Balarama das Remembers Srila Prabhupada

Following Srila Prabhupada

Interview DVD 08

Balarama: Actually after the installation, Prabhupada called me up into his room. I was the temple president at that time, and he asked me if we’d be able to maintain the three pujaris at all the aratiks. I told him that with our manpower we’d probably find it difficult for all the aratiks, and he said therefore we should have Mangala-aratik and evening aratik with the three pujaris. So we pretty well maintained that right through after that. He also asked that we make sure prasadam distribution took place as far and wide as we could from the temple. He said, “So what plans have we got to distribute prasadam?” We’d only just opened the temple, of course, so I said, “We’re having the Sunday Feasts and lunchtime prasadam,” and we had a restaurant downtown that we were wanting to expand. There had been a big advertising campaign that the devotees were involved in with the Wrangler jeans company. One of the congregation devotees, they dressed him up with a dhoti and a blue Wrangler shirt. The whole idea of the ad, there was a sankirtan party coming right down Burke Street, the main street in Melbourne, and he was dressed in his dhoti but he still had a blue Wrangler denim shirt on and the caption at the bottom was, “I’m not going if I can’t wear my old Wrangler shirt.” And that was on billboards all over the city. So when we were driving Prabhupada out to the airport, we passed one of the billboards and pointed to the billboard and said, “Prabhupada, this is one of the ads that we’re in.” He said, “Oh, everywhere, they are seeing us everywhere.”