Gour Hari das Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 01

Gour Hari: So this area is known as Hippy Hill in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Almost every day everyone would gather at Hippy Hill, and sometimes the devotees would come and chant. This particular day was like any other day there, but I remember entering the park and what attracted me was the beauty in the sound of the…I didn’t even know at that time was the Hare Krishna mantra. People had been chanting all around the Haight-Ashbury area for months and months prior to this. The idea that Srila Prabhupada was there that particular day just captured me through his sound vibration. He just reached into me, reached into my heart and somehow or other said, “This one is mine.” It wasn’t maybe a year or so later that I had actually started to join the temple.

Interview DVD 02

Gour Hari: They assigned duties to everyone, and I was to be in charge of making the feast with the idea of feeding between five and ten thousand people, maybe more. So undaunted…I had never really cooked for large amounts of people…but in those days, we could climb Mount Everest and not be tired. Prabhupada’s energy was just driving the movement so powerfully that if we were given a duty to do, it was nothing. It was a feast actually that Prabhupada requested. There was so much prasadam there, we had gotten truckloads of watermelons donated so at the end we just stopped slicing the watermelons and just started giving whole watermelons to take home with them or to serve out.