| Yadavendra
Das
Dear Srila Prabhupada,
Please accept my obeisances. All glories
to your Divine Grace! Bhava-roga, the disease of material existence is a
great, unrelenting plague and I find the only way for me to keep the disease at
bay is to take shelter of your books, to study and to distribute your books. Best
I can relate to your letters because the philosophy is presented and there are
also many practical hints to be found. In your letters we can also sense your
affectionate concern for your disciples and others as well. Some devotees
openly preach that book distribution is outmoded. Isn't that a nonsensical proposal?
You often said that some of us should make lifetime plans to distribute your books
and in India you attributed the success of the communists to their book distribution.
Book distribution also includes the books of your talented and faithful disciples.
There are many new titles being published incessantly. Just as the statements
of powerful materialists will affect the share market, similarly talking down
book distribution will generate financial losses. There are hundreds and thousands
of people and institutions which are willing to buy our books. It is simply a
matter of supplying them. No doubt book distribution is hard work.
Recently
I was in the Cairns library and besides your BG As It Is and Kurma's Transcendental
Adventure, which I personally sold them in the past there was a Krishna Conscious
book from another Math which I opened at random. There I could read the story
of Bhilvamangala Thakur who plugged out his eyes with pins.
I started considering
whether it would sometimes take some radical means either self- imposed or brought
about by destiny to transcend our material attachments. Of course one may say
disease, old age and death are radical means in themselves. But let us conclude
on a lighter note by stating that kirtan is probably the more radical means. We
hear of devotees whose bodies are afflicted by pain and other imperfections but
as soon as they join the kirtan, they dance like madmen and their pain disappears
as if by enchantment. I have personally experienced this incompatibility of bodily
pain and kirtan at the Cairns programs of your staunch preacher H.H. Ramai Swami.
One may actually feel pain and think:" I cannot join the dancing because
it will exacerbate my condition". But the actual fact is that as soon as
one allows oneself to be transported by the sound of the Holy Name in a melodious
kirtan the pain flees away just as the birds flee the branches of a tree by hearing
the sound of clapping. In conclusion let us continue to distribute your
own books and those of your faithful and talented disciples and attend as many
festivals as possible and thereby dance our way back home Back to Godhead. Your
not-much-of-a-disciple, Yadavendra Das
| 
