And he wept in front of me, holding my hands, and said, “The whole credit for making me the principal goes to you. Not only have you changed my relationship with the students, strangely, once I started changing, the change has affected every relationship. I have loved my wife for the first time, I have loved my own children for the first time. Now I am teaching not just to earn money, I love it. I enjoy it.”

“When someone commits a mistake it does not make me angry. And now I can see that before I was angry twenty-four hours a day, so any slight excuse was enough. I was fighting with my father, with my mother, with my wife, with my brothers…I was carrying all that mountainous burden and these small children were simply victims. You were right: it was because I could not show my domination towards anybody else – I am just an ordinary school teacher – but I could show my domination and my power and my greatness and my superiority, and deep down fulfill a certain ego. Since the day I dropped the idea of being violent with the students, slowly, slowly my eyes have become clean and clear, and I can see that to err is human.”

I said to him…and he has remembered it; the last time I saw him in 1970, he reminded me. He said, “To err is human and to forgive is divine – that is the old proverb.”

I said, “That proverb is dangerous because it makes forgiving so far away. Gods forgive, and you are not a god. To err is human. To forgive is more human, it is not divine – just more human.”

In fact, the moment you have achieved your own humanity, you have achieved your divinity. They are not two things. Your humanity at its climax is the beginning of your divineness, of your godliness.

My criticism of the politicians, first, is the criticism of the hidden politician inside you – as a husband, as a wife, as a mother, as a father. You are expecting obedience, you are thinking that your child is not only born out of you but has to be just a carbon copy of you.

Children are born of you, but they don’t belong to you. They belong to the future, of which you know nothing. You are the sunset, your children are the sunrise – and the gap of the whole night is there.

Secondly, I don’t see men as islands, separate from each other. And I don’t see their activities as separate from each other either. They are all part of a network.

If I want a revolution in human consciousness I will have to hammer on the heads of politicians as hard as possible, because politicians are the ones who are always standing and they have the power to prevent any kind of revolution, any kind of change. They want a society with a status quo, because any revolution is going to throw them from their power positions.

A conscious humanity cannot tolerate idiot politicians guiding it.

I have had to criticize the so-called leaders of religion, high priests, popes, shankaracharyas, because they are making every effort that man’s mind remains retarded. Only a retarded mind can be exploited.

And you ask me not to be offensive, not to be violent.