From the full steam Serbian camp Kadamba Kanana Maharaja made his way to Prague in the Czech Republic. Maharaja arrived in the temple on Friday (13 July) in order to have one day of good rest before the yearly Ratha Yatra was to happen on Sunday, 15 July 2012.
The Ratha Yatra started off good, enthused by the sunny weather. Vidya Vijaspati Prabhu began the kirtana and rocked for half an hour until he passed on the microphone to Kadamba Kanana Maharaja. The locals and tourist, wandering through the streets of Prague seemed to highly appreciate the parade. Many pictures were taken and foreigners danced and sang along with the devotee group while the chariot was pulled through the beautiful inner city of Prague. After a parade of one and a half hours the Ratha cart came back to the festival site, just to prepare for a second tour through the city. This time the main kirtana leader was Vayasaki Prabhu, who just injected everyone with his spiritual enthusiasm. Unfortunately during the second parade it started to rain heavily, which might have diminished the attending number of visitors but definitely not the enthusiastic spirits of the dancing and chanting devotees, once again led by Kadamba Kanana Maharaja.
Back on the site the ambassador of India was given the honor to open the festival with a speech, followed by a Vedic wedding which was very well attended. Next were bhajanas and an open speech by Kadamba Kanana Swami, where Maharaja narrated stories of his first experiences with traveling through holy places in India. In full color he narrated how he found a dead body, which just lied on the streets of Benares and how nobody had seemed to care but just threw some money at the corpse. On asking the townsman he found out that the money was given in order to pay the wood to burn the body since from the Vedic point of few the soul has to continue his journey and is helped with that through the cremation of his old shell.
Because of a program on Monday in Slovakia Maharaja left the Ratha Yatra site after his talk and drove on to Modra, Slovakia. The program was held in Paramesvara Prabhu’s house and successfully attracted a lot of congregational devotees as well as new visitors. Maharaja held two hours of kirtana, singing many different tunes, followed by a talk about the all attractive beauty of the spiritual world.
The next day he made his way to Germany, via the Prague temple. There he stayed for one more night, just to give the morning Srimad Bhagavatam class and then proceeded to the temple in Leipzig, Germany.
Can’t view the slide show? Just visit flickr!
