Karandhar: I developed personal contact with Prabhupada when the temple moved from La Cienega, which was rented, to the place we purchased on Watseka Avenue. Gargamuni and Dayananda were working closely with Prabhupada in the negotiations with the Methodist church group and I was going on sankirtan. Then Gargamuni said, “We need somebody to build the altar.” And somehow I got volunteered, although I didn’t have a background in construction. Gargamuni said, “Okay, you’re the person, and Prabhupada has a plan.” So, I went to Prabhupada’s room, he made a little diagram of how he wanted the three doors (this was when the temple was in the hall in the back), and then that construction became my full-time job. Everybody else went on sankirtan and I was only involved in making the altars. Prabhupada would frequently take a look and say, “Oh, yes,” and “let’s do this and let’s do that.” And I would be called to his room to give a progress report or to hear his comments. In that way I spent a lot of time with Prabhupada, always on practical matters. “Should this be tile? What color should this be?” and so on. I didn’t know what was going on in the politics of the devotee leadership, but all of a sudden it was announced that Gargamuni and Brahmananda and Vishnujana were going to take sannyas, travel and preach. By default, the presidency of the Los Angeles temple fell on me. I was prominent in the sense that I’d done a lot of practical work, but I hadn’t shown any distinction doctrinally or philosophically. In fact, I’d spent the previous several months just working in the temple alone. But somehow or other the presidency fell on me. And shortly thereafter, Prabhupada decided to organize the GBC and the BBT. And because I was the president of the L.A. temple, which was one of the bigger temples and was where Prabhupada spent a lot of time because it was conducive to his writing, I got drafted into those positions also. It all came about quickly, and it was dramatic for me. I didn’t know exactly what was going on or if I was qualified or could handle it, but that’s how it developed.
From the very first time that Prabhupada gave me that little drawing of how he envisioned the front part of the temple room in Los Angeles, ninety-five percent of my contact and association with Prabhupada had to do with specific practical matters—like dealing with the printer Dai Nippon, managing Book Trust funds, the Mayapur-Vrindavan Trust funds. If there was a dilemma about a philosophical point, sometimes I asked questions, but mainly our contact had to do with practical management affairs. Only on the morning walks on Venice Beach in L.A. was there an occasion for philosophical debates, and somehow I was the protagonist for impersonalists and scientists. I would qualify my arguments with, “This philosopher said this, or this person said that,” but I was also expounding my own ideas and doubts. Prabhupada perceived that. It wasn’t just an exercise in academic objectivity.
Prabhupada quoted a lot of Bengali proverbs, practical things like “If you can make twelve dollars running around, you can make thirteen dollars sitting down.” Once, when I was the treasurer for the BBT and the Mayapur- Vrindavan Trust, he told me, “The treasurer never reveals to the devotees in general how much is in the treasury room, because as soon as you reveal how much is there, then everybody will want to plunder it.” So I was always tightlipped. Once I told Prabhupada, “I’m always exhorting the devotees to pay their bills because it’s an emergency—the BBT has to pay its bill.” And sometimes that was the case, but a lot of times there was money in the account and I was trying to keep money coming in. Prabhupada said, “Yes, this is correct.” He wasn’t authorizing me to be overtly deceptive or dishonest, but to be practical, not to get carried away by ideological absolutes of honesty. Everything in the world has to be done with an eye to the time and the place. In that way, I got a lot of what Allen Ginsberg, in his review of that first Macmillan Gita, called, “Prabhupada’s practical Hindu granny-wisdom.” Most of us came out of the hippie milieu and had a lack of down-to-earth sense about how to do anything in an organized or systematic way. We were still detoxing from the drugs and hallucinogens we had been taking. Although we were idealistic and had presumptions of being philosophically sophisticated, which we weren’t at all, we were spaced out and more or less incompetent when it came to practical matters. Most of Prabhupada’s input to me was about that.
The devotees couldn’t get Nair, the owner of the Juhu property, to give them the title to the land even after they had met all the requirements. So, Prabhupada asked me to help. I’m a babe in the woods in India. The levels of sophisticated manipulation and deception there are light years ahead of what exists in the West. So, I couldn’t help. I was puffed up. I thought, “The American management know-how is going to set everything straight,” although I didn’t have any idea what I was going to find in India. After two weeks I realized it was a morass that I didn’t have the slightest notion of how to deal with. I was completely naive. When I tried to make a phone call from the little Juhu office to downtown Bombay, it took me three or four hours. Finally I said, “My God, I just want to get out of here. This is a nightmare.” In fact, I copped out. Although Prabhupada wanted me to stay longer, I was in India only for a couple weeks. I told Prabhupada, “I’ve got to get back, I’ve got these problems with Dai Nippon and I’ve got to do this and do that, so please let me go.” Prabhupada said, “Okay, go ahead.” I went back to escape the difficult problems there. By that time, I had become accustomed to being the wonder boy of business among the devotees. In several letters, Prabhupada had praised me, saying that I was a good manager and so on, and I’d started to believe it. Juhu was a good lesson. Prabhupada was like a father figure, encouraging immature children just to keep them motivated.
In Los Angeles I asked Prabhupada about the devotees’ diet. He mentioned that devotees should eat simply. He also told me that mung dahl should always have a little bit of ghee in it otherwise it creates problems with the eyes. And he mentioned that ghee should be made from unsalted butter. But, when we had a chance of getting surplus salted butter from the government, Prabhupada said, “Oh, okay. Get it and make it into ghee. It can be used but it’s not ideal.” Aniruddha: We went on many walks with Srila Prabhupada in San Francisco. One of his favorite places was Stowe Lake, a beautiful lake in the middle of Golden Gate Park. Prabhupada called it a garden because it’s architecturally landscaped—it isn’t natural like Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Every morning, the same woman would come with her dog, and Prabhupada would always say, “Hello, good morning, how are you?” And she’d smile. Prabhupada never said, “Hare Krishna.” One morning one of our God-brothers said, “Swamiji, why don’t you say ‘Hare Krishna’ to her?” Prabhupada said, “She would not say ‘Hare Krishna’ back, but this way she gets the benefit of giving respect to a saintly person.”
Devotees had a tendency to be a little more rigid, inflexible, and doctrinaire about diet and about how many hours to sleep and the like. If somebody was sick on an extended basis, couldn’t come to mangal arati, and had to have special food, it upset things and would create dilemmas in the group dynamics. I was probably a big part of maintaining the military rigidity, to “follow the program or go somewhere else. Everybody else has to eat this, and everybody else has to get up.” But Prabhupada was always a little more flexible. “Okay, if they can’t eat this, give them that.” Prabhupada said, “If a person’s really hungry, he can eat anything,” but that a diet of rice, dahl, chapattis, and subji was the best overall. But if somebody needed steamed vegetables, okay, arrange for it somehow. Once Prabhupada said, “A young child cannot eat too much and an older man cannot eat too little.” As far as medicine, we were trying to follow the Eastern tradition, although in the West there wasn’t much known about Ayurveda until some devotees went to India and discovered the herbal formulas. But there was the old macrobiotic thing, “Should we eat brown rice, macrobiotic rice? Should we eat raw sugar?” Prabhupada said, “No, not generally, because we should eat what Krishna wants. We should eat what we offer to Krishna.”
One day a devotee in Prabhupada’s room was upset that the breakfast oatmeal was too sweet. We all had sweet tooths but this devotee said, “Prabhupada, we eat too much sugar.” Prabhupada looked at him and said, “Why do you eat so much sugar?” Prabhupada was saying that we had to work on our compulsions ourselves, although institutionally it was true. Devotees living in the temple had to eat what was served in the temple, and a lot of the time the food was probably not the healthiest or the best prepared.
Siddhasvarupa came to L.A. He split up his group and sent some to San Francisco, some to L.A., and some to New York. He himself came to L.A. and right away we butted heads because I was critical. I thought his group was dilettante. His people were nice, charming and sincere, but I thought, “This is the real movement and you guys are interlopers. Now you’ve come to us and you have to follow our program.” A couple of his close associates wanted to put him in a special position, and I was against that. I said, “No, you’re going to have to follow the program like everybody else.” There were a couple of spats. Siddhasvarupa went to Prabhupada and complained about me and Prabhupada called me and said, “Be a little patient and tolerant. Let’s try and work this thing out. He’s a sincere boy. He’s come with his people and we have to try to make them comfortable” and so forth. But my ego was too big. Siddhasvarupa left after a short time. I don’t know where he went, but he had to go someplace where he could find his own space and be his own GBC, which was no different than a lot of other devotees. I was like that more than anybody else. As long as I was in L.A. in my own domain, I was comfortable. As soon as I went somewhere else where I didn’t have so much control over my environment and my schedule, I didn’t like it and I wanted to get back to L.A.
I wasn’t a special soul. I was a spoiled, self-centered, immature brat. And I had low self-esteem. But Prabhupada nurtured me psychologically. In that sense, we had a profound and deep relationship that did a lot to rehabilitate my damaged and dysfunctional personality. But then my faults swung to the other side. I became egotistical and puffed up and began to think I knew more and I knew better. My remembering Srila Prabhupada’s qualities, is like a child remembering the qualities of a parent. I’m not a great judge of character or saints. I don’t know who Prabhupada is or who he was. He was kind and nurturing, and that’s what attracted me to him. For most of the devotees—Tamal Krishna, Gargamuni, Silavati—that I was involved with in those early days, my formative years, their relationship with Prabhupada was like mine. In most ways we were childish, and Prabhupada gave us the attention and patience that our parents were unable to give. The time, the history, the circumstances and the culture all contributed to our neediness. Prabhupada was a father figure and we were children who needed tolerance. He was practical and sensible and he was definitely dedicated to his mission. Prabhupada was really alone. Although he told us how much we helped him, we were at least as much trouble and gave him as many headaches as we did any service. But he was centered. He carried on with his mission despite all of the hassles and the turmoil that we provoked and generated.
