Jagat

This news that the Allahabad High Court has ordered a temporary injunction against the construction of the bridge over the Yamuna is most welcome. We can rejoice and thank the devotees from around the world. Their massive sigh of despair has no doubt influenced the way that the karmic wheel is turning. More and more people have become conscious of the issue and have been deeply affected emotionally at the thought of the wanton desecration and destruction of our beloved Vrindavan Dham. But we are far from winning this war. It is only lull, a break, a little bit of time to mobilize our forces for the even greater obstacles that need to be overcome. This war will not be won by mind vibrations only, nor even by Harinam alone. It will require convincing people on a massive scale in India and around the world. When we started in Krishna consciousness so many years ago, we thought that the whole world would turn to Krishna in a very short time. We were so enthusiastic and convinc...

We may or may not stop the bridge, but as Vaishnavas we are not attached to the results of our action. We neither lose enthusiasm for doing the right thing when we fail to achieve the results we sought, nor do we stop and rest on our laurels when we do reach our goals. Seva to the Divine Couple is infinite. The degradation of the Vrindavan environment has been going on for some time, but without cars or accumulations of garbage, it was somewhat tolerable. We could live with it and still appreciate the underlying transcendental atmosphere. The exponential increase of pilgrims over the past decade has meant that the environmental degradation is also increasing apace. It has also meant that a taste for materialism has crept into the spirit of the people, with all that this entails. The sum result is that it is getting harder and harder to see or feel the sacred power of Vrindavan. Service to the Dham means perceiving and making manifest that sacred power. That is prema. We are ac...

The Yamuna Vrindavan Heritage Foundation has been set up in Vrindavan with Padmanabha Goswami and K.P.S. Gill as its principal officers. The constitution is in the course of being written and a website is being set up. The first task of the Foundation is to mobilize efforts to stop the Keshi Ghat Flyover, but it is an attempt to rally all the various organizations in Vrindavan behind the concept that Vrindavan and the Yamuna are heritage sites that need special protection. There have been some very encouraging developments lately which we will hopefully be able to report soon. The website will contain a discussion board, plenty of background information, official petitions and links to related petitions and other organizations doing similar or related work. An important upcoming event is preoccupying the leaders of the YVHF and that is the Supreme Court hearing on January 10. More information about that will be posted soon, but Sri Chandan Goswamiji already made a report about th...

Shyam Das kindly posted maps of Vrindavan which make it possible to better visualize the big picture. On the map, the bridge roughly from the numbers 10 to 17 along the top right hand side. Here is the story: There is a new superhighway being built from Noida just east of Delhi all the way to Agra. This highway is being built with great haste as a part of the 2010 Commonwealth Games preparations. The Taj Expressway or the Yamuna Expressway. It runs along the south bank of the Yamuna. That may be a bit confusing when looking at this map because the Yamuna is always curving. It's general direction, however, is flowing southeast. Now what they have done is to build a bridge across the Yamuna near where the N on the directional arrow is pointing. This bridge is part of an access road that joins the new highway to Vrindavan. What the planners decided was that the Parikrama Marg would make a perfect continuation of this access to the town itself, but it did not solve the problem of conge...

On Dec. 25, a few hundred persons, mostly from Vrindavan’s religious community, including many foreigners from several maths and ashrams, gathered at Vrindavan’s Keshi Ghat to protest the building of a bridge. This bridge, which loops around the ancient redstone ghat, will permit car traffic to make the full tour of Vrindavan, turning the Parikrama Marg into a Ring Road. Even ten years ago, the Parikrama Marg was still mostly a sandy trail that circled the hallowed central portion of Vrindavan, the site of so many temples—Banke Bihari, Radha Vallabh, Radha Damodar, Govindaji. Hundreds of barefoot pilgrims from dawn to dusk quietly followed the 14 kilometer trail, reciting their japa or singing God’s names, or simply walking in meditative silence. Some even covered the length lying prostrate on the ground. But the success of many Vaishnava preachers, Bhagavata pathaks and bhajan singers has drawn a steadily increasing flow of the faithful from around the world and, more to the point, fr...