Jagat

My next door neighbor here in Vrindavan was a woman named Krishna Kumari Dasi, a disciple of Srila Prabhupada’s who had had a pretty rough life in ISKCON, to say the least. At any rate I wrote about this place on Vrindavan Today a couple of years ago. LINK . As it so happens, things change and right now, the garden stands empty... Akhiladhar has gone to St. Petersburg with his wife to settle visa issues and to collect money to develop the property. He wants to create a separate venue with guest house for Russian devotees. gave me the key and so the last couple of nights I have been going there to do a little kirtan. The dominant feature there is the rather full sized figures of Gaura Nitai standing in front of the Yamuna, with Madan Mohan temple in the background. But as I sing the Gaura arati of Bhaktivinoda Thakur, the river sure looks like the Ganga to me. The statues were made by Akhiladhar, though he told me he was not an artist... I had to laugh at the uncanny resemblance...

Geography Bengal is situated in the delta of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, which means that it is criss-crossed with wide rivers. It is probably the most humid part of the subcontinent, with the hilly Meghalaya region at the north being the wettest area in the entire world. This means that the delta was tropical rainforest until quite late in its history, filled with tigers, crocodiles and mosquitoes. The march of civilization is associated with deforestation, which has been ongoing even through to the present day. At present, only the peripheral areas, which are still hilly and less suitable for agriculture, remain wooded. The implications of this historically are that Aryan civilization was slow in implanting itself in this area, leaving tribal and non-Aryan belief systems strong until relatively late, in comparison even to areas not so far to the West. The region to the north of Orissa and west of the Ganges plain, the present day provinces of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, is ...