SPIRITUAL INDIA: People ask me how can India have so much spirituality and yet be so poor. I have my own explanation to this. India has one-third the land of America and thrice its population. It has six major religions, so many dialects, plus a thousand years of foreign rule. That India is still existing as a country is a miracle. We could have gone the Yugoslavia way a long ago. Yet, it’s because of spirtuality that India still exists. Tell me, today there are more hospitals, how come there are more diseases? Are the hospitals responsible for this? No, it is because of the lifestyle. You still feel the villages in this country have lots of ethics, human values are greater there. Do you know 27 per cent of the European population suffers from depression? Do you know 50 per cent of the students in Washington DC drop out of school? The crime rate in the US is unbelievable. 33 per cent of college students there have gone to jail or done some crime. In face of these statistics India seems a much better place. It could be much better I agree. But there is an air of spirituality in India. Even in the freedom movement Mahatma Gandhi could do what he did because he was such a spiritual person. There were many more intelligent people than him around. Motilal Nehru and others were more well-read people. I agree moral degradation is happening, but it is because of no spirituality. Nobody taught us in school how to manage our mind when we are upset. Nobody taught us that your breath and your emotions are connected. That we are surviving is a miracle, let’s accept that. Then we are progressing economically—it’s only you people who tell us this, that GDP is growing. On the happiness front I would say we can do better. If we do better in the moral plane we could do even better.

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