Sigmund Freud says that these people are wish-fulfillments. We want that there should be people like these, but they have not really existed and even if they have existed they have not existed the way we have described them. That was the cause of the rift between Freud and his disciple Carl Gustav Jung; the rift was of tremendous significance. Freud is very pragmatic; Jung is far more poetic. Jung has tremendous trust in mythology and has no trust in history. And I absolutely agree with Jung about this.

All the mythologies of the world are closer to truth than your so-called histories. But we teach our children history, not mythology. We teach them arithmetic, not poetry. And the way we teach a little bit of poetry – we teach it in such a way that they become so fed up and bored with it that once the student leaves the university he will never read Shakespeare again, he will never look at Milton’s works again. The very names of Shakespeare, Milton, Kalidas, Bhavbhuti will create a kind of nausea in him. The professors have tortured him so much behind these names that he is finished forever. His interest has not been encouraged, he has not become more poetic; he has lost all interest in poetry. He has not been supported to be creative, he has not been helped to learn how to poetize.

The scholars are so clever in destroying all that is beautiful by their commentaries, interpretations, by their so-called learning. They make everything so heavy that even poetry with them becomes non-poetic.

I myself never attended any poetry class in the university. I was called again and again by the head of the department, that “You attend other classes, why you don’t come to the poetry classes?”

I said, “Because I want to keep my interest in poetry alive. I love poetry, that’s why. And I know perfectly well that your professors are absolutely unpoetic; they have never known any poetry in their life. I know them perfectly well. The man who teaches poetry in the university goes for a morning walk with me every day. I have never seen him looking at the trees, listening to the birds, seeing the beautiful sunrise.”

And in the university where I was, the sunrise and the Sunset were something tremendously beautiful. The university was on a small hillock surrounded by small hills all around. I have never come across…I have traveled all over this country; I have never seen more beautiful sunsets and sunrises anywhere. For some unknown mysterious reason Sagar University seems to have a certain situation where clouds become so colorful at the time of sunrise and sunset that even a blind man will become aware that something tremendously beautiful is happening.

But I have never seen the professor who teaches poetry in the university to look at the sunset, to stop even for a single moment. And whenever he sees me watching the sunset or the sunrise or the trees or the birds, he asks me, “Why you are sitting here? You have come for a morning walk – do your exercise!”

I told him that, “This is not exercise for me. You are doing exercise; with me it is a love affair.”

And when it rains he never comes. And whenever it rains I will go and knock at his door and tell him, “Come on!”

He will say, “But it is raining!”