In plain words
Instead of earning ten thousand rupees a month abroad, it is enough to earn even a thousand rupees in our country. Half the money earned abroad goes on house rent alone. The price of everything else is also very high. Even getting drinking water is very hard. Abroad, everything is a hardship! To buy one banana: ten rupees! Where will you bring all this from? How will you bring up the children? It is not possible. In our homes, even if we cook a little rice and serve it with chutney, the children eat it and are well content. You leave such an easy life, put up with hardship and hope to go abroad.
If our feelings are good, even wild beasts behave well with us
In all this time I have not gone abroad anywhere. But once I did go to East Africa, and only there. There, in the forest, I went about looking at the animals and noting the great qualities they have. There are elephants there. How grand they are! How beautiful they are! Their ears are like big winnowing fans. If they flap their ears just once, even mosquitoes a long way off fly away. I went up to those elephants and gave them fruit. They took it happily. Then there are zebras; there are giraffes. How happy they are! None of the animals in that forest is the kind that harms man. The bad qualities of man today are themselves bringing about the change in cattle, birds, beasts and the like. If we intend them any harm, they will harm us; but if we do nothing, they follow us like pets. In one place in that forest some lions and their cubs were sitting. Even when we went close to them, they did not move. They sat right there, looking at us happily. In that way even the wild beasts behaved very well. ‘As the feeling, so the result.’ They behave that way only in answer to our feelings. Snakes are just the same! They come and lie down right beside us, but do nothing.