Bhaskara das Remembers Srila Prabhupada
Following Srila Prabhupada
Interview DVD 08
Bhaskara: And one day Gaura-Nitai arrived in two gigantic crates. They came in on a huge crane off the truck, maneuvered into the Prabhupada House, as we called it, where They remained for some time while the devotees made clothes and organized all the necessary what-have-you for Their installation. It was a wonderful installation. Actually before these Deities were installed, I began making a small set of Gaura-Nitai Deities. We knew we were never going to be able to move these big Deities again, and we needed some small Deities. They were made for the traveling sankirtan bus as Sabhapati Prabhu was organizing at the time. Unfortunately, not being a brahmana, I wasn’t allowed to go and examine big Gaura-Nitai. So I really just made it all up, how They had to look. But we just did it in the backyard of the temple. We bought a little bit of paraphernalia for the job, some fire bricks and some old vacuum cleaners to pump a bit of air into the fire. As the vacuum cleaners would melt, we would grab another one and turn it on. They melted pretty quickly because it was very, very hot. As we were doing this, we had the Rath carts parked right beside them and there were devotees sitting all over the Rath carts watching this casting procedure underway as we were melting it and pouring it. They were cast metal in bronze and brass. While they were being cast, we didn’t have any gold so certain of the ladies who were watching it were pulling off their wedding rings and throwing them into the crucible as we were melting down the metal, and that was very exciting. Dipak was handling the metal with me. It was something we’d never attempted before, and we really didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing with it but we had a shot at it. This casting…the making of these Deities had transpired…must have been shortly after Prabhupada’s visit. I imagine Prabhupada would have installed those too if he had been there at the time. He came to make Lord Caitanya available to everyone. I tried to please Srila Prabhupada in this way, and it was all by his mercy that any of it was ever achieved, obviously. We certainly weren’t going to be able to do anything alone or by ourselves.
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