Letters to the editor

From: oscar naters 
To: HpS (HHR)  
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2017 11:13 AM
Subject: Re: oscar naters
I think is GREAT! This means we will focus on the movie and forget the theatre plan?

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2017-08-02; 1.48AM

Oscar et al,

Hare Krsna!

Sorry for delay in this. Trip back from Peru was also incredibly tough. Think we have done permanent damage to our vision and voice. Just collapsed when we got back to Tennessee, but the soul is eternal and this Yoga stimulates it so we are recovering energy.

The money is there in Peru, but it is not mine. I've trying to talk with Nitai-gaurasundara Das, our President, about it but the back of his left eyeball separated from the sheet of receptors so he has been in surgery and considerable pain, but will try to get it all approved this morning and then tell Caturatma to pass the money to you.

Also, talked with Abhirama Das about the idea that has come to us for the mode and focus of the movie and he has appreciated it.

If we get the budget for the film then we can include anything else as part of the movie, no?

I think a series of pre-events, dialogs, interviews, involving our whole community would be the way to develop the film, no?

National Geographic or BBC quality?

HpS - ASA

Hare Krsna, Sesa Prabhu, RGD,

Back in our Ashram in Tennessee. Things are 90% the way we are used to them. Two months of HARD, productive travel.

The Journal.

Called your numbers today, Prabhu, Sesa Ji.

Are you traveling?      We need your decisions on the Journal. I feel we have enough input to go ahead with a first issue if we just get your final decisions.

Please contact as soon as possible.

HpS - ASA.

Hare Krsna!

We (Tom Brown) propose the following.

HpS will apply through NIOS to several Foundations for a Grant of $125,000 to make and promote a movie on "Art & the Sacred: Looking for the Pathway". We will do interviews and collect short clips on the topic from:

HpS,

Ramon,

Raul,

Shonyu Shyam Dasani,

Dr. Kalyana Kumar,

Dr. Samaresh et al

by agents and by travel to India and Europe. The travel team will be HpS, Ambarisha Das, Oscar and Anna.

What do you think?

Piggy: When would you go?

Monkey: In April for one month.

Piggy: Can we come?

Monkey: Eat my dust.

Piggy: Can we be "et al".

Monkey: "Everyone man (or woman) should be allowed to talk to himself as long as he proves to be amusing",  Pierre Baudelaire.

Hare Krsna, Prabhu,

Thank you for your last letter.

After one day in Lima, one day in Cusco, now we are for one week in Cochabamba. It is still cold and very high altitude, so a lot of stress for our body, but the preaching is wonderful. They filled the Civic Center for Hamlet and Arjuna last night.

We are giving the SB class most mornings and everyone very readily agreed that the focus for this National Winter Festival, about 155-devotees involved, could be, The Prayers by the Demigods to Lord Visnu in SB 6.9.

We are on about the fifth verse and we started by a quick read through of all the prayers. We also wondered why the SB changed to prose after the first two prayers.

Our thoughts are that the demigods don't seem to be as elevated as ISKCON devotees (Ha!  Ha!   Hare!). Of course, they start by illuminating, glorifying, isolating the Lord so that the communication can be good. We notice that they start by saying that He is the source of the results of fruitive material activity. We say material because the second line says that He is the cause of destruction of the results of sacrifice. They say He has many names and this seems to feel like He has not got a very specific personal name. In the third verse they recite a very, very beautiful bunch of names, but for several verses they are saying that they are not sure if He takes a material body when He incarnates.

A lot of other discussion abut their level of realization.

Without the formal knowledge of cosmology from ISKCON it seems so easy to see that we could also be classified as Sa-kama devotees and we really don't know how real the body of Radha Banki-bihari's body is.

In any case, meditating on their state of consciousness and their wonderful prayers we can also see the consciousness of many people in this actual world and then know how to relate our preaching to them.

We continue with these prayers. What is our next module?

Tomorrow, 7AM Boise time, we have our regular Anjana Suta Academy, Pada-padma online workshop. Of course, we are always inviting the whole world to join, and we will record it and can send the link.

Very intense discussions with our GBC representative here about the educational development.

Can you please send a summary of your Seattle thoughts and get M. Arruddha to do the same for the Journal. It is supposed to be in the can within the next 8-days.

We will post this letter on our Blog also.

Thank you.

Hare Krsna, Hare Rama.

Esteemed Director, Kalyan Chakravarty,

We have not read Dr. Samaresh's letter yet but we shall reply to yours with copy to his excellency. We have heard that you are visiting Spain?

Since the last letter we have passed through Arrequipa (Hari-krpa) which sits at 3,000 feet in the shadow of two active volcanoes, Cuzco, the ancient capitol of the Inca Empire and after being seated on a replacement airplane we continued on to Bolivia, Cochabamba, from where we now write. The airport in Bolivia is 13,333 feet altitude. The Red Cross is waiting with oxygen. I actually saw one child pass out and being giving oxygen, "If you have hypertension medicine use it".

Back in Lima we hear news from Alejandro that the Ricardo Palma Community Center in the Lima, Miraflores district, has received the prospect of hosting "Art and the Sacred, An Introduction", in September or October 2018 with great enthusiasm. Our organizers are neighbors and childhood classmates of the Directors. It has four state of the art exhibition gallerys. Promises that 40,000 people a week will pass through the gallerys and an excellent performing arts theater.

I have suggested that we can all sign a Letter of Intent while I am back in Lima for Monday and part of Tuesday. Then we proceed back to our USA.

By September the new Ambassador of India should have been installed and we should have some ideas of a budget. We should also have a decision from Marvin Gurvich about his participation with "Faces of the Divine".

While I was in Cusco for the one day we also met with Oscar Natars and his wife Anna who were doing dance workshops there. He was elected Director of the Year in 2015 and we have done about five movies with him. He agreed that the Ricardo Palma Center is a world class tourist center and that the auditorium only housing 150 would be adequate for mounting an good show that could be repeated for five nights.

Art and the Sacred, Sacred Music and then what came up was Drama and the Sacred, but this led us to Dante's Divine Comedy. Last night "Hamlet and Arjuna" scored another knock-out success at the Municipal Art and Cultural Center here in Bolivia, so the Divine Comedy might also be a nice meditation for all of us?

Jiyada nrsmha Das has just arrived with some Coca Tea so we don't have bad stomach reactions to the altitude and then we are off to our evening lecture.

We are scheduled to arrive in the all glorious New Dehli 28th of September. Our first foot in Bharatavarsa. Then we leave for Ujjain on the 2nd or 3rd of October. We are struggling in our inept fashion to always be at your's and Dr. Samaresh's service. Please direct us.

By your mercy we will send news as soon as we get back to USA on the 26th.

Hanumatpresaka Swami

Prof. H. H. Robinson

NIOS

HpS - AGTSP. We have just read RGD's excellent letter. We agree with everything except we are still squirming on making it a Journal for all of ISKCON Education. We really, really, really feel that it should be a Western Hemisphere, USA Canada, English language journal, that includes ISKCON news and views from the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the world.

This is a view from my perspective on the elephant, the backside.

I think that will make it work, make other Continents work and then from that chorus of maybe five Journals we will get an overarching Journal.

We are humorously fanatical about this, but don't think it should really adversely influence the production of the Journal. We are going to do this and our copy will be ready for our circle as the related date copy of our "Kapi Dhvaja".

We will write to the participants of the Seattle Symposium for short sumarries of their presentations with references for more information if any readers wish to contact them.

RGD - Can you contact, twist the tails, of the two other working groups: Accreditation and Curriculum Development, for their reports for the Journal?

Again we hit the USA 27th September running and should be able to talk on phone by that time. This Journal will be wonderful.

From: Ramanan Nagarajan <[email protected]>
To: 'Vinode Vitthala' <[email protected]> 
Cc: 'HpS (HHR)' <[email protected]>; 'Sesa Prabhu' <[email protected]>; 'Jagad Guru Das' <[email protected]>; 'Nrtya Kisori' <[email protected]>; 'Indira Meshram' <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2017 1:36 PM
Subject: RE: ISKCON Education Journal
 

Dear Prabhuji,

Hare Krishna. Dandavats. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.

I had a call with Hanumat Presak Maharaj sometime ago. We are happy to have Mukunda Datta Prabhu being part of the team for editing and related services for the journal. We were only considering that he is presently in India (that’s what maharaj told). So we should clarify and also be prepared that whilst he is part of the team, we would keep moving forward with our publishing just in case if we are NOT able to get Mukunda Datta Prabhu’s involvement due to time constraints. This is in the case of first journal, and since we will be publishing every quarter we can engage him in the future issues as well.

We also discussed the following:

• First issue will be a printed and also e-version (which we had discussed) but then we will do the printing regionally. For India, Ramgiridhari will take care of the printing and distribution and for USA maharaj will facilitate for printing and related. Distribution shall be taken up through our appointed 3 regional representatives for USA (Gopi Geetha, Balimardan pr and Visvambara Pr). For south America Jagad Guru Prabhu will take care of the printing and distribution (both the English version of it and also a parallel Spanish version of it).

• Maharaj is proposing the name of the magazine as “Pascatya Desa Tarine - A Journal of the ISKCON Ministry of Education”. If anyone have any other suggestions please share them here. I have few thoughts. I shall think further on this and circulate them tomorrow.

• We have discussed that the first journal being an introductory one can cover about our (recently concluded) Seattle conference and also what we intend to do thru this journal.  We also discussed if we should restrict this journal for North America… we finally discussed and concluded (which we had also agreed before) that this shall be a single global magazine for the ISKCON’s Ministry of Education as we don’t have many team members to run continent wise magazine. If in the future we have more team who can take up regional initiatives we can facilitate them. It is important that the outline of the first magazine should be finalized.

• I had shared with Maharaj that I have got some draft version. I shall share them shortly with everyone. I strongly urge that each of us write down our thoughts on what should go in the Journal in general and if anything specific we wish to have them in the first one.

• We have 20 more days to wrap up the content and the layout of the journal. We are strongly desiring to launch the first journal on Srila Prabhupada’s Vyasa Puja day (August 16^th 2017).

Please keep this thread active and lets consolidate our thoughts and enable the content team to finalize them asap.

Nityananda Prabhu,  I will be in Houston between August 17^th and 31^st. Maharaj is also planning to come to Houston then. We were wondering if either you could come to Houston during one of the days or if myself and Maharaj could come to Dallas to chalk out the rest of the 3 issues for the year. This is just a heads up. More details have to be worked out.

Finally, this journal is an important part of our Ministries activities and hence lets make it happen and network all the educational initiatives.

So the immediate TO DO List is:

• Name for the journal – Everyone shall contribute (just in case if we need other names apart from what Maharaj has proposed)
• Outline for the first journal – If possible nominate who will / should provide the content – Everyone can contribute for this.
• Contacting Mukunda Datta Prabhu for being part of the editorial team – Nityananda Prabhu / Maharaj to contact him.

Your servant,

Ramgiridhari Dasa