Ramesvara: Karandhar met me in 1970 at the Portland temple and decided that he wanted me to become his assistant to work for the book publishing. So in 1971 he brought me to New Dvaraka and he personally trained me throughout ‘71, ‘72 and ‘73. Then the unimaginable happened. Karandhar left at the end of 1973, which was a shock. Jayatirtha and I flew immediately to Hawaii to visit with Srila Prabhupada. At that time Prabhupada was asking us how would things go on, and the conclusion was that Karandhar’s jobs would be split. Jayatirtha would handle the zonal responsibilities and I would handle the BBT responsibilities. In 1974 I made an official BBT visit to our Brooklyn temple where ISKCON Press was located. I had been to the temple a number of times as a book distributor and as a preacher, but not in the capacity of a BBT manager. We were getting ready to reprint two books, The Teachings of Lord Chaitanya and the Krsna Book. One of the artists had been working for the better part of a year on line drawing sketches that would appear in every chapter of the Teachings of Lord Chaitanya. The other devotees had been regularly painting for the Srimad-Bhagavatam, and they had this idea to replace some old paintings with new ones in the reprint of the Krsna Book. The original paintings were done in 1968 and 1969 and the early ‘70s. The artists’ technique had gotten much better and they thought that the new paintings looked more realistic. So it was my task to fly back to Los Angeles and present all of this to Srila Prabhupada as my first official act as a BBT manager. Prabhupada was in his room and we started off by showing him the drawings of the Teachings of Lord Chaitanya. One by one, Prabhupada was commenting and rejecting them for various reasons. Prabhupada liked the original drawings, as simple as they were that had been done by Govinda dasi and Gaurasundar. These drawings, while technically I think superior, lacked in so many ways according to Srila Prabhupada. In one drawing the Goswamis, Rupa and Sanatana, were absent. In another drawing one of the Goswamis was sitting on the same level as Lord Chaitanya. On and on, Prabhupada would tear apart these drawings, and as he kept going through them he was getting angry. I don’t know if any devotee had ever seen Srila Prabhupada angry before but I certainly had not. It was a shock and it was scary. I was frightened. The conclusion was we weren’t going to use any of those drawings. Then I had to bring out the Krsna Book and show Prabhupada the paintings that the artists wanted to take out and the new ones that they wanted to insert. I introduced the topic and Prabhupada said, “They want to add paintings?” I said, “No, Srila Prabhupada, they want to replace paintings, not add. In some cases they are the same scene but they think they painted it better. In other cases they want to take out paintings that they think were painted too long ago and were not painted in a serious way and insert other paintings, not of the same lila.” Prabhupada said, “What? You have no authority to do that. You have no authority here. Once a painting has been approved, you can’t remove it. If you want to repaint that pastime and if the new painting is better, shows more detail, shows more lila, more character, then that might be considered. But just to take one painting out to put a different one in? No. You cannot do that.” He said, “Once I have approved something in my books, it is eternal. Once a painting is approved, it is eternal. You have no authority.” I said, “Oh, okay.” So I said, “Do you want me to show you what they are proposing?” Very unhappily he said, “Okay.” So I started to show Srila Prabhupada the paintings one by one that they wanted to insert. One of them was a painting of Krishna killing Putana. Now we had a painting of Krishna killing Putana, so this I think would have fit the category of taking an old one out and putting in a better one. Prabhupada looked at it and made a face. He said, “That is an ugly black mass. That is not superior. Rejected.” Next I showed Prabhupada a painting of Krishna sitting on the rocks that I thought was beautiful. Prabhupada thought His hair was too long and wild. “Rejected. And besides you want to take, you don’t want to add? You want to take out a painting that I have already approved for that? No. Rejected.” As I kept showing Srila Prabhupada these paintings, the anger that had started with the line drawings for TLC had grown to almost like roaring proportions. At one point he was pounding his fist on the desk, saying, “This is what I’m afraid of, that you will make changes in my books that will ruin them. No. You have to get permission. You cannot do this.” Finally I had one last painting to show Srila Prabhupada. I said, “Prabhupada, they want to take out the painting of the rasa-lila and insert this new painting of the rasa-lila that appeared in the Third Canto.” Prabhupada didn’t say a word for a moment. From his sitting room he could look into his bedroom where he saw this beautiful painting of the original rasa-lila, that Devahuti did, hanging on his wall. He was looking at that painting and he looked back at the print of the painting that we at the press wanted. He said, “You think this is better? This is a hippie dance. Their heads are not covered. Krishna’s hair is wild. The gopi’s hair is wild. Hippie seeds. Hippie dance. Rascals. They are all rascals.” Prabhupada was so angry that he was banging his fist and yelling at me. At that time his servant, Sudama, came running in because he heard the yelling. He couldn’t imagine what it was. He opened the door and saw Prabhupada like Lord Nrsimhadeva. He couldn’t even get down to offer his obeisances because he was so terrified. He stood trembling in the doorway and covered his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see the scene. Then Prabhupada said, “Get out!” And he threw us both out. It was the first of many lessons that Prabhupada gave me about making changes to his books.
In 1974 the artists and I had thought for the reprinting of the Isopanisad that we would have a new picture on the cover. Instead of Lord Vishnu we would have a picture of Krishna on the cover. Again I had the good fortune to present that idea to Srila Prabhupada. He rejected it. He was angry. He said, “I have specifically chosen Lord Vishnu to be on the cover of the Sri Isopanisad. I want this book to be attractive to people of all philosophical persuasions, even Mayavadis and Vedantists. All the different philosophical schools have to see Vishnu on the cover of Isopanisad. Krishna they won’t buy. What is wrong with you? Whose idea is this?” Prabhupada was so involved in selecting the artwork, choosing the size, the number of pages per book, the design of the book. Prabhupada’s genius was that he was taking books of the highest philosophy and making them popular. Philosophy books aren’t popular. Philosophy books don’t sell anywhere in the world. But Prabhupada’s genius was to have these gorgeous art paintings, carefully chosen, to insert in philosophy books to sell them to average persons all over the world. This was genius marketing on Srila Prabhupada’s part. He was in charge. He planned this. You could not make a change if he didn’t approve it.
A few weeks before Srila Prabhupada’s visit to Los Angeles in 1976, I had come back from India with hepatitis and jaundice. I was as yellow as you can imagine. I was deathly ill. I could not get out of bed. Some of my GBC God-brothers knew this at the time, and Kirtanananda had connected me with an Indian doctor who was part of the congregation from New Vrindavan. He prescribed a specific diet to cure me of hepatitis. Srila Prabhupada heard that I was sick and had his secretary at the time, Pusta Krishna Maharaj, call to find out what diet I was on. When Srila Prabhupada heard the diet, he called the doctor a bogus rascal and gave me a new diet. Within a week I was completely cured and ready for Srila Prabhupada’s visit. I thought it was astounding that Prabhupada had perfect knowledge of so many things. When Prabhupada did arrive in New Dwaraka, one of our leading artists, Jadurani, had also gotten very sick. She had gotten so sick that she couldn’t even feed herself. We had assigned a devotee to spoon-feed her. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t walk. We didn’t know what she had. She was in a wheelchair. She had been seeing a doctor that a number of devotees in 1976 had been going to. He was a wellknown iridologist, a doctor that prescribes by examining your eyes for various conditions in the body. He had given Jadurani all kinds of medications and diet instructions. Prabhupada heard this and he wanted to see her. We carried her up the stairs to Prabhupada’s quarters in her wheelchair. When we got to the top of the stairs we helped her crawl out of her wheelchair. She literally had to crawl through the door of Prabhupada’s sitting room and up to his desk. When Prabhupada saw Jadurani he told her, “Come here,” and we watched her crawl up to Srila Prabhupada. Srila Prabhupada put his hand on her forehead, but it was much more than just a parent touching a child’s forehead to see if they had a fever. We were watching how intense this was. Prabhupada was holding her head as if it was an instrument that was measuring all the disease in her body. He was diagnosing her. After a few moments, Srila Prabhupada looked at her and said, “You will be all right. And this doctor you are seeing, this Dr. Benish down in Laguna Beach, he is a quack.” Jadurani crawled back through the sitting room to her wheelchair. We carried her down the stairs and as we were carrying her down the street to her quarters, she was yelling at the top of her lungs, which she didn’t have the strength to even whisper before, “Dr. Benish is a quack. Dr. Benish is a quack.” She was announcing it to the world. Within three days, Jadurani was completely well. She was walking, talking, feeding herself and she went back to painting. She had been cured. It was a miracle health cure like something out of the New Testament. That’s exactly what happened. Srila Prabhupada had the ability to cure on every level imaginable.
In January of 1977 I was traveling with Srila Prabhupada as his personal secretary. I had a lot of opportunities to have intimate conversations with him especially when we were traveling by train to the Kumbhamela. One particular conversation was about the topic of nuclear war. Prabhupada had spoken about this over the last two years predicting that America and Russia would start a nuclear war through their proxy states, India and Pakistan. This had been a topic of great concern, and katha all over ISKCON for some years. I asked Srila Prabhupada if there was any chance of this war bring averted? At first he said, “No.” He said, “Communism is so evil, we must force this war to happen. Communism has to end.” In fact, Srila Prabhupada said, “Just as Krishna appears to protect the devotees and annihilate the demons, so this Hare Krishna movement has arisen to annihilate the two great demons of our age - Godless communism and Godless science. So there must be a war to end it.” Then Prabhupada sat back and thought for a moment. Then he said, “But there is a possibility that this war may be averted. It depends on your book distribution.” He continued to say, “Your book distribution is creating a spiritual environment throughout the whole world. And that will awaken spiritual sentiments in everyone’s heart. And as that awakens, as you continue this book distribution, that spiritual sentiment may bring down communism from within.” Then Prabhupada said, “Yes, and future historians will note how communism failed because of your book distribution. They will note how a revolution, a spiritual revolution throughout human society took place.”
In 1976 I had been flying with Srila Prabhupada to different cities. Once I was sitting with Srila Prabhupada and his servant/secretary in the airport past the security checkpoint. We were talking about war in Kali-yuga and whether or not these happen by chance, like a fire in a forest, or whether or not they are deliberate, caused by a small group that controls governments and oligarchs and so on. As usual, Prabhupada had an amazing and ingenious insight as he did with every topic. He started off by telling us, “Yes, take for example your Vietnam War. Your President, from Texas, Johnson, a state where they kill cows, a great meat-eater. So whatever he tried to do to end that war, because of his sinful activities, he simply became more and more entangled in the war and it kept going on and on.” And then Prabhupada said that actually they wanted that war to go on and on. Prabhupada said, “After Johnson was your Nixon and they were afraid of the American youth, hippies, drugged hippies in revolution against society, blacks in revolution against society. And they thought, ‘Let this war go on and we will draft these hippies and we will draft these black activists and let them all be killed off in this war.’” That’s what Prabhupada told us.
Srila Prabhupada said, “And after communism is defeated, we must attack and defeat Godless science, the demons of Godless science, Darwin. We must attack. We must defeat.” We were traveling on the train and Prabhupada looked out the window and said, “There is so much illiteracy in India right now, and that is Krishna’s blessing.” I said, “Why?” Prabhupada said, “So they don’t have to hear the nonsense atheistic philosophies of Darwin.” Srila Prabhupada’s last instruction to me as a BBT trustee was to publish books that defeat Godless science and sell them to the temples at cost. They were going to be exempt from the markup that every other book had. He carved out an exception for the science books, and he ordered me to take money from the BBT as a budget for the science preaching - ten, twenty thousand a month, whatever they needed. That’s how much Srila Prabhupada was determined that through the BBT we were going to defeat Godless science.
Srila Prabhupada was a genius in every sphere of life. His vision for he Bhaktivedanta Book Trust was unique. For example, let’s say a book costs a dollar. You sell it to the temple for two dollars. When the two dollars come in, one dollar goes into the book fund, one dollar goes into the temple construction fund – fifty-fifty. That was his vision. That was his plan. Starting in 1973, Srila Prabhupada started giving out loans to temples from the temple fund. And the genius of this was that as the loan payments came back in, that money paid for the entire BBT overhead. The temples were repaying loans with interest, and that money was not part of the formula. In 1973, if a book cost a dollar, you still sold it for two dollars. But meanwhile the loans you had made in 1972 were starting to come back in, in 1973. That money covered the entire BBT overhead. So that’s how we were able to stick to this brilliant formula of fifty-fifty.
It was 1976 and Srila Prabhupada was coming to visit New Dvaraka for the last time. Every morning we would drive Prabhupada to his morning walk either to Venice Beach or Santa Monica. This particular morning, Tamal Krishna Maharaj and myself along with Prabhupada’s servant were driving Srila Prabhupada to his morning walk in Santa Monica. It was typical that we would either ask philosophical questions or we would talk about something in the world news or current events that we found controversial or exciting and have Prabhupada comment on it. This particular morning, a news story had broken the day before that was, to us, somewhat astonishing. There was a group of demented artists in New York that had captured headlines all over the world by having a party in which they served and ate the flesh of aborted fetuses. This artist, the leader of this group was Andy Warhol who was famous for sensational shock. We told Srila Prabhupada this story and I expected Prabhupada to comment on the demonic nature of the living entity and the horror of slaughtering anyone for food. But instead he leaned back on the back seat of the car and said, “Yes, they have not yet learned in this Kali-yuga that human flesh is the tastiest of all meats. That will come in the future of Kaliyuga.” Tamal and I were astonished at Prabhupada’s response to this story. It was not what we were expecting. And in that instant I realized Prabhupada knew everything. He knew what the future of Kali-yuga was. How did he know what meat tastes like, what to speak of which meat is the tastiest is? Our minds were literally I guess you could say, blown. We were just amazed that Prabhupada knew everything and I blurted out, “Srila Prabhupada, you know everything about everything. You see the future, you comment on things that are current, but also talk about the future.” I said, “This is what makes your books so unique. Previous great acharyas have written commentaries on Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-Bhagavatam, but your commentaries are not only perfect for the time that we’re living in, but they’re perfect for the future because you have the ability to see the future. It’s just amazing to me how unique and special your books are.” Srila Prabhupada smiled and said, “Yes. My books will be the law books for humanity for the next ten thousand years. That is how I think as I write each word.”
Some time in 1971, Srila Prabhupada had told Karandar that his vision for New Dvaraka went way beyond just the building that we had bought for the world headquarters. He wanted us to buy the residential buildings and start buying up the block. He told Karandar, “You buy the first building and then you go to a bank and take out a mortgage on that building. Use that money to buy the second building. That second building doesn’t have a mortgage because you just bought it with the other money. So now you take out a mortgage on the second building and you use that to buy the third building. In this way you buy up the block.” Prabhupada told Karandar, “This is called ‘frying the fish in its own oil.’” And that’s how we bought all these buildings that make up the New Dvaraka community. Between 1972 and 1975 we had bought six or seven buildings. Prabhupada was a genius.
Watching the loans that Srila Prabhupada made gives you an idea of how this movement grew in many ways. In 1973, about $250,000 was loaned out to temples. In 1974 it was just under $500,000 that was loaned out to temples. In 1975, it was a little over one million dollars that was loaned out to temples. At the end of 1975 we had just finished the seventeen book Caitanya-caritamrita marathon. Now we knew we could do anything. There was no such thing as “impossible”. We got a letter from Srila Prabhupada stating that they have finally gotten permission to build the beautiful Bombay temple, hotel, theater, and cultural center in Juhu Beach. Prabhupada wrote in the letter, “We have just signed the contract with a major construction managing company. As a result, I will need you, in addition to the loans you are making, in addition to the books you are printing, to send to Bombay every month $70,000 in order to fulfill this contract and build the Bombay temple.” So in 1976, the loans plus the Bombay money totaled almost two million dollars. Again, it doubled. As a result, when the Bombay temple had its grand opening in 1977, Los Angeles became the sister city to Bombay.
Srila Prabhupada came for one visit to New Dvaraka starting in March of 1973. We had just completed the first Christmas book distribution marathon in 1972. So this was a very exciting time. I was the sankirtan leader at the time. Every day I would compile a report on how many books were distributed devotee by devotee. At night I would bring that report over to Prabhupada’s quarters. I’d wait at the bottom of the stairs and either Brahmananda or Srutakirti would come down around 9:30 p.m. to collect it from me as they were going to read it to Prabhupada either that night or the next day during his massage. I would go back every day at around eleven in the morning to meet them at the stairs and find out what Prabhupada had to say because we lived for any instruction, any word, any encouragement. We saw Srila Prabhupada as giving his whole life to writing these books and we saw ourselves as giving our whole lives to distributing these books. So there was a phenomenal relationship going on with the sankirtan devotees and Prabhupada at that time. One day Srutakirti came down and told me that they had read it to Prabhupada the night before and as he was lying in his bed he was rolling from side to side in ecstasy, exhibiting ecstatic symptoms. Srutakirti said Prabhupada uttered the words, “We will smash all these bogus incarnations.” Finally on March 20th, 1973, after his massage, Prabhupada hand wrote a note to the sankirtan devotees: “My dear boys and girls, you are all working so hard to broadcast the glories of Lord Krishna’s lotus feet. Because of that, you have pleased my Guru Maharaj so much that he will bestow his mercy upon you thousand times more than me. And that is my satisfaction. Your ever well-wisher, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” And then he wrote NB, note below: “Everyone must join the sankirtan party as soon as possible.” We have that note in Prabhupada’s handwriting.
