Jagadisa das Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 07

Jagadisa: Prabhupada had traveled to Chicago with Brahmananda on the airplane, and Brahmananda was reading Time magazine and the Time magazine feature article was “Crime – why and what to do?” So Prabhupada got inspired by the idea that we could help to solve the crime problems in America with our program. So when he arrived in Chicago, he asked us to arrange for him to meet some people in the government so he could talk to them about this idea. So he met with the mayor of Evanston and he met with some police lieutenant, I think Mosley was his name, I remember that. Then there was this old abandoned school in Chicago, in Evanston actually north of Chicago, and Prabhupada asked us to propose to the government that they give us that school and help us fix it up to take in prisoners from the penal system and give them a program where we would feed them prasadam and engage them in kirtan and some other things during the day but a kind of rehabilitation program based on Krishna consciousness. And Prabhupada was serious about it. He wanted me to go to the mayor of Evanston and propose this, and I did. The mayor was friendly, but he said that that was the building that they had in mind for their new City Hall. So he didn’t think it was likely that he could get the Council to approve it for our proposed purpose. I pursued it a little bit, and we found some other properties that we looked at. But we couldn’t get anyone to donate any facility and we didn’t have the money to buy any place, so we had to drop the idea.