Soon the child is going to become a fully-fledged citizen of the world – he should be grabbed. He should become a Catholic if he is born out of Catholic parents or if fortunately, he is an orphan, then Mother Teresa can look after him and convert him into a Catholic. They are immensely happy. The more the world has orphans, the more Mother Teresas can get Nobel Prizes, and more orphans means more Catholics. The more poor people in the world… They can be easily converted to Christianity.

Jesus says man cannot live by bread alone. That is true of an authentic man but not true about the masses. As far as the masses are concerned, I say to you, man lives by bread and bread alone. And there are only masses. Where is the authentic man? These politicians, these priests, these pedagogues don’t leave anybody to himself so that he can become authentic, so he can get his original face, so that he can find himself.

Everywhere there are people with vested interests in every child. And the child is simply a tabula rasa, nothing is written on him; it is a great temptation for everybody to write something on him. The parents, of course, would like to write their religion, their caste, their philosophy, their politics, because the child should represent them. The child should carry their inheritance.

If they have been Hindus for centuries, the child should be a Hindu, carrying the heritage of Hinduism to future generations. They are not interested in the child’s own potential – nobody is interested in it – they are interested in their own investment, and of course everybody is investing.

Parents are investing too much in the child, giving birth to him, raising him, educating him; and everything is conditional – whether it is said or not, that is not the point. They will say one day, “We have done so much for you, now is the time that you should do something for us.” They themselves may not be conscious of what they are doing, – because this is how they have been brought up by their parents, generation after generation, the same process.

The teacher is interested that the student should represent him. The religious teacher is interested that the disciple should be a model of his teachings. What I want you to remember is that everybody is interested in the child, for something which the child is not interested in at all.

And the child is very helpless, he cannot fight all these people. They are powerful. He’s dependent on them; if they want to make something of him, he has to become that. This much is absolutely clear to the child: if he goes against the parents he is misbehaving, he is betraying them. These ideas are also given by the parents, the priests, the teachers, so he feels guilty.

Any assertion of his own self becomes guilt, and every pretense of the parents, of the religious priests, of the educationists, of the politicians – which is only a pretense – pays very well. The child starts learning politics from the very beginning, to be hypocritical, base – be authentic and you are punished. Now, the child has a simple arithmetic, and we cannot condemn the child.