Esteemed Professor Samaresh Bandyopadhyay et al
We hope this meets you in the best of spirits and excellent health. Here we, Hanumatpresaka Swami, Anjana Suta Academy, NIOS, have been working hard since our return from these intense travels through India, Europe and North and South America.
If it is agreeable to your good self and others we will write a report each Thursday to be dispatched to the Nil-kamal office of NIOS and then call on Saturday with the presence of Ravi Singh et al. We post a report daily on our Blog in the spirit of the Vanaras of Hanuman who were out each day looking for Sita and would then regroup nightly to discuss the days search. Can we can this anveSaka samAgama? (We use www.spokensanskrit.de as our translator).
We have sent the University Mailing list to Rama-giri-dhari Das and the Promotional Letter in its current format. We also gave him $1000 while we were in Houston together for one year’s expense for warehousing our NIOS books and developing an aggressive program of marketing. This will include work from his in-house professional marketing agent who will be in contact with your and our good self for advice actively. From this we really expect to see our books going out.
The question then came up of printing our third book, Man Making. Should we wait and us the income from the sale of the first two books or should we try to go ahead and print it and warehouse it also.
In terms of the NIOS program in South America, we are beginning to contact the scholars who attended. From Beverly Zabrieskii of the Jungian Foundation of New York we have had no response to our preliminary contact, but Darrol Bryant of the Center for World Religions in Ottawa we have had very nice proactive contact. Everyone is very enthused to work toward a big global program in 2018 on Art and the Sacred. Sir, what do think of this theme?
The idea would then be to use the magazine, Solaris, as a focus to organize our work in developing this event.
Solaris is printed in Spanish in black and white and color. It has received excellent appreciation and is now in distribution to all of our academic and cultural contacts in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Spain. Abhirama Das is sending me the files for the English edition and we are working toward publishing that next. I think it can be a little different than the Spanish version. For this we would hope to send the articles to your good self and see if you can write an Forward to the Journal and the project.
We have been doing work to move the base for NIOS to Houston and merge with a more general corporation, the Goloka Foundation. This has gone well. The Foundation is legally incorporated and has had its first meeting and we are working to open bank accounts etc. Besides these NIOS publications of first-class academic literature, South America symposium, the Foundation is also generating a standard curriculum for Sunday School for ISKCON’s 100,000+ congregational children and cooperative funding application for the five active ISKCON primary schools in North America.
In general we feel that ISKCON as an institution is going through very, very critical times in its historic development, that other institutions such as Buddhism, Islam and faced. Unless it develops its educational institutions such as primary schools and universities it will certainly schism. We feel the ISKCON congregations are such a valuable allies to NIOS in its work.
Our calendar is becoming more certain. We will probably be based here until the beginning of January. Then we will go (with you?) for Radhika’s program on the Srimad Bhagavatam, 10 January, at University of Madras. Then we can travel and finish with time in Mayapur, 10-13 February, for the ISKCON Guru, Sannyasi, GBC Sanga.
Please write to us as Principal Advisor for NIOS and as one of the kindest well-wishers that we have.