A mother's debt can never be repaid: serve her yourself, and never be the reason she weeps.
Never cause your parents' tearsThe one resolve he asks of everyone: never be the reason a tear comes to a mother's or father's eyes.
Money and servants are not serviceSending rupees or hiring a helper does not discharge the duty; serve them with your own hands and sit with them daily, phone aside.
Old-age homes shame our cultureTwo parents can raise eight children, yet eight children cannot keep two parents, so they split them by the calendar.
Executive SummaryAI
After the opening prayers and hymns, the Maharaj asks everyone to close their eyes, travel back to childhood and bow at their mother's feet, saying the single sweetest word in the world is one letter long: मा.
He retells Shravan Kumar's story: parents who had wealth but no child were warned by a deva that seeing their son would cost them their sight, and when the baby cried they tore off their blindfolds and went blind, so the boy vowed to carry them on a kavad to sixty-eight tirthas.
In a village three-day halt a five-year-old boy named Manoj climbed into his lap and asked whether he missed his mother; the Maharaj answers that his own mother took diksha, that her last chaturmas was with him in Surat after he brought her by wheelchair, that at 84 she had no illness at all, and that she has now been gone 550 days, a year and eight months.
The hardest story is of a son who, told by his wife that a widow's face ruins business, sent his mother to an old-age home with 5,000 rupees a month, went on a Kullu-Manali trip instead of visiting her when she fell ill, and afterwards found a letter returning every rupee with the warning that his own son would one day send him there too.
The sermon closes with Ganesha circling his parents instead of the universe to win first worship, and then with hall announcements: rooms at Dadawadi at 3,51,000 rupees each with only three left, orders placed for 22 temples, Siddhi Tap starting with over 250 tapasvis, a 31,000-rupee anumodana slot, the children's shivir from 3 to 5, and a mandal meeting at three for the 15 August programme.