Remembrances by Sanatana Prabhu

Remembrances by
Sanatana Das
part 1

Sometimes we must have eaten. But I don’t remember that. I do remember working very hard, then coming home and going straight to bed then waking up again and going back to work. Five days of that. My flat mate and I worked near each other so on Saturdays we would go our separate ways.

One Saturday he came home with a few hippy magazines. He had been working around the flea markets in Kensington High St (London) where the hippies were.

One of the magazines had a picture of Sri Krsna and Balaram herding cows on the cover.

“Who are these two boys?”, I thought. “This magazine is different”, I thought as I glanced through it. My friend told me how he had met a Hare Krsna devotee who had given him this Back to Godhead magazine and asked him for a donation. There was also an invitation to a feast on Sunday at their Temple.

We looked in the London Street Directory. (We were living in Ealing – about as far as you could go west on the central line of the tube train) and found Bury Place, a little lane near the British Museum. It was a good hour’s ride on the train.

Being a big city full of tourists the trains were slow on a Sunday afternoon. As we walked around the corner into Bury Place we didn’t really know what to look for. I mean what does a Hare Krishna Temple look like? We had never seen one. No harm. We smelled it. At first the fragrance of incense came and went with the breeze, but as we got closer it became easier to follow. A few doors down we discovered a very colourfully painted door. Behind it there seemed to be a large number of people chanting, and from underneath it swirls of incense smoke escaped. We pounded on the door and when a smiling devotee opened it a cloud of fragrant smoke billowed around us.

We stepped though the portal and we were in amongst it. The exuberant atmosphere of this new dimension was infectious and we were soon exploring the blissful activities there were going on with increasing curiosity.

And now it all begins…..

In Sri Sri Radha Ballabha’s Temple in Melbourne Srila Prabhupada had finished his lecture in the evening and asked, “Are there any questions?”

One of the devotees asked, “Is Lord Chaitanya’s Sankirtan movement going on only on this planet?”

Srila Prabhupada relied, “Lord Chaitanya’s Movement is going on on every planet in this universe.”

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