In plain words
In this supremely holy land of Bhārata, forbearance itself is our beauty; the vow that shines brightest among all vows, noble truthful conduct, is itself the hardest tapas; if you ask which feeling is sweet in our land, what is more honoured than the feeling for a mother? that which held honour alone greater than life, our country's code, they have thrown into the fire; searching out foreign codes, they have handed us today, in haste, the naked sword called strange freedom. Ah, what shall I say of the rule of Bhārata! Just as the elephant does not know its own strength, so have the people of Bhārata become today.
The mahout, an ordinary man, can frighten the mighty elephant and bring it under control. Precisely because it does not know how much strength it has, the elephant yields to the mahout: when he tells it to sit, it sits; when he tells it to get up, it gets up; this is how it goes on behaving. In the same way man, though he is the embodiment of the Ātma, though he himself is God, cannot know his own strength; he yields to the world, yields to the world's delusion, and falls into troubles of many kinds.