June 27-July 3

The Polish festival tour sounds wonderful. Sitala and Rasarani-priya are having a great time, busily engaged in a variety of preaching activities. There’s no time for anything but Krsna. Its really difficult to appreciate what exactly Indradyumna Maharaja is doing for Srila Prabhupada and Lord Caitanya’s movement. He is an ideal sannyasi and preacher. I admire his dedication and sheer effort very much.

I sit back sometimes and wonder how it is that I haven’t done as much. I have gotten lazy and I am still mired in so many desires. I guess it takes a few lifetimes to get to the platform Indradyumna Maharaja is on.

Here in Houston I am staying with Advaita Candra and his wife Kalasudha. She is the daughter of Bhaktajana Priya prabhu and was largely brought up in Mayapur. Now she’s actively preaching in Houston with her husband, who is a product of the Chowpatti preaching.They have a beautiful, new, large house in Houston so it is spacious and comfortable. They have made their living room into a temple and do a simple mangala arati at 5.30 AM every day.

Different rooms in the house are dedicated to different aspects of Krsna and Lord Caitanya’s lilas so the atmosphere is always spiritual. They preach through the bhakti-vrksha program and seem happily engaged in their service.The Houston temple has the largest Radha Krsna deities outside of India. Radha Nila-Madhava are awesome.

 They are nicely worshiped with all the grhasthas taking turns on a roster system to do the worship. Now they are building a whole new, huge temple for Them, and they have a large community hall that they build a few years back. The main hall can seat 1,000 people and there are large rooms upstairs in which they teach Bhakti Shastri classes etc.

Main Hall:

I have been speaking morning and evening on the topic of Deities and the reception has been good. The Sunday feast was quite packed up and I sold all the books I had with me plus a couple of extra sets. Between Dallas and Houston I have sold about 70 books so that’s been very good.

One further good piece of news. I just finally received the royalty payment from Russia for Vol. 3 translation-$370. My books are being translated and published by Philosophical Books, a privately run devotee publishing house. They generally print 1,000 of each volume and pay me a small royalty of 10% of the retail price.

Advaitacandra and I went to see two shows at the local Planetarium. We went in devotional attire which proved to be useful. We had an informative chat with the projectionist. He was more than willing to share info. with us about the systems they use. I think he was intrigued with our exotic appearance and it must have brightened up an otherwise routine day.

Like the Hayden in NY, they also use a completely digital system. He told us it was far easier to maintain and preferred it to their old opto-mechanical systems despite the resolution being so much less.

Another interesting bit of info. was that their income is chiefly derived from school tours and bookings for their portable planetarium which tours the schools during term time. They make a loss from just walk-in shows.

At the end of the visit one of the devotees was kind enough to drive me back to Dallas for my flight to Washington DC on July 3.

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