"And if sometimes a murder happens, then a very rare thing happens – which is inconceivable to the outsider. The murderer goes hundreds of miles to the capital to surrender to the police, confessing that he has murdered a fellow man and he needs to be punished. Unless he is punished, he will not find peace of mind.

"These things look beautiful – nice people – but they are hungry, starving. They don't have clothes. They live naked. They don't have any of the facilities that science has made available to man – no comforts, no entertainment. Their life is boring from inside – no education….

"And the culture that looks to us beautiful, to them is simply taken for granted, they don't see its beauty. They have been born in it, brought up in it. They have not suddenly come across it, they have grown slowly into it.

"Things look good to us – that there is nobody who is a thief; but the truth is there is nothing to steal. People are so poor. The same fact can be looked at from two viewpoints. Somebody can say people are so moral that locks are not needed on the houses, and people don't use locks; but the reality is that there is nothing in the house that needs to be locked. Secondly, the lock itself is a highly technological thing for them, they cannot make locks. They are so far behind.

"Gautam Buddha, his whole life, was teaching people not to steal. Mahavira was teaching not to steal. One of Mahatma Gandhi's successors, Vinoba Bhave, spoke in a meeting. I was only a student then. He said that at that time people were so educated, so moral, so cultured that no locks were used.

"I was just graduating from the university; I wrote a note to him and I told him, 'You should tell the whole truth. Was there anything in their houses that had to be locked? Were they capable of making locks? And moreover, you will have to give a second thought to why Gautam Buddha and Mahavira – the great teachers of that time – were telling people every day not to steal."