The power of book distribution
In the early 1980s, my father was a doctor working with the United Nations. He had some friends who were visiting the United States, and while there, they met a devotee in the airport who gave them a BTG. They were Buddists, so they weren’t very interested, but they knew that my father was a Hindu, so they took the BTG magazine back to Burma, where we lived and gave it to my father. He never read it. But I saw it and read it. I...
Al Furqan
I was walking back to my car after few hours of Stree chanting and books, this was in Burwood Sydney, with couple books still in my hand. I came upon what appeared to be a Chinese restaurant, the owner sitting outside having a smoke. Turned out to be an Islamic Chinese restaurant and the owner belongs to Chinese occupied Kashmir. Looking at my attire and Indian appearance, he started using some provocative language such as...
I left Guru but Guru didn’t leave me
We went to apartments door to door distributing Sri Caitanya Caritamrita sets in the Bay area. We saw one middle aged lady at one apartment, we greeted her by saying “Hare Krishna” and she replied with “Hare Krishna.” She studied in Varanasi and said when she was studying she used to follow Srila Prabhupada and the Hare Krishna movement. After college, however, she left chanting and she told us once in while...
A KGB agent named Leonid
Many many years ago I was working in the Soviet army. I spent quite some years also in the Afghanistan war, but it was such a nasty experience that I wanted to orient myself to a more peaceful atmosphere. So I joined the Moscow Institute that trained KGB staff. Of course it is not publicly known to be in that function. I chose the justice line, for to become some spy in the foreign countries did not fit with my mind either. Once I had...