Jagat

Picture dated June 1896, glued to the handwritten manuscript by Lalita Prasad Thakur, who would have been 17 at the time. Among the many things I am trying to do at present is a revision of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s memoir, written to his son Lalita Prasad Dutt in 1896. I have been promising to do this for a long time now and I finally had no way to escape. There is more work to do than I expected. Even though Shukavak’s translation and a revised edition are available, as I go through it I find that there is much left to be desired, not only stylistically, but often in matters of understanding the original text and properly translating it.  I was inspired to post this portion of the autobiography because it is about the Thakur’s own education. Since education and child abuse are a part of my current reflections, and our modern sensibilities are a recent development, not a wrong one mind you, but a part of developments that have only taken place during my own lifetime. One t...

Tonight I am back here in Vrindavan. It is very interesting for me to observe this differences in worlds as I constantly go back and forth between Rishikesh and Vrindavan, the two places where I have spent most of the last nearly seven years. Now, in a few days, I will go to my guru's home. I am barely able to imagine what it will be like. It really will be the first time in ages. I went once a few years ago, in a rented car with Gadadhar Pran. It was a very unsatisfactory visit in that there was little closeness between the two of us white foreigners and the people living at the mandir. This time I go in the company of my godbrother, Harigopal Dasji. Thirty years ago, I knew Harigopal as Bhakta Das when I first went to Birnagar. There were three young men staying in the ashram; Badol, Madhav and Bhakta Das. Though Madhusudan and I only stayed there a few times for an extended period of time, we developed friendships with all three of them. But Bhakta Das was always curious an...