda. So today self-confidence is most necessary for man. For all enjoyments, for all riches and wealth, self-confidence itself is the root cause. So we must develop self-confidence.
Today the world is wasting away in turmoil of many kinds and in unrest. In such a condition, what is the work we must do? Does the power to drive away this unrest lie in us ourselves? Can just one individual alone drive away this unrest? To such a weakness we must give no room at all. When every person of Bhārata steps forward with self-confidence, all this unrest can be driven away in a single moment. We are unable to step forward precisely because we have lost such faith today.
Above all, every man needs the vow of helping others. Every man is born of a portion of God. If he has no Prema for his fellow men, that is not humanness at all. So every man must recognise the truth that all belong to the family of God, show forth the principle of Prema towards all, and shape himself into an ideal.