(HH Kadamba Kanana Swami, 24th October 2012, Vrndavan, India) Lecture: Rama-Vijaya, Nama-Vijaya
Aindra was an artist, undoubtedly, and artistic people are often dramatic by nature. So he was simply a very dramatic person and it was dramatic when he spoke here the last time on the vyasa-puja or the disappearance day of Srila Prabhupada. He read a message from his book which was then unpublished and he chose the spiciest message of the whole book to read out in front of everyone because after all, he was a red-head bearded revolutionary so he couldn’t resist… he had to do it! He just read it out… so he was inspired by Srila Prabodhananda. Srila Prabodhananda had wrote a verse which basically said: ‘To hell with all my duties, my bathing, my chanting of the Gayatri and all these brahminical duties. To hell with all of them because the essence is pure devotional service.’
Taking that spirit, Aindra applied it to Iskcon and just listed everything in Iskcon was doing and he said: ‘To hell with this, to hell with that. To hell with everything!’
Some devotees couldn’t take it anymore and they were covering their ears as if: ‘How can you speak like this? Aparādha, aparādha… offence!’
They didn’t wait for him to finish. His point was that although all these activities are there, the essence of everything is to become completely absorbed in transcendental loving service to the holy name, immersed in Krsna prem. So when he wrote his book, he called it The heart of transcendental book distribution and he wanted to make the point that we should be absorbed in Krsna prem and he did that in this dramatic way!
