A pleasant surprise
Badarayana Das: “Once, a nice woman and her friend walked up to me at Rockefeller Center in New York with deliberate intention. I had been doing sankirtana there for many years, after legalizing it with much ordeal. She said to me, ‘If you could be anything or anyone in your next lifetime who or what would you be?’ I was struck by the depth of the question and I answered in kind. I then inquired, ‘Why do you ask?’ She replied, ‘Because one year ago at this exact same spot you asked me the exact same question!’ I immediately recalled how I was...
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Working while doing their real work
I just heard an amazing story from the book distributors of ISKCON of Silicon Valley. A few devotees there work remotely; they don’t have to go to the office. So, what do they do? This is going to shock you. They are so fired up that they bring their work laptop with them on book distribution, and set it up on the side of their book table. They’ll log in, do a little work on the computer, and then when they see someone coming they’ll show them the books. And these devotees do huge! One devotee did 60 Srimad Bhagavatam sets...
read moreMaking the unfortunate fortunate
There is a “tradition” in Slovenia that on the first day of highschool the older students paint the freshmans with F all over the face, hands, T-shirts, pants and so on. F comes from the Slovenian translation of pheasant. Some freshmen take it as a joke and paint themselves to “be cool” but some are quite disturbed by it. So we decided to go in a city with many highschools, found a strategic location and target mostly the freshmen. So we were distributing quite some books to young people and tried to transform what was...
read moreA GITA USED, A GITA ABUSED
Due to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, many people are called to join the war effort, including devotees. One such Russian devotee brought a *Bhagavad-gita* with him when he was called. While in his barracks, he was able to share Krsna consciousness with another soldier and was inspired to give him his *Gita.* As it turns out, after that gifted soldier went to the front line, he was shot by an enemy sniper and fell to the ground, writhing in pain. Fortunately, the medics were able to treat and stabilize him. Grateful he was still...
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