Making the unfortunate fortunate
There is a “tradition” in Slovenia that on the first day of highschool the older students paint the freshmans with F all over the face, hands, T-shirts, pants and so on. F comes from the Slovenian translation of pheasant. Some freshmen take it as a joke and paint themselves to “be cool” but some are quite disturbed by it. So we decided to go in a city with many highschools, found a strategic location and target mostly the freshmen. So we were distributing quite some books to young people and tried to transform what was a traumatic experience for some of them into the best day of their lives because they got Srila Prabhupada’s books.
Gita got a Gita
We were having harinam in one smaller city in Slovenia and one devotee pointed out: “Look, that’s, “Gita hair styling salon.” Go offer her a Gita.” So I went inside, figured out which of the 2 ladies was “in charge” and told her we are monks and we are distributing these 5000 year old books called Bhagavad Gita. She was struck, “Hey, my name is Gita”. So I just told her it must be a sign (people like these kinds of things). So she just asked how much and got a Bhagavad Gita.
The fishy lady wasn’t so fishy
We were having harinam in a small city in Croatia and we went to the market. This lady was selling fish but she was attracted to the harinam. I offered her a Krishna book which she already had but she wanted the Prabhupada Lilamrita. She somehow cleaned her hands, got the book and gave a good donation. She was quite a nice lady for someone with such a degraded business.
Give it 1 more hour
I was doing sankirtan in Northern Slovenia, an area where we don’t go so often. The day before I was doing quite good and this day I decided to do half a day in one city and half a day in another city. So I started with the smaller city, I was doing decent and after lunch I went to the other city which is the main city in that area. So I was thinking books are going to fly. It didn’t start like that. It was getting too hot, there were no people and after 1h I distributed 1 small book and that also to someone not really interested. So I was thinking of calling it a day. But then I said “let’s give it another hour, whatever happens happens”. And as soon as I did that, books started flying, and people were giving good donations . So in the next hour I did quite some books including big books, Gitas and so on. So you can’t know which is a good day and which is a bad day until the day is over.
She gave away her husband’s Bhagavad Gita
I met this lady in a small city in Slovenia. Actually she came to me and said Hare Krishna. She said her husband is a devotee and he has all the books. But I asked her for a donation anyway and then I offered her a book. So she called her husband to ask which book he doesn’t have. He had everything except the Bhagavad Gita. Which is quite surprising for a devotee. And then she confessed that she was cleaning and she gave her husband’s Gita away. She didn’t think that book was important. This reminded me of the “tea or me” incident in Srila Prabhupada’s life. Lucky for her she got a Bhagavad Gita back for her husband.
Your servant,
Mukunda Madhava dasa
