And these people are thought to be saintly, and these people are thought to be great preachers of nonviolence. That’s exactly what his master, Mahatma Gandhi, did his whole life; now he is perpetuating the rotten tradition. For these thirty years at least, India has suffered from these people – and there seems to be no end to it.

This is called nonviolence. If I threaten somebody that “I will kill you if you don’t listen to me,” I will be caught by the police. I will be a criminal against the law. But if I threaten that “I will kill myself if you don’t listen to me,” this is thought to be some holy act.

This is strange that nobody says, “These people should immediately be caught and brought into the court – because they are threatening suicide, and it is a crime against the law.” Any attempt to commit suicide is a crime against the law. But Vinoba Bhave is a saint.

Morarji Desai went to see him to persuade him: “Don’t do it!” because he himself has been doing it, the same thing. That’s how he has come in power: by threatening to commit suicide.

These are subtle ways of coercion, violence. Who is one single person to decide for the whole country? Then somebody can say, “I will fast unto death unless everybody stops smoking – because my mother appeared in the dream and she said, ‘Son, this great work you have to do.’”

Coercion becomes non-violence. A threat to commit suicide becomes a beautiful thing when you call it “fast unto death.” And rather than being caught by the police and brought before the court, the prime minister runs, the ministers are running and everybody is trying to persuade him: “Don’t go on your fast unto death.” And nobody is saying that this is a crime.

These are rationalizations. One can do anything if one has a cunning and clever mind to rationalize it.

Sometimes you may be rationalizing – watch it. But my own experience of women is that they are not great rationalizers – men are bigger rationalizers, because women live more intuitively, more instinctively, and man lives more through the head, through reason.

Women don’t bother much about logic. Their behavior is more or less illogical – instinctive, spontaneous. They don’t try to masquerade it in a logical way; they simply jump from one point to another without bothering about the Aristotelian process of logic. They simply jump. Their leaps are quantum, from one point to another. You cannot see what the bridge is, how they manage to get from one point to another. Their ways are totally different from men’s.