In plain words
Only When We Guard the Honour of Society Does Society Guard Our Honour
We were born in society. We are growing up in society. We are living in society. We have to look to the honour and dignity of society. Only when we guard the honour of society will society guard our honour too. This itself they called ‘Dharmo rakṣati rakṣitaḥ’. You children must not think of it otherwise. Today, what are the natural ways of things as they happen in the world? A brother of twenty, the elder, and a girl of sixteen: the two are brother and sister. They know it; we know it. But when those two travel by themselves, what does the world think? It wrongly decides that they are some wife and husband. That is, we are behaving against society. The sister and the brother must go separately, or else one, a mother or a father, must be with you. These young people, even if they are brother and sister, the two must not go alone. Society will punish us. It will reduce our honour and dignity to ashes. Society does not understand our ties of kinship in the least. From ancient times society has been setting our ties of kinship within limits of this kind. This itself they have been calling ‘saṃskṛti’. Because it is what refines, it is saṃskṛti. It refines the matter of when, where and how we must travel, how we must live, how we must behave and how we must speak. We must go on keeping the rules of society well. If she really is your sister, at home you may talk in any way you like; but in the world outside, though you are the brother and she the sister, you must conduct yourselves with great care. This conduct itself goes on raising a man's value. Human values, the values that show the true path in daily life: these we have forgotten today. When we bring the same thing in by another road and look: an old man of sixty, because he had no one at home to help him, tried to marry a girl of eighteen.