Nayanabhiram das Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 01

Nayanabhiram: We took Prabhupada here for a stroll and he said, “This is just like Vrindavan,” and after that we called the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens “Brooklyn Vrindavan.” He was talking about how all this desire to make parks, urban parks and botanical gardens, things like that, it’s a sublimation of our desire to recreate Vrindavan. We actually did do that by having this tableau. The two girls that played Radha and Krishna, they were actually sisters, Indira and Ekayani. Indira played Krishna and Ekayani, her sister, played Radharani. They lived outside the temple. After the girl that played Krishna took a bite out of the fruit, then we took it as prasadam. At the time, Damodar…I think he had been an underground filmmaker before he joined the movement, and I was studying filmmaking at Columbia University at the time. So Damodar and I worked together. Prabhupada gave us an instruction that he wanted a movie made of the Bhagavad-gita including battle scenes of the Mahabharatand elephants. He spent a whole session telling us how the movie should be made. Prabhupada said when the time comes he would direct it, and I never quite understood what he meant by that – maybe through Supersoul or whether he would do it personally. But he did speak at length about it. But he was very serious, and we took that instruction very seriously for some time. Damodar and I used to go out of the temple and watch normal movies because we thought that would help us. Or maybe we rationalized that way; that we could only fulfill Prabhupada’s instructions by being cognizant with contemporary filmmaking. But I remember one time when I did go to the airport with Prabhupada and I was distributing prasadam and we were having a kirtan, and the airport authorities made us stop. I was at first distributing prasadam to the nondevotees who were onlooking. When they stopped our kirtan, Prabhupada was a little bit peeved; and he told me to come over with the prasadam and distribute the prasadam to the devotees instead of to the onlookers and he said, “Charity begins at home.” You see those garlands, they were all gardenias. We heard from the devotees on the West Coast that Prabhupada liked gardenias because they are very fragrant. So I used to buy the flowers for the temple, and we used to go to the flower shops and buy day-old gardenias, which were cheaper. Even though they were cheaper, they were more fragrant because I think Prabhupada had mentioned that a flower smells sweetest when it’s dying. They weren’t as fragrant when they were fresh, but they were more fragrant when they were older. Prabhupada said that the flowers that didn’t have a fragrance were useless Kali-yuga flowers so, therefore, he liked gardenias, whereas some of those carnations that we put in his garland were not very fragrant. I remember that globe that Prabhupada had in his room in 26 2nd Avenue. I remember one time I was there with Prabhupada and he looked at the globe. I think he may have spun it a little bit and he said, “If they only knew my plans, they would put me away, they would lock me up,” because he was talking about plans to expand the movement all over the world. At that time, there were no branches in foreign countries and it was just kind of like a joke – somebody would go to Russia, somebody would go to China, somebody would go to England, and we all used to dream about it. We never really thought that the movement would expand beyond the hippie enclaves in New York and San Francisco and some college campuses, and even then… There was one college campus in Buffalo that Rupanuga prabhu was running a center at which was very successful, but we never really dreamed that Hare Krishna would be popular with college students because we thought it would only appeal to dropouts. I never thought that the movement was going to expand beyond the counterculture. 61 2nd Avenue before we took it over was a tuxedo parlor. So we retained those three-way mirrors and made alcoves out of them, and I think we put the vyasasana in one of the alcoves. There was one letter where Brahmananda wrote to Prabhupada about the Tuxedo Palace, and he still called it a palace when it was hardly a palace. Prabhupada wrote one letter, “Brahmananda has found me a palace.”