“Your son sounds very amusing,” laughed the psychologist. “How old is your boy?”

“Thirty-nine.”

Somebody clinging to power at the age of eighty-three: it looks really pitiable. And doing nothing with that power – doing only one thing: trying to cling to it, trying to keep it, trying to maintain it. Such an unproductive man, such an uncreative man should not be there.

The country needs a younger person with more brains, with more vision of the future; only then can this country be saved. The country needs a scientific approach towards life – not out-of-date sermons and puritanical, moralistic preachings. The country does not need a preacher; it has thousands of preachers, there is no need of any more. The country needs somebody who has the scientific capability to transform dreams into reality.

Morarji Desai does not have that capacity, that’s why I have been criticizing him. And it is difficult for him to reorient himself at this time; it is too late. He is closed, frozen, everything in him has become stone-like. He cannot flow with the times, he cannot relax with reality as it is. Rather than flowing with the times and with reality as it is today, he would like reality to follow him. He is asking the impossible. And in asking the impossible, he shows his dictatorial attitudes.

This country calls itself a democracy, but it is not yet, because this country does not have the consciousness of being democratic. Democracy is just talk – deep down, there is just dictatorial bureaucracy.

And the whole mind of the past has been that way. Democracy is a new phenomenon. Democracy is a by-product of a scientific attitude – and this country lacks scientific attitude.

Try to understand this. Democracy could not have happened in any other time in the past, because all the religions have been dogmatic. Every religion claims the truth and the whole truth. Every religion claims: “I am right and everybody else is wrong.” All religions are closed.

And I am not including Buddhas, Christs and Krishnas; they are exceptions, and they are not part of your so-called religious traditions. Buddha is not dogmatic, he has a very scientific openness. He approaches every fact of life with an open mind. He told his disciples, “Don’t believe in what I say. Unless you have experimented with it and unless you have experienced it, and unless you have become a witness to it, don’t believe it.”

But Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Jainism – all these ideologies are dogmatic: everybody claims the whole truth. That very claim is inhuman, that very claim is egoistic. And because this country has no scientific mind, it lacks the democratic spirit.