In plain words
Curing disease is our saṅkalpa
To our mind, the first and foremost is the heart. After that, the lungs. Third, the kidneys, and then the brain: we started this hospital with the very intention of giving special importance to these four and wholly curing the village people of the diseases connected with them. Yet for us there is no distinction of village people and town people. Disease does not choose only the village people and fail to choose the town people. Diseases have no such distinction at all. So for us, too, there is no distinction at all in curing disease. Village people or town people, to cure the disease of anyone at all: that is our saṅkalpa.
Today all hospitals are turning into business concerns. If some people spend ten crores and start a hospital, an income of a hundred crores is in their heart; they start these hospitals for such selfish ends of their own. But in Sai, from the foot to the hair of the head, it is selflessness itself, selflessness itself. In Sai there is no selfishness at all; no one tries to recognise such a truth.
Health is the greatest fortune
Whatever work we wish to begin in the world, the body is most necessary. “Śarīra mādyaṃ khalu dharma sādhanaṃ”. For all actions the body itself is the root cause. Only when this body is healthy can we do any work at all. Man is endowed with the four kinds of puruṣārtha called “Dharma, artha, kāma and Mokṣa”. “Dharmārthakāmamokṣāṇāṃ ārogyaṃ mūlamuttamaṃ”. Whatever work we wish to enter on, health is most necessary. So, holding that “health is the greatest fortune”, we have been starting such institutions in order to give such health. Yet what is the use of being healthy? This healthy body must enter on the work it ought to do. Even if we have a body, there is no use if it enters on the wicked path. For having taken on a body in this world, we must give it its proper fulfilment.
A five-year project finished in five months
We must also enquire a little into the way this hospital was built. L. & T. Brothers have had many buildings put up. Not only in our country but in foreign countries too, their influence is great. But though they have had buildings put up in many places, nowhere had they seen the joy of the workers who worked here. With joy and with zeal every humble worker went on doing alone the work that ten people should do. All the workers entered on this work with śraddhā and Bhakti. Only after I came back from Kodaikanal in the month of ‘May’ did we start this work.