Patit Udaran: I was living in the Bay area at the time basically as a hippie, but I always had aspirations to understand transcendence. Therefore, I didn’t really consider myself a hippie, but I considered myself a seeker. When I heard that there was the Rathayatra Festival being held by the Hare Krishna devotees through Golden Gate Park in 1968, I made up my mind to try to get there; and I think I walked the whole way, which is why I ended up being late. So I must have walked several miles because I came at the end of the festival and I saw Lord Jagannatha looking out at the ocean. Now, I had visited the temple a few times; but it was the moment that I saw Lord Jagannatha gazing out into the ocean that somehow some eternal quality was sparked, and at that moment I became a devotee.
We set up the ISKCON Press in Boston. And after we were set up Prabhupada came and visited. And I was hand-binding Isopanisads, Nectar of Devotions. And I remember we did a run of Back to Godheads. I remember hand cutting 80,000 Back to Godheads. That requires three cuts per magazine. So that was quite a load of work. And some of the magazines, if I would load too many in the cutter, they would come out kind of misshapened, but we’d go out and sell them anyways. And next to my folding machine—I folded the papers and Advaita would print—so the printing press was right next to the folder. So Prabhupada came in and saw the folder and then walked over to the press and looked at Advaita, and looked at everybody in the crowd, and touched the printing press and he said, “This is my heart.” So I feel that my service was much appreciated by Prabhupada even though we switched from printing and binding to Japan soon thereafterwards. And I feel privileged to have served him in the press capacity in the earliest days.
