My Life on “The Pick”
A Memoir by Henry Doktorski
Hrishikesh dasa plays harmonium in the Bahulaban Temple.
Drawing by Krishna Katha (Carl Carlson) published in the February 1982 issue of Brijabasi Spirit.
Part One: Introduction
I served my spiritual master, the ISKCON-approved guru His Divine Grace Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada, out on “The Pick” full-time from October 1979 (with a two-month break from January to March 1980 when I served as Temple President of ISKCON Pittsburgh) until September 1985, and then part full-time and part part-time at least until 1988. “The Pick” is devotee jargon for fundraising out in shopping center, sports stadium and rock concert arena parking lots, and other places, to collect Laksmi (the Goddess of Fortune commonly known as “money”).
At first I was highly unsuccessful at this trade. Approaching strangers and trying to coax them to give me a dollar or two for charity was incredibly difficult for me. I felt I was a failure. But after a year or two, I discovered the secret to collecting big, and began collecting $1,000 per week. Then $2,000, then $3,000 per week. One year (I think 1984) I got 30,000 people to give me a $5.00 donation. I raised $150,000 for New Vrindaban that year. My total contribution towards the New Vrindaban coffer could have been $500,000. Perhaps more.
I was known as a maharathi, a Sanskrit word for a great warrior. My picking partner dubbed me “The Professor,” and a few years later, Devamrita Swami, the New Vrindaban temple president and sankirtan leader, started calling me “The Prince of the Pick.”
We pickers were respected as warriors for Krishna, rescuing Laksmi from the evil (or at least ignorant) karmis (non-devotees) to reunite with her Lord, Master and Husband, Vishnu, where she belongs. I mostly enjoyed my service. It was exciting at times, often austere, sometimes painful, but it had its own pleasures and perks, which I will attempt to describe in this essay.
Henry becomes Hrishikesh dasa
Perhaps some background information is in order. I lived at the New Vrindaban Hare Krishna community from August 1978 until April 1994. When I joined the community I had just received three months earlier a Bachelor of Arts degree in music. I had studied music for most of my life. In 1963, as a seven-year-old child, I showed some musical talent so my parents enrolled me in the studio of one local New Jersey accordion teacher.
In high school I discovered classical music after joining the school choir. Shortly after, I began serious piano studies and later was awarded a scholarship as a piano major at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. There, along with music, I developed a keen interest in Indian spirituality and the counterculture. I grew my hair long; I heard the former Harvard University Professor-turned-yogi, Baba Ram Dass, lecture at the University of Kansas; I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation for a $35 fee and silently chanted my secret mantra twice a day; I decided to become a vegetarian and even told my piano professor, much to his chagrin, that after finishing graduate school I would join a spiritual commune somewhere and devote my life to the search for the Absolute Truth. I acquired a packet of LSD from a friend and kept it in the kitchen freezer, intending to expand my consciousness, but never used it because I feared, as a pianist, that it might ruin my music career if I had a “flashback” during a concert performance and I lost my motor control and coordination.
Senior Piano Recital, Park College, Parkville Missouri (April 16, 1978).
After graduating from college in May 1978, I briefly visited the Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa, to check out the scene, but was sorely disappointed; the students there dressed in conservative shirts and ties and wore short hair cuts. I thought they looked a little like fundamentalist Christians. I was looking for something more radical; something less mainstream; something more austere. By chance or by the design of a higher power, on the way home from Kansas City to New Jersey in July 1978, I visited a former high school buddy who that year happened to have a summer job in Wheeling, West Virginia. While sitting in his barren, hot and stuffy apartment with nothing to do, he suggested, “Why don’t we visit the nearby Hare Krishna community; they’re building a palace for their founder. I’ve been there before; it’s really cool!”
We spent the afternoon touring New Vrindaban and I was impressed. I found a community of spiritual seekers who seemed to practice what they preached: renunciation. The single men slept for only six hours each night in sleeping bags on the floor of an ashram with twenty or thirty others; they took ice cold baths (there was no hot water)—without even using soap (as far as I could see)—in the communal bath house. The toilets were only holes in the concrete floor (Indian style) without even doors on the front of the stalls! [Endnote 1]
The New Vrindaban devotees chanted Sanskrit mantras for two hours daily, usually attended two temple services daily (and sometimes three on Sundays), worked at least eight hours daily for Krishna without remuneration, ate only vegetarian food offered to Krishna, and spoke nothing except topics about Krishna or Krishna’s service.
One of the devotees remained perpetually silent except for the words “Hare Krishna” which he would sometimes unexpectedly and loudly shout. [Endnote 2] Another devotee stubbornly refused to wear socks or shoes, even in winter. His feet were heavily calloused and pitted with deep cracks which reminded me of the canals on the surface of Mars. [Endnote 3] These people obviously were serious about minimizing bodily needs. They were tough; like the Marines. Hare Krishna seemed to me to be the elite “Green Berets” of all the Indian spiritual movements. And the philosophy appeared undefeatable. This is what I wanted: a challenge.
About a month later, I visited the community again during a drive out West and met Kirtanananda Swami for the first time. I was immediately drawn to the warmth and kindness which seemed to radiate from him. He appeared to express genuine concern for me and I listened to him speak as a respectful son listens to a wise and compassionate father. During our first conversation he convinced me (not an easy task) to set aside my music studies and join the commune as a full time devotee to develop my spiritual life.
As I had sacrificed a great deal (a potentially promising career in music) to live at New Vrindaban, I decided to give the process a fair chance: I faithfully chanted sixteen rounds daily, strictly followed the four regulative principles, scrupulously attended all the required spiritual programs, resided with similarly-minded godbrothers at the remote Old Vrindaban brahmachari (celibate male student) ashram, and worked to the best of my abilities to help build a ornate memorial shrine for the late founder and acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977) who had passed away only nine months earlier.
Going “cold turkey.”
My first months at New Vrindaban were incredibly difficult, due in large part to withdrawal from the object of my affections: classical music. During college I had performed with symphony orchestras, sang Handel’s Messiah with a huge 280-voice choir, and even performed a leading role in a concert performance of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. I had composed original music for musical theater productions and directed pit orchestras. But that was all over now. Finis.
From hearing Bhagavad-gita and Srimad-bhagavatam classes I technically understood that most music was simply sense gratification: a highly pleasurable activity which distracted the soul from God and entrapped the living entity in Maya’s illusory energy. But God! how difficult it was for me to shed my addiction to classical music! My intellect insisted that I should stay at New Vrindaban, shed my material desires and develop my dormant love for God, but my heart sorely missed the thrill of composing, performing and listening to classical music; the excitement, the glamour, the acclaim, the intellectual satisfaction and the rapturous beauty of the passionate melodies, harmonies and rhythms which had captivated my consciousness for so many years.
Building Prabhupada a palace.
I clearly remember working at Prabhupada’s Palace-under-construction, probably in October 1978, doing some solitary gold leafing in the central kirtan hall, crying out in despair from the pain of my mental and emotional anguish and mournfully singing in a loud voice the mahamantra (great chant for deliverance): “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare; Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare” to the tune of the plaintive Jaya Radha Madhava melody which was sung every morning before the daily Bhagavatam class. I put my entire heart and soul into that chanting; I was suffering so much. I begged Krishna, “Please help me! Please save me! Tear out my material desires from my tortured heart and heal it with unconditional ecstatic love for you!”
Kirtanananda Swami at Prabhupada’s Palace-under-construction. The author appears in the background applying gold leaf to a Palace Kirtan Hall column capital (Philadelphia Inquirer photo, c. October 1978)
Sometime shortly after, apparently by the grace of guru and Krishna, I acquired a taste for devotional service—seemingly overnight—and my mental tempest dissipated like the thick New Vrindaban early-morning fog which is burned off by the rising sun. I requested initiation from Kirtanananda Maharaja: “I would like to become your disciple and spend the rest of my life serving Krishna here at New Vrindaban.” Maharaja beamed joyfully and exclaimed, “Jaya! That’s what I like: someone who comes and does not run away.” (“Jaya” or “Jai” is a Sanskrit exclamation designating approval, often translated as “victory.”) I was initiated on March 13th (Gaura Purnima), 1979, and received the name Hrishikesh dasa (servant of Krishna, who is the master of the senses).
The author applies gold leaf to the Palace dome (Summer 1979)
“The Pick.”
In October 1979 I worked a big event in Chicago, “The Pope Pick,” and excelled at selling buttons with the image of Pope John Paul II. This was my first time collecting money for New Vrindaban, and I was, amazingly, the top men’s collector at the event. Thereafter I was sent to the ISKCON temple in Cleveland, Ohio, to learn how to distribute Prabhupada’s books. At first I was terrible. But I doggedly continued in this service, as my spiritual master said Sankirtan is the highest service.
Somehow or other, after about six months, I suddenly discovered how to do this service of collecting money, and a couple years later, in 1981, I won an award for being the top men’s collector for 1981. I enjoyed the praise I received from my spiritual master, my godbrothers and the other New Vrindaban residents.
I excelled at this service of “picking” for perhaps five years, but, beginning in 1984, I began to develop some physical weaknesses which greatly reduced my stamina and collections. I was unable to regularly do big on “The Pick” anymore because my body had lost much strength, I believe, partly from the stress of the service itself as well as our customary abuse of and disregard for the body’s needs. Now I will tell the story about my life on The Pick.
Part Two: Helping to Raise Money for Krishna.
The Candle Factory.
The once-profitable New Vrindaban Spiritual Sky incense business—which funded the purchase of properties such as Madhuban, Bahulaban and Guruban—folded during the mid-1970s, and the income from drug smuggling and dealing—which funded much of the construction supplies for Prabhupada’s Palace—ended soon after the September 1979 Palace dedication. (For more about unconventional sources of funding for New Vrindaban, see the author’s books, Gold, Guns and God, Vols. 2 and 3.) A new source of funding was needed.
Candles were a big money maker in 1978 and 1979. New Vrindaban established a candle factory at Bahulaban where residents dipped and carved elaborate and colorful decorative candles which sankirtan devotees sold in malls or on the road. Beginning in September 1978, I worked up at the Palace-under-construction, mostly gold leafing the interior and exterior. In October, I began painting the perimeter ceiling of the Kirtan Hall, a project I finally finished in March 1979. But around December 3, 1978, I was assigned to work for a few weeks in the New Vrindaban “Candle Factory” at Bahulaban. My service was dipping candles in 55-gallon barrels of molten wax.
As I recall, we began with a plain, generic commercial candle, purchased cheaply in bulk. The candle factory workers dipped the candle a dozen times in one barrel of colored wax to thicken the candle, then we’d take the candle over to another barrel with wax of a different color, and dip into the new barrel. We continued this process maybe a half dozen times, then passed the bulk candle over to the candle carvers, who sat at tables with sharp knives. These carvers sliced the soft, warm wax and folded the slices to create fantastical patterns with bright kaleidoscopic colors.
An ornamental candle similar to those manufactured at New Vrindaban.
When the carvers finished a candle, it was then passed to the packers, who placed each candle in a corrugated cardboard box with dividers, so the candles would not get damaged during transport. Finally, the traveling sankirtan devotees picked up boxes of candles when they visited New Vrindaban, and then went back out on the road to sell the hand-made New Vrindaban product. Candles were a big seller during the Christmas season, as shoppers often look for unique and exciting gifts for family and friends.
In 1980 as I recall, the Candle Factory moved up to the Palace. It was located in the rooms behind the Palace which were in future to become the Palace Restaurant and Gift Store. Unfortunately, during the winter of 1980, the Candle Factory burned to the ground. The flames shot a hundred feet into the air as thousands of gallons of wax blazed. Even the specially-ordered incredibly-long steel-reinforced concrete beams which supported the roof (which cost many tens of thousands of dollars and were shipped in by dozens of specially-trained tractor-trailer semi-truck drivers) were destroyed. The devastation was complete. A new source of income was needed, and traveling sankirtan evolved to fill the void. Soon New Vrindaban pickers would generate millions of dollars in income per year. But back to the winter of 1978.
During the 1978 Christmas marathon I dipped candles in huge barrels of colored molten wax at the Bahulaban candle factory. When the Christmas marathon was over, and the sankirtan devotees returned to the farm, I returned to my service of painting the perimeter of the ceiling of the Kirtan Hall at Prabhupada’s Palace-under-construction.
The six-month Palace Marathon, from March to September 1979 was intense. I will tell some stories from that time later. For now, after the Palace Dedication Festival during Labor Day Weekend 1979, I began serving as a teacher at the Nandagram Boys School. I taught music there for about a month. I lived at the Vrindaban Brahmachari Ashram, and walked across the ridge to the Nandagram school, about a mile distant. Every day I returned to the Vrindaban Farm. I enjoyed teaching the boys. I had no discipline problems. I think they respected me, and I was fair to them.
The Pope Pick.
On October 5, 1979, I worked the “Pope Pick” at Grant Park on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois. New Vrindaban sent out dozens of collectors in vans to Des Moines, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D. C., New York City and Boston—the cities on the pope’s first United States tour—to hawk buttons and other paraphernalia displaying a photo or image of Pope John Paul II to the massive crowds who came to attend Mass presided by the pope. Tens, if not a hundred thousand dollars were raised for New Vrindaban to help complete Prabhupada’s Palace of Gold, which had been dedicated only one month earlier.
Pope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła in Wadowice, Poland in 1920. He rose through the ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, becoming a priest, a bishop, the Archbishop of Kraków and then a cardinal. He was elected pope in October 1978, becoming one of the youngest popes in history. John Paul II was pope for nearly 27 years, until his death in 2005. Nine years later, he was officially canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. He was the favorite pope in my family, as we are both Roman Catholic and Polish.
John Paul II in Chicago.
The Pope Pick was my first time ever collecting money for New Vrindaban. As noted earlier in this essay, during my first year at New Vrindaban I helped build Prabhupada’s Palace, and after the Palace dedication on September 2nd I served as a music teacher for the boys at Nandagram School for a month. Now, I looked forward to the exciting experience of collecting money for Krishna. I rode in the back of a van with a bunch of others from New Vrindaban to Chicago the previous evening (October 4th). We slept in sleeping bags on the crowded floor of the van.
As I recall, after an eight-hour drive, we arrived at Grant Park in Chicago early in the morning. Dharmatma dasa (Dennis Gorrick) was there with his own van to coordinate the New Vrindaban pickers. He provided us with shoulder bags containing hundreds of pope buttons. Some other pickers had bars of soap carved in the likeness of John Paul II, which people could hang up in their shower stall. We called the item “Pope on a Rope.”
Around 8 a.m., the crowd started pouring in, and we began picking, offering our buttons for sale. As I recall, we asked $2 per button. The buttons cost maybe twenty-five cents, if that. We were vendors hawking our wares: “Get your Pope buttons here! Pope buttons, only two dollars!” People in the crowd raised their hands, indicating that they wanted a button, and we’d move through the crowd, passing out buttons and collecting money. Some people bought four or five buttons. Some bought ten. Many, many times, I ran out of buttons and ran back to Dharmatma’s van, turning in my Laksmi and grabbing another shoulder bag filled with buttons.
A button with Pope John Paul II’s image.
I discovered that the best way to make money was to find a fresh crowd; people who hadn’t yet seen the buttons. After we’d been picking for four or five or six hours, it was not easy finding a fresh crowd, but somehow I managed to find them.
The climax of the day was an afternoon open-air Mass at the Petrillo Band Shell at Grant Park. At 3 p.m., church bells rang throughout the archdiocese, signaling the entrance procession for the Mass that was celebrated by the Holy Father and 350 bishops from all over North America. An estimated 1.2 million people gathered in the park for the two-hour-long Mass. The weather remained sunny and seasonable.
The pope was a half an hour late, and by the time he arrived, more than 1 million people had amassed in the 319-acre park. John Paul II gave Holy Eucharist to 150 people chosen from the six Vicariates of the Chicago Archdiocese, while more than 600 priests and deacons administered the Eucharist to the full crowd.
During Mass, naturally as a respectful Catholic boy, I did not hawk my buttons loudly. If I did, the people would have hated me for disturbing their Holy Mass. But I did walk quietly through the crowd waving over my head a button in one hand, and with my other hand, displayed two fingers which indicated the number “two dollars.” I still made some sales in this way.
The crowd was estimated to be 1.2 million.
After the Mass, many in the crowd chanted “John Paul Two, We Love You!” The pope responded with “John Paul Two, He Loves You!”
When the Mass ended, around 5 or 6 p. m., the crowds began dispersing. Of course it took several hours for 1.2 million people to get back to the taxi stands, bus stops, subway stations, and their parked cars. I found a good spot where many thousands of people had to pass and hawked my buttons again, this time only for $1. “Last chance to get your Pope buttons! Only one dollar!” I think after a while I dropped the price to “Two for a dollar!”
The sun set in Chicago that day at 6:30 p. m., but we kept working, as the crowd still numbered in the thousands. Finally around 10 or 11 p. m., everyone had left, except for a handful of park maintenance employees and us New Vrindaban devotees. Dharmatma’s helpers were counting the Laksmi scores.
I was quite surprised when Dharmatma announced, “Hrishikesh is the biggest collector of the day, with 1,643 Laksmi points!” In sixteen hours, I averaged more than $100 per hour. I even beat New Vrindaban’s biggest picker on the men’s parties: Muktakesh dasa (Ronald Burstein) by a mere $20.
Muktakesh was a big book distributor and a big picker for the last five years for Buffalo ISKCON and New Vrindaban. But now his big ego was bruised. He was so pissed he had been beaten by a rookie, and he told me so to my face, that he grabbed some buttons and ran out into the night in a futile attempt to make 21 more dollars and retain his title. He returned fifteen minutes later, disappointed, and he reluctantly admitted that I had taken away his crown.
After this, my days on “The Farm” were numbered. In a few months, I would become a full time “Picker,” a position I maintained and (mostly) enjoyed for about seven years.
Muktakesh dasa, ACBSP (Ronald Burstein) (1947-2007).
Trying to sell Prabhupada’s books in Cleveland.
On or around October 7, 1979, perhaps only a couple days after the Pope Pick, New Vrindaban authorities shipped me to the Cleveland, Ohio ISKCON temple, the New Vrindaban satellite center at 15720 Euclid Avenue in the East Cleveland ghetto. The temple president, as I recall, was Sundarakar dasa Adhikari ACBSP (Steven Fitzpatrick). The deities on the altar were Radha Muralidhara. Janakanath dasa ACBSP (Anthony Gierz) served as pujari and cook.
Tapahpunja dasa Brahmachari ACBSP (Terry Sheldon) was the resident sankirtan expert, and he attempted to train me up how to distribute Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s books, like the small paperback Easy Journey to Other Planets, in the parking lots of Kmart department stores and Kroger supermarkets in various small towns in North Eastern Ohio.
Tapahpunja Swami (Terry Sheldon)
Just a few days earlier, on October 5th, I proved my prowess as a collector at the Pope Pick in Chicago, my first ever sankirtan event, where I collected $1,643 by selling buttons displaying the image of Pope John Paul II. New Vrindaban authorities suspected I might be able to learn to collect big on regular sankirtan in the parking lots of Ohio shopping malls and rock concert stadiums, but I proved myself a failure. I was terrible. I could hardly get a donation, let alone sell a book. This service was incredibly difficult for me. In fact, it was frightening.
It was one thing to sell a button which everyone wanted; and an entirely different thing to sell a book (with an image on the cover of an emaciated yogi) which no one wanted. Not to mention the police officers and security guards who constantly told me to move on or get arrested, as Tapahpunja never bothered to apply for a solicitor’s permit.
The cover of Easy Journey to Other Planets by Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
My First Rock Concert, and First Arrest.
On October 27, 1979, the American rock band, the Eagles, performed the first of a two-night sold-out stand at the Richfield Coliseum—a 20,000-seat indoor arena between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. This was the first leg of the Eagles’ “The Long Run” tour. I was there before the concert in the parking lot, trying (without much success) to get donations for Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s paperback book, Easy Journey to Other Planets.
The Eagles
After a short time a security guard questioned me, then asked me to come with him to the security office where I was charged with trespassing. My mentor, Tapahpunja, bailed me out and asked me what happened. I said a security guard stopped me and asked me if I was going to the concert. I said, “No. I’m just here to distribute books.” Then the security guard arrested me for trespassing.
Tapahpunja rebuked me, “You fool! You should have said that you were going to the concert! Then he would have simply told you to stop distributing books, and you wouldn’t have been arrested!” Tapahpunja conveniently forgot the fact that he had not given me any prior instruction on what to tell the security guards if I was questioned. How could I possibly know what to say?
I felt bad after his chastisement, but the pained look on my face must have touched Tapahpunja’s heart, for then he encouraged me, “That’s all right. You are a brahmin, and a brahmin is always truthful.”
Richfield Coliseum
My first taste of traveling sankirtan.
On or around November 7, 1979, while stationed at the Cleveland ISKCON temple, my mentor, Tapahpunja dasa Brahmachari, took me out on traveling sankirtan for an entire week, my first time on the road.
Terry Ray Sheldon was born November 2, 1948 in a “poor, working-class neighborhood” in Detroit, Michigan. He joined ISKCON at the Detroit temple, and after a few months, moved to New Vrindaban. He received diksa and the name Tapahpunja in October 1974. He admired Kirtanananda Swami and developed a strong emotional attachment for his siksa guru. For a few years he served Bhaktipada in Buffalo, New York and Columbus, Ohio. Both were New Vrindaban satellite centers.
Tapahpunja exhibited his leadership abilities by becoming an expert sankirtan “Picker” and party leader, renowned for his ability to avoid detection by the police. He also served as the New Vrindaban men’s sankirtan leader (1979-1980). Some affectionately called him “Mr. Scam Kirtan.” Tapahpunja was intelligent and personable. Dharmatma remembered him, “He was very innovative. He was quite intelligent in regards to putting things together.”
In November 1979, Tapahpunja and I left Cleveland ISKCON in a beat-up old van with a couple cases of Prabhupada’s book, Easy Journey to Other Planets. Tapahpunja drove south towards Akron where we worked the parking lots of Kroger supermarkets and Kmart department stores. Although this was extremely difficult work for me—trying to get a donation from a housewife on a budget for a book with a picture of an emaciated yogi on the cover—I trudged along and gave it my best, as I was told this service was extremely pleasing to Krishna.
One time we coincidentally met another New Vrindaban traveling sankirtan party: my godbrothers Damodar (Allen White) and Jagannath Mishra (James Bulsa). Those two guys took to the pick like ducks to water. When we arrived at a supermarket parking lot, Damodar and Mish jumped out of the van like paratroopers jumping out of a military airplane going to battle to rescue Laksmi from the karmis. I, on the other hand, was petrified and I sat in the van chanting my rounds.
After a few hours, after the store manager came out and told us to leave, Tapahpunja drove us to another parking lot in another part of town. Late in the day, we stopped distributing books and drove to a Kmart parking lot where we spent the night sleeping in our sleeping bags on the floor of the van. But first we used a small propane camp stove to heat up a quart of milk in a steel pot, which we drank before spreading our sleeping bags on the floor of the van and taking rest.
Kmart parking lots were good places to park overnight, as there were usually a half-dozen or more other vehicles parked overnight and we wouldn’t draw any attention to ourselves. Truck stop parking lots were also a good place to spend the night. If we parked at other locations during the night, sometimes the police would wake us up and tell us to move on.
In the morning, Tapahpunja drove our van to a partly-seclude place, such as against a brick wall, where we opened the side doors of the van, stripped to our kaupins (a one-piece loin cloth underwear common in India) and bathed using a gallon of water in an old plastic milk jug. We had filled the jugs with water the previous day at a gas station. First Tapahpunja bathed, to show me how to do it.
Bathing is very important to Krishna devotees. At New Vrindaban we take a cold shower every morning before dressing in a clean dhoti and kurta to attend the morning program at the temple. Tapahpunja demonstrated: first he poured a couple cups of water on his shaved head, and let the water flow down his body. Then he grabbed a bar of soap, and lathered himself. He untied his loincloth in the rear, and washed out his kaupins, while the cloth still covered the front of his body, as devotees are taught to be modest (never nude).
Then Tapahpunja poured the remainder of the gallon of water on his head and rinsed off all the soap. When the jug was empty, he dried himself with an Indian towel, changed into a fresh kaupin, and got dressed in his karmi clothes. I followed suit. I found this life of the traveling picker quite pleasant, as I am an Eagle Scout and I love camping out in the woods. However, camping in a Kmart parking lot is not as romantic as camping in the woods, but I think you get the idea.
After we freshened up, Tapahpunja put up a picture of Radha Vrindaban Chandra, the presiding deities of New Vrindaban, on the dashboard, and we chanted our sixteen rounds, which took about two hours. If the outside temperature was uncomfortably cold, we chanted inside our van, but most of the time we went outside and chanted while slowly pacing back and forth. Often Tapahpunja drove to a nearby park which was quiet and beautiful; a peaceful place to chant our rounds.
A photo of the presiding deities of New Vrindaban: Radha-Vrindaban Chandra, on their altar at Bahulaban.
After our rounds were completed, we had a short Morning Program, chanting the Samsara Prayers, Prayers to Lord Nrsimhadeva, and the Jaya Radha Madhava Prayers, using a small pair of kartals (brass cymbals) for musical accompaniment. Tapahpunja then read a verse from Srimad-Bhagavatam and spoke a bit about the verse.
We had our own little kitchen in the van, with a cutting board, knives and serving spoons, and a Coleman propane camp stove. Tapahpunja chopped up the vegetables, and prepared a pot of kitchari. Every day we cooked and ate the same dish: kitchari (the word means “mixture” in Hindi), a traditional Indian dish typically made with mung dal (split mung beans) and white basmati rice, flavored with herbs and spices (we used cumin seeds, dried chili peppers, turmeric powder, diced ginger root and asafoetida powder fried in ghee), and cooked with various vegetables. Some say that kitchari is the ultimate comfort food.
Asofoetida powder (hing) is made from the dried latex (gum) exuded from the tap root of several species of perennial herbs from the carrot family. Turmeric powder, made from the dried rhizomes of a plant in the ginger family, has a warm, bitter, black pepper-like flavor and earthy, mustard-like aroma. It is often used in Ayurvedic medicine.
Where did we get our vegetables? Tapahpunja liked to save Krishna’s money (we were taught not to spend money on ourselves) so instead of purchasing vegetables at the supermarket, each morning we drove our van behind the supermarket where Tapahpunja went “Dumpster Diving,” to search for vegetables which were discarded by the produce managers, as the vegetables were beginning to wilt and were unsellable. In a minute or two Tapahpunja would return to the van with an armload of wilted, but still edible produce. Dumpster diving was lots of fun. Occasionally, when we were unable to find a public restroom, we’d do our duty (morning duties we called it, passing stool) in the dumpster.
A bowl of kitchari.
After breakfast, around 11 a. m., we hit the parking lots in a courageous attempt to distribute Prabhupada’s paperback book, Easy Journey to Other Planets. Tapahpunja appeared to enjoy walking up to people, getting their attention, conversing with them, showing them the book, and asking for a donation. I did not. I’m not a shy person, but it was very difficult for me to approach all these people and get rejected dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. Sometimes I’d just sit in the van and chant on my beads, too “fried” from working the parking lots without success.
Once in a while in the morning while preparing a pot of kitchari, Tapahpunja would take a cup or two of wheat flour, add water, roll the dough into cylinder shapes about 6 inches in length, and deep-fry them in a pot of hot ghee. I thought these breadsticks were delicious, and around 4 or 5 p. m., we’d take a break and snack on the bread sticks.
On Sunday, for an afternoon dessert treat, we’d split a 48-ounce container of Breyers ice cream. Tapahpunja said that Breyers was the best brand. Eating such prodigious amounts of ice cream gave us nasty flatulence a few hours later, but it was well worth it; a real creamy and sugary treat. Eating ice cream was usually the high point of my week. We rarely got to eat such rich food at New Vrindaban, except during the weekly Sunday feast.
Then we hit the parking lots again until sunset. Before bed, we drank a glass of hot milk.
A 48-oz. container of Breyers ice cream.
During this week of distributing Prabhupada’s books on traveling sankirtan, we passed through Eastern and Southern Ohio, visiting small towns along the Ohio River and working the supermarket parking lots. We eventually landed in Louisville, Kentucky, about 300 miles from Cleveland.
Tapahpunja told me Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada predicted World War III was coming soon, and because Prabhupada knew Krishna, he knew everything: past, present and future. Tapahpunja played for me a cassette tape during which Prabhupada claimed, “Your country, America, is very much eager to kill these Communists. And the Communists are also very eager. So very soon there will be war. . . . Preaching will be very nice after the war when both of them, especially Russia, will be finished.” [Endnote 4]
Tapahpunja was dedicated to Bhaktipada’s mission and he believed New Vrindaban would become the saving grace of civilization when the nuclear bombs started falling from the sky. This, he claimed, would destroy human society as we know it. During such a nuclear winter, the government would break down and anarchy would prevail. In such a catastrophic scenario, he believed, hundreds of thousands of displaced people would take shelter at ISKCON farm communities, such as New Vrindaban, where the economy was (in theory, at least) based on land and cows.
Every day Tapahpunja studied the Rand McNally road atlas to note our position in relation to the Ohio River. “In the event of a nuclear war,” Tapahpunja told me, “the best way to get back to New Vrindaban would be to follow the Ohio River upstream to Moundsville, and then cut across country by foot.” After a week or so on the road, we turned back and returned to Cleveland ISKCON. I never imagined at the time that I’d be living out of a van for the next five or six years.
Simulation of an atomic bomb explosion.
My Second Rock Concert, and Second Arrest.
On December 2, 1979, the British rock band “The Who” performed at Pittsburgh’s iconic Civic Arena, the world’s first retractable-roof major sports/concert arena. Barry Paris, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviewer, declared it the “best show of the year.”
The Who in concert (undated)
New Vrindaban naturally sent a contingent of sankirtan devotees, including myself (at the time a rookie), to sell books and collect donations from concert attendees. We worked the parking lots and sidewalks. Some of the Dharmettes snuck inside the massive domed structure and worked the aisles and hallways inside.
Pittsburgh Civic Arena
After a relatively short time, I found myself behind bars with about a dozen other devotees in a stone building which resembled a Medieval fortress: the Allegheny County Jail. I believe we were charged with trespassing. We chanted kirtan behind bars in the holding cell for a couple hours until we were processed and released.
Allegheny County Jail
We all considered our treatment by the police a blatant crime against Sanatan Dharma, the eternal religion. Senior devotees told me that Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had, when informed of efforts by law-enforcement agents to restrict his disciples from distributing his books, declared, “Police are pigs. Maya’s pigs.”
Senior devotees tell me, Prabhupada said “Police are pigs. Maya’s pigs.”
Kirtanananda Maharaja gives me a choice.
My temperament was not at all conducive to this life of panhandling. I suffered so much out on the road. Hardly anybody gave me any money. I was a big failure. The rejection I received from hundreds of potential donors one after another in the parking lots was a greater austerity than taking ice cold showers.
On December 3, 1979, after our release from the Allegheny County Jail, Tapahpunja and I returned to New Vrindaban for some R and R (rest and relaxation). I needed a break. For two months I had quietly suffered on “The Pick.” While visiting New Vrindaban, I liked to hang out at Bhaktipada’s house (a brick one-story home right across from the Palace) and sleep at night in my sleeping bag on the floor in his basement, along with other brahmacharis. Bhaktipada always allowed his sankirtan collectors to hang around him during our monthly festivals.
Once Bhaktipada asked me, “How’s life on the road?” I glumly replied, “Horrible. I can’t make any money. I feel useless. This service is very difficult for me.” He smiled and said, “That’s all right. I never was much good at it either!” I thought this was very funny, as I had read that a pure devotee was expert in everything.
Then he quietly suggested, “Would you like to return to the farm? You can teach music at the gurukula.”
I remained silent for a moment, turning it over in my mind. I had taught music at Nandagram for about a month in September, after the Palace dedication. I enjoyed working with the boys and they seemed to respect me as a teacher. Bhaktipada had once talked to me about starting a children’s choir and a gurukula band, and eventually a symphony orchestra and opera company. Teaching at Nandagram might be a good opportunity for me.
Bhaktipada’s proposal was tempting, but I clearly understood from hearing his classes and darshans (conversations, usually in question and answer format) that he considered traveling sankirtan to be the highest service: “The money is the honey.” I wanted to become a dear confidential disciple. Finally, hoping to please him, I said, “No. I’ll stick it out. Maybe I’ll get the hang of it someday.” Bhaktipada was pleased and affectionately rubbed my shaved head. I was in total bliss.
I go out on the Candle Pick
During the first week of December 1979, I went out on a solo money-collecting mission during the 1979 Christmas Marathon to sell the candles manufactured at New Vrindaban. In the morning I drove a small car belonging to the community to the shopping mall in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, about an hour-and-a-half drive. I set up a small folding card table in a prominent place inside the mall, covered the table with a table cloth, set up my candles, and hawked my wares. In the evening, I’d pack everything into the car, drive back to New Vrindaban, and give my collections to my sankirtan leader, Tapahpunja. I enjoyed it. I was performing valuable service for Radha Vrindaban Chandra, the presiding deities of New Vrindaban, and helping to provide funding for construction projects. I explained in Gold, Guns and God, Vol. 4:
Candle Sankirtan
During December of 1979, my sankirtan leader, Tapahpunja dasa Brahmachari (Terry Sheldon), gave me a beat-up car, a card table and a few boxes of candles, and sent me to Uniontown, Pennsylvania—about ninety miles east from New Vrindaban—to set up a candle table at the Uniontown Mall. He told me if a security guard asked me what I was doing to tell him that our school—Nandagram Boys School—received permission from the mall manager to set up a table. He gave me a cheap-looking ID card with my name and photo on it.
My candle table was a good money maker. Our New Vrindaban candles were big and beautiful and people liked them. I sometimes made $500 per day which I promptly delivered to Tapahpunja each night when I returned home. I was happy to help make money to complete the landscaping and gardens for Prabhupada’s Palace of Gold and other New Vrindaban projects.
I think it was Christmas Eve when the security guard approached me again; but this time he was with the mall manager, who was furious. He had no idea who I was, but he knew from the crowd of shoppers at my table that I was making money hand-over-fist without paying for a legitimate vendor’s booth. They called the police and the police questioned me, but they let me go after confiscating my candles. Tapahpunja later told me, “You should have given them a few free candles. They would have given you less trouble.”
The Uniontown Mall
I serve as Temple President for Pittsburgh ISKCON
On or around January 10, 1980, I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the order of the New Vrindaban temple authorities, and began serving as the Temple President of Pittsburgh ISKCON at 1112 North Negley Avenue. At the time as I recall, Pittsburgh ISKCON was essentially little more than a New Vrindaban sankirtan outpost. Weekend Warriors (money collectors) from New Vrindaban, while working the area, stayed overnight in the ashram at the Pittsburgh temple.
In the past, the temple building had been a Polish dance hall. Many wedding receptions had been celebrated there. At times, wedding guests drank too much alcohol, and got in fights with members of the bride’s or groom’s family members, and (according to the late Naranarayan Visvakarma dasa—Nathan Baruch Zakheim—who lived there in 1970) so many wedding guests died in the hall that the neighbors began calling the building the “Bucket of Blood.” He said when he lived there, he heard ghosts at night. I, on the other hand, never heard anything unusual at night. I supposed Naranarayan’s chanting drove the ghosts away.
About a half-dozen residents lived in the Pittsburgh temple: myself, Dundee (who, as I recall, had a regular nine-to-five job somewhere) and his heavy-set Spanish-speaking wife and infant daughter. Dundee, when he had spare time from work and family, helped around the temple as a handyman and janitor.
We also had a pujari/cook who worshiped the big 51-inch-tall Jagannath (carved by Naranarayan about ten years earlier from a big New Vrindaban log), Subhadra and Balarama deities. If I remember correctly, our pujari/cook was Hladini devi dasi (Linda Jury), who was exceptionally devoted to Lord Jagannath. Eight years later, in 1988, she accepted sannyasa from Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada, and became known as Hrishikesh Maharaja, a fired-up preacher. A couple years later, she left Bhaktipada’s service, and moved to Africa under the direction of the ISKCON guru Bhakti Tirtha Swami.
Altar of Balabhadra, Subhadra, and Jagannath, at New Vrindaban (c. 1983).
Hladini died in 1990, along with several other devotees, from gunshot wounds during an execution by a firing squad during the Second Liberian Civil War. Another devotee who served with Hladini in Africa, Mahavegavati dasi (later known as Dasi Radha Govinda Swami), claimed that Bhakti Tirtha Swami purposely sent Hladini to Liberia to her death because he didn’t want ISKCON to discover that he and Hladini had a clandestine romantic relationship. For more about Hladini, see Remembering Hladini Devi Mataji.
A very quiet, mousy lady, Krishna Mayi devi dasi, also lived at Pittsburgh ISKCON. She left the temple every morning, took a city bus to a different Pittsburgh neighborhood which had a small commercial district or downtown, and quietly approached people inside stores and shops without saying a word. She handed them a tiny American flag on a toothpick, with a little strip of paper proclaiming: “Made by deaf and dumb people,” or something similar. People gave her a dollar or some coins, which she brought back to the temple treasury. Not much money; maybe $100 or less per day. Of course she was not deaf and dumb, but hey! we needed money to preach and whatever she collected was going to Krishna and help build New Vrindaban into a glorious place of pilgrimage in the West.
Every day or two while serving as Temple President of Pittsburgh ISKCON, I’d get a telephone call from a devotee who was a patient/inmate at Western Psych (Western Psychiatric Hospital) in Pittsburgh. His name was Mahayogi dasa, a Prabhupada disciple initiated in Pittsburgh in 1971. One of my New Vrindaban godbrothers said, “Mahayogi was a crazy man from Pittsburgh. I never spoke to him, but I saw him a couple times at New Vrindaban.”
I don’t know why he was locked up in the psychiatric ward, but he was a devotee at heart and he liked to associate with like-minded people. We chatted for five or ten minutes, and then I had to make up an excuse why I had to go. “It’s time for Bhoga Aroti!” “Someone’s at the door.” “Good talking to you Prabhu, but I have an appointment now.” After I left Pittsburgh ISKCON I never heard from him again.
A test.
One night, perhaps 10 p. m., a sankirtan mother came in late after a hard day doing “The Pick.” She was by herself; she had no sankirtan partner, for some reason. Usually pickers traveled with a buddy. She was a Prabhupada disciple, Muralidhara’s wife. Muralidhara (Mark Missman) was regarded by many as ISKCON’s best artist at the time; he lived at New Vrindaban and produced spectacular paintings for Prabhupada’s Palace and the temple. He also received two commissions to produce enormous historic murals for the Wheeling Civic Center.
She was about 26 years old, I was 24. Her name was Yogamaya devi dasi. I had seen her from time to time at New Vrindaban, but we never had occasion (or need) to talk. I thought she was quite attractive and pretty and energetic and sexy with a slender waist, but on this particular evening she was distraught after a very bad day on “The Pick.” She needed a sympathetic shoulder to cry on.
No one else was awake except for me, so recognizing my duty to my spiritual master and Krishna, despite the fact that I was a pukka brahmachari and not supposed to associate with women, especially hotties like her, I stepped up to the plate for my service.
We sat on a step of the stairway leading from the temple room to the ashram upstairs, and Yogamaya poured her heart out about the extremely terrible and stressful day with profuse tears dripping from her eyes, smearing her mascara. I consoled her, and preached to her, that we should try to be steady in happiness and distress, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and big collections and small collections. Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day.
My natural inclination was to put my arms around her and give her hugs and affectionate petting, as any father would do for a distraught teary-eyed young daughter. However, as I was a strict brahmachari at the time (I followed the regulations totally), I refrained from this natural expression of compassion and remained inches away without touching her. It wasn’t easy for me.
Most normal men I think are naturally protective of women, especially a gorgeous, distraught, crying woman, and she desperately needed (or so I thought) some masculine attention, but I kept my distance, although, to be frank, I would have appreciated some intimate female association myself.
During this time of trial for me, I derived inspiration by thinking of the great Gaudiya-Vaishnava saint Haridasa Thakur. He was born c. 1450 into a Muslim family, but converted to Vaishnavism at an early age. As a young man, a most beautiful and seductive woman named Lakshahira, reputed by some to be an incarnation of the goddess Maya Devi herself, came to him and tried to tempt him to break his vows of celibacy, but Haridasa passed the test due to his unflinching devotion to Lord Krishna.
“While chanting the Hare Krishna mantra in Benapola, Haridasa Thakur was personally tested by Mayadevi herself.” Image and caption from Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s Sri Caitanya-Caritamrita, Adi-lila, Volume 2, Plate 9.
After perhaps ten intense minutes, when I finished offering counsel to the beautiful and distraught sankirtan woman, she calmed down, her tears stopped, she thanked me, and she went upstairs into the women’s ashram.
I guess I passed the test. I don’t know if Yogamaya was actually distraught, or was she ordered by the New Vrindaban administration to try to tempt me into illicit activities to test my determination? In any case, soon after, I was back on the road again.
For more about Haridasa Thakur, see Gaudiya History.
St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah, Georgia.
On March 17, 1980, I did “The Pick” at the 156th annual St. Patrick’s Day parade in Savannah, Georgia.
The first St. Patrick’s Day procession in Savannah Georgia was celebrated on March 17, 1813. It was a private affair and consisted of Irish immigrants who walked from a riverfront hotel to the Savannah Irish Roman Catholic church. The event was organized by The Hibernian Society of Savannah, founded one year earlier for the purpose of offering aid and assistance to needy Irish immigrants. Eleven years later, The Hibernian Society hosted their first parade open to the public on St. Patrick’s Day (March 17, 1824).
Today, the Savannah St. Patrick’s Day parade is the second largest in the United States, second only to New York City’s parade. The celebrations include prominent displays of the color green, eating and drinking, religious observances, and numerous parades. The merriment of the festival is aided by a very lenient public drinking policy which allows open alcoholic beverages every day of the year in the Landmark Historic District.
St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah, Georgia.
Wherever large numbers of people with spending money congregate, you can bet the Hare Krishnas will also be there to try to get their share. At the time (January-March 1980), I served as the temple president of Pittsburgh ISKCON, which was basically not much more than a New Vrindaban sankirtan outpost. We only had about a half-dozen permanent residents living there to serve the giant Jagannath, Subhadra and Balaram deities and maintain the building, but on Friday nights without fail, a dozen or more Weekend Warriors arrived from New Vrindaban to do “The Pick” in the Pittsburgh shopping centers, shopping malls, concert halls and sporting stadiums. These devotees, usually householders with young children, left New Vrindaban Friday mornings and returned Sunday evenings. Sometimes they might collect $1,000 per weekend.
As I recall, the New Vrindaban administration must have decided that they would profit more if they sent me out on “The Pick” instead of having me serve as the ISKCON Pittsburgh temple president, and so on Monday, March 16th, a van from Cleveland ISKCON picked me up at the Negley Avenue temple. The Cleveland temple president, Sundarakar dasa ACBSP (Stephen Fitzpatrick) drove the van. I knew him, as I had lived at Cleveland ISKCON in October and November 1979 when Tapahpunja dasa Brahmachari attempted to train me up to distribute Prabhupada’s books in supermarket parking lots and rock concert arenas. I noticed Sundarakar had a long, red scar across his forehead, but I never asked him how he got it. [Endnote 5]
Sundarakar (Stephen Fitzpatrick) at Palace Press (undated).
Inside the Cleveland ISKCON van were maybe a half dozen pickers, mostly women. Sundarakar drove us 700 miles straight through the night. At the time, all-night drives were not uncommon, although the pickers’ accident rate was so dismal New Vrindaban could only get automobile insurance from Lloyd’s of London at ridiculously high rates. No American insurance company would insure us. We arrived in Savannah early in the morning and found a parking spot near a park along the Savannah River near the Landmark Historic District.
The Savannah St. Patrick’s Day parade.
The parade was enormous, a massive city-wide event with roughly 350 marching units, including bands and floats and dancers. The attendance was also enormous: between 300,000 and 400,000 people came from hundreds of miles distant to watch the festivities, drink Irish beer and taste Irish delicacies from the vendors’ booths and city restaurants.
I don’t remember what paraphernalia we used. Perhaps we sold St. Patrick’s Day buttons, or perhaps green carnations which we pinned on peoples’ shirts. We worked all day and into the night, as many thousands of people partied in the Historic Landmark District. I don’t remember how much Laksmi I collected, but it wasn’t very much. Perhaps a few hundred dollars.
I found that people here were not as eager to purchase our buttons and carnations as the people I met at the Chicago Pope Pick six months earlier. New Vrindaban’s women pickers (known as Dharmettes) were the big collectors that day. They were very expert at pinning carnations on single men and getting them to give (sometimes large) donations.
Mother Maharha devi dasi.
One of the Dharmettes was Mother Maharha (Mary St. John). She joined ISKCON in 1970 and moved to New Vrindaban in 1971. Here I quote a few paragraphs from Gold, Guns and God, Vol. 4 about her:
Maharha became New Vrindaban’s top collector, a position she held for many years. She claimed to have collected over two million dollars for the community during her decade-long sankirtan career. She gave the best years of her life (23-34) to Bhaktipada and Dharmatma. She was known for her enthusiasm and austerities.
She worked the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade and festival at Savannah, Georgia. This event starts early in the day and ends late at night, as the entire waterfront area along the Savannah River becomes a big party with perhaps a hundred thousand visitors. I worked this event in March 1980.
Unfortunately, Maharha contracted a nasty case of diarrhea. She lost a lot of fluids and became weak. However, “The Pick” was so huge that she decided she couldn’t afford the time off to search out and visit the ladies room every few minutes, so she decided that she would simply ignore her bodily functions and let nature take its course while she continued to work and hit up partygoers. She may have thought that since there was so much vomit on the ground from drunken revelers that probably no one would notice the smell of diarrhea dripping down her legs.
Because of her austerity, she once again proved herself as New Vrindaban’s top collector. Dharmatma was so pleased that he spoke to all the sankirtan devotees about Maharha’s superhuman feat and praised her devotion as a shining example for the rest of us.
However, Maharha couldn’t keep up this breakneck pace forever, and developed severe physical and emotional disabilities. In order to get some rest and heal, she left New Vrindaban. I remember the big January 1985 sankirtan festival which followed the 1984 Christmas marathon. Our biggest collector, Maharha, was missing and we inquired about her. Dharmatma told us, “She lost her faith; she became envious. She couldn’t appreciate the great mercy Bhaktipada gave her, and has become poisoned by Maya. Better to forget her and continue with our own service for Krishna.”
Attraction for the Opposite Sex: Danger for a Brahmachari.
Back to March 1980 in Savannah Georgia: I remember the return drive back to Pittsburgh. I was one of the few men on the party and I got to sit in the passenger seat of the van, while the women sat in the back. One mataji about two or three years older than me (I was 24) offered me a paper plate with maha prasadam. I accepted. Her name was Sumati devi dasi (Carol), ACBSP. Although she was not what most people might consider an exceptionally gorgeous woman, she did have a slender figure and a submissive demeanor, and my mind went crazy.
I practically fell in love with her. I couldn’t stop thinking of her. I hadn’t had any sex with a women for more than a year and a half, since I joined New Vrindaban in August 1978, as I was very serious about my vow of celibacy and the other rules. I had not masturbated once during this entire time, although I had nocturnal emissions two or three times a week. But temple authorities told me that was okay, as they were involuntary ejaculations, so I still got the spiritual and material benefits of celibacy. (Today I think they were bullshitting me.)
Anyway, when a man has been starved from food for a long time, even an old dry chapati looks and tastes like a sumptuous feast. Fortunately, I never pursued the matter (who knows, maybe she didn’t even like me), and soon after, I was given a sankirtan van filled with broken candles from the previous Christmas marathon, and ordered to go out on “The Pick” with my godbrother Dasarath dasa (David Van Pelt), and not return until we had sold all the candles. That was how I became a full-time New Vrindaban traveling sankirtan picker. I remained on “The Pick” nonstop for more than five years, only returning to “The Farm” once a month for three days.
Selling candles on the road.
On or around March 20, 1980, soon after returning from the Savannah Georgia St. Patrick's Day Parade, New Vrindaban authorities demoted me from my service as Pittsburgh ISKCON Temple President, and gave me a van filled with broken candles left over from the December 1979 Christmas marathon. Most of them wouldn’t even burn.
They gave me a traveling sankirtan partner, my recently-initiated godbrother Dasarath dasa (David Van Pelt from the small town of Greenfield in Western Ohio). Dasa received diksa at a 1979 Christmas Day fire sacrifice at New Vrindaban less than three months earlier. Temple authorities told us to get out and sell those candles and not to return until they were all sold. Dasa and I eagerly accepted the challenge.
Dasa and I traveled north about 150 miles and worked Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and Mercyhurst College, a Roman Catholic college in Erie founded in 1926 by by the Sisters of Mercy. Then we headed into Upstate New York and worked colleges such as Binghamton University and Saint Bonaventure College, a Roman Catholic college in Olean, New York, founded in 1858 by Franciscan monks. We set up tables on and off campus and hawked our candles to students for a dollar or spare change. We worked the dormitories at night. During those days it was easy to get into the dorms because security was light; the doors were never locked.
A Contemporary Casanova
I distinctly remember one room in a college co-ed dorm. I don’t remember which college. On the outside of the door was posted a naughty cartoon, probably from a porn magazine. A handwritten note under the cartoon advertised, “Adventurous girls: inquire within.”
“What was this about?” I wondered?
I knocked on the door and a deep male voice answered, “Come in.” I opened the unlocked door and entered. The room was dark except for a lava lamp on the desk. The smell of incense permeated the air, and I heard quiet romantic soft rock music coming from the stereo speakers. But I didn’t see anyone in the room.
Just then, I heard the male voice speak from behind a curtain on the upper bunk of a bunk bed, and a female voice giggled, also from behind the curtain. I then understood what the sign on his door was all about: he was looking for sex partners amongst the female students, and it looked like his advertising effort was attracting inquisitive customers.
Although I couldn’t see him or his partner, I gave him my pitch about collecting money for needy children, and he told me, “Take a dollar from my wallet. It’s in my pants pocket hanging over the chair.” I took a dollar from his wallet, placed a broken candle next to the lava lamp, thanked him for his contribution, and I left the room, leaving him and his female partner to continue whatever it was they were doing behind the curtain. I was impressed by his boldness, and I wished I could have been so bold when I was a college student two years earlier!
Sometimes campus security or local police caught up with us and told us to pack up and leave, whereupon we promptly went to another area on campus or another town. It took us a month to sell all our candles and we returned home to New Vrindaban triumphantly in April with a nearly-empty van and a couple thousand dollars.
Dasa and I had fun; we enjoyed our time on “The Pick” together. We were a great team. We enjoyed the life of traveling, seeing new towns and countryside, meeting hundreds of new people each day, cooking on a propane camp stove, sleeping inside our van, bathing with a one-gallon water jug outside our van every morning, and we even (mostly) enjoyed running and hiding and sometimes getting caught and apologizing to security guards and police. “Oh, you mean we’re not supposed to do that? Soliciting without a permit? Oh my gosh, officer, we’re so sorry! We don’t want to get in trouble. Will you please let us go with a warning?”
We knew that soliciting without a permit was a minor offense and not to be taken seriously. We didn’t bother to even try to apply for permits, because they were too limiting and we made more money working without them. We had a carefree life. We mostly had a good time on “The Pick.”
An ornamental candle similar to those manufactured at New Vrindaban
Sticker Sankirtan.
In May 1980, Dasa and I went back on the road. Instead of candles, we had a few boxes of stickers. Tapahpunja had designed the stickers specifically for the New Vrindaban pickers to distribute in shopping center parking lots. He designed a sticker for Ohio, and stickers for Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, states in Kirtanananda Swami’s GBC zone. Each sticker was about six inches square, and had images of a map of the state, the name of the state, the state bird, the state flag, and notable landmarks. As I recall, the sticker for Ohio featured the state nickname: “The Buckeye State,” the state bird: “the Northern Cardinal” the state flower: “the Scarlet Carnation,” etc.
A bumper sticker similar to the sticker designed by Tapahpunja.
We carried identification badges with our name, photo, and the words “Nandagram Boys School,” the name of the New Vrindaban gurukula. We worked mostly parking lots at supermarket and department stores. I found this work to be very difficult. It was one thing to approach a housewife who was loading groceries into her car. They were easy targets. Stationary targets, not moving targets. But it was another thing to give her a bumper sticker and get a donation.
Fortunately for me, my sankirtan partner, Dasarath, was a superb salesman. He had an easy-going way with people and knack for saying the right words to gain their trust and get a donation. When we arrived at a parking lot first thing in the morning, I’d follow him around for ten or fifteen minutes and see how he was approaching people, what he was saying to them. What was his mantra, or script.
Then I’d go off on my own, hit up people in another part of the parking lot, and say the same things that Dasa was saying. Only then I’d make any money. This was extremely important, to get the right mantra, because the mood changes from town to town, from day to day, even from parking lot to parking lot. A mantra which worked on a Tuesday morning in a particular town and neighborhood, might not work in another town, or even in another parking lot in the same town later in the day, in the evening for instance. Dasa was a genius in sales. In fact, decades later, after we both left New Vrindaban, he got a job as a car salesman at a used car lot.
Dasa and I made a good team. I served as the party leader; I read the map in the morning and figured out where we were going to work during the day. I got so good at map reading, that when we came to a new town, a place we had never been before, I could look at the map and point out where the big shopping plazas were located. My accuracy was nine out of ten. Perhaps this is why Dasa started calling me “The Professor.”
At this time, we were making perhaps $1,000 per week. On Monday mornings, we’d stop at a bank, step up to the teller and ask to purchase a cashier’s. check. Then we’d pass the teller a couple thousand dollars, mostly in small bills. After she gave us our cashier’s check made out to ISKCON New Mathura Vrindaban (if memory serves correctly, this was the actual legal name of the New Vrindaban corporation), we put the check into an envelope addressed to Dennis Gorrick (Dharmatma dasa), our sankirtan leader at New Vrindaban, which we dropped into the nearest U. S. Post Office box. This was our once-a-week ritual.
Radhanath questioned by police.
Around this time, 1980 or so, Bhaktipada ordered a beloved, long-time New Vrindaban resident, Radhanath dasa Brahmachari (initiated February 11, 1973), to go out on the pick. Radhanath was the talk of the town among the sankirtan devotees. Although I never had the opportunity to go out on the road with him, I heard many stories about his picking skills, or rather, lack of.
One time, Radhanath went into a bank on a Monday morning with a couple thousand dollars in small bills to purchase a cashier’s check. However, Radhanath was dressed in very shabby clothes. He looked like a homeless person. The teller became suspicious, and quietly mentioned her concerns to the bank manager, who called the police. Radhanath was questioned by the police, “Where did you get all this money? Where are you from,” etc. The police also searched their van.
Radhanath showed the police the stickers and said he and his partners were members of the New Vrindaban Hare Krishna Community in West Virginia, and they were collecting money for their boy’s school. They police were satisfied and let them go, but warned them, “No soliciting without a permit in our town, and if we catch you soliciting, you’ll find yourself in jail.” Radhanath and his partner wisely drove to the next county before they resumed picking.
After a few months on sticker sankirtan, Bhaktipada called Radhanath back to the farm. It seemed whenever Radhanath joined a traveling party, the party’s collections decreased significantly. He was like a third wheel; a superfluous person on the party. Radhanath’s partners claimed that Radhanath always told them stories about Lord Chaitanya and Lord Krishna, and they enjoyed hearing the very detailed and enlivening pastimes so much that they always got out late in the day. Radhanath’s temperament was obviously not suited to doing big on the pick. A couple years later, Bhaktipada forced Radhanath to take sannyasa, and sent him on the road again, this time to establish vegetarian cooking classes and preaching centers at colleges and universities in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Radhanath (undated).
May 18, 1980: On this date in history, Mt. St. Helens in Washington State erupts and darkens the sky over much of the earth with ash. One of our traveling pickers, Ajeya dasa (Alfred Tarantino, later known as Adi Purusha Swami), a Prabhupada disciple initiated at New Vrindaban in October 1974, spoke to me during our next New Vrindaban Sankirtan Festival. He told me he was driving from Seattle back to New Vrindaban on the day of the blast. That night, he parked his vehicle in a rest area along Interstate 90 near Lolo National Forest in Montana, about 400 miles from the volcano.
Bhaktipada always enjoyed the company of his sankirtan devotees when they returned to “The Farm” for the monthly three-day sankirtan festivals. Ajeya is smiling at bottom left.
This photo was taken in the living room of Bhaktipada’s house across from Prabhupada’s Palace. On the left we see: Damodar, Nityodita, Ajeya and two others, probably Bala Krishna dasa and Tapahpunja dasa. On the right are Siksastaka and Dasarath. Photo from Bhaktipada’s Vyasa Puja book (September 6, 1982).
When Ajeya awoke in the morning, he was a bit disoriented. He felt he had gotten a good night’s sleep, and he thought the sun should be up, but the sky was still pitch dark. He lay around in his sleeping bag, which he had placed on top of a picnic table in the rest area, and eventually looked at his watch. It was 8 am. He was shocked, as the sun was supposed to rise an hour earlier!
He got out of his sleeping back, and he noticed a layer of ash covering his bag (and face). What was going on? He walked to the parking area and talked to a truck driver sitting in the cab of his truck. “Why is is so dark?”
The truck driver responded, “Haven’t you heard? Mt. Saint Helens in Washington State blew up yesterday!” The sky downwind from the volcano remained dark for days.
Mt. St. Helens
The Iran hostage crisis.
On November 4, 1979, sixty-six Americans, including diplomats and other civilian personnel, were taken hostage at the United States Embassy in Tehran, with 52 of them being held until January 20, 1981. The incident occurred after the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line stormed and occupied the building in the months following the Iranian Revolution. With support from Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Iranian Revolution and would eventually establish the present-day Islamic Republic of Iran, the hostage-takers demanded that the United States extradite Iranian king Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been granted asylum by the Carter administration for cancer treatment.
In the United States, the hostage crisis created “a surge of patriotism” and left “the American people more united than they have been on any issue in two decades.” [Endnote 6] During the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1979, high school students made cards that were delivered to the hostages. Community groups across the country did the same, resulting in bales of Christmas cards. [Endnote 7]
New Vrindaban devotees, although allegedly not concerned with political or humanitarian movements, capitalized on the surge in American patriotism by designing and printing bumper stickers with patriotic themes for the sankirtan pickers. Tapahpunja dasa Brahmachari ACBSP (Terry Sheldon) was the first to begin sticker sankirtan. Dharmatma dasa ACBSP (Dennis Gorrick), at that time the Director of Women’s Sankirtan, recalled:
In the very early days, Tapahpunja was basically in charge of the men. After I moved down to West Virginia from Pittsburgh, and after some time, Bhaktipada asked me to take charge of the men and the women. Then Tapahpunja became an actual picker. Tapahpunja printed the first bumper sticker, one that said, “Don’t Mess With the U. S.” [It] had a picture of an eagle on it. And that was the first bumper sticker. He produced that one. Another one was made at the time of the Iran fiasco, there was a sticker that had a picture of Mickey Mouse [giving the] finger that said, “Hey, Iran!”
I remember the original version of that sticker, which was especially popular with devotee salesmen such as Lokavarnattama dasa ACBSP (Larry Burstein), who made a fortune in illegal business activities and years later spent time in prison, in which the Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse emphatically proclaimed: “Fuck Iran!” My godbrother Kumar dasa (Craig Thompson) told me he would take these stickers into Pittsburgh automobile dealerships and sell dozens at a time to the mechanics; they were that popular during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. I think we sold them for $2.00 each.
Sticker sankirtan was so huge that book distribution was discontinued, more or less permanently. A new era had dawned at New Vrindaban, which would in short time spread to nearly all the entire United States ISKCON temples: paraphernalia distribution. Books were past history. Stickers proved to be the future of ISKCON fundraising.
A bumper sticker used by New Vrindaban pickers during the Iran Hostage Crisis (1980).
A variation of the bumper sticker used by New Vrindaban pickers during the Iran Hostage Crisis (1980).
Tapahpunja also created a fictitious organization: Americans Who Love American Men Overseas (ALAMO). You can see the word ALAMO on one of the bumper stickers above. He gave us identification cards with our picture on the card, and told us to tell people that their contribution was going towards sending letters to American soldiers stationed overseas. Of course, that was a lie. The money was going to help build New Vrindaban. But we knew that the money was the honey. We did the needful to please our spiritual master and Krishna.
For many months, I told potential donors, “Please give a buck for a Viet Nam vet who got messed up.” I have no idea what that meant, but the line worked. People gave money. Maybe they thought I was a Viet Nam veteran? If I had been born a year earlier, I could have been drafted into that war. When the draft ended in 1973, I was 17 years old. So some people might have thought that I was a young Viet Nam vet with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I never thought about it. All I knew is people gave money when I recited that line.
Despite our constant lying to people, I guess I still had a little bit of a conscience left, and after a few months I thought since we were collecting all this money, we should actually do something for American veterans. So during my next visit to New Vrindaban, I canvassed a dozen or so devotees to give me their old and torn books by Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada: Bhagavad-gita, Srimad-bhagavatam, etc.
When I went back out on the pick, I visited the nearest Veterans Hospital, where I donated a case of books for the hospital library. I asked the secretary in the administrative office to type out a letter for me addressed to ALAMO acknowledging receipt of the books. I thought if I was ever pulled over by the cops, charged with fraud, and taken to court, I could produce this letter which I thought would exonerate me from any crime.
Later, when I did “The Pick” in Dallas, Texas, I discovered that ALAMO was actually an organization, a church with a bad reputation. The Alamo Christian Foundation was an American cult which was founded in 1969 by Tony Alamo and his wife, Susan Alamo. In the late 1970s the church headquarters was located in Dyer, Arkansas, about 300 miles northeast from Dallas. The organization had a bad name, even in Texas, and many people refused to give us money. For good reason: after years of legal troubles, Tony Alamo was convicted of 10 child rape offenses in 2009. He received a maximum sentence of 175 years and was imprisoned until his death in May 2017.
Part 3: After much austerity, finally success on “The Pick.”
During the Summer of 1980, I acquired rather suddenly the ability to get people to stop and listen to me, reach in their wallet and hand me money. At the time I attributed this breakthrough to be the mercy of guru and Krishna: a result of my dogged determination to please my spiritual master.
Today however, I realize that this breakthrough occurred because my natural sense of honesty had finally been sufficiently numbed by untold repetitions of hearing how, if a karmi (fruitive worker, essentially a non-devotee) is tricked into rendering some small service for Krishna, he will make spiritual advancement. We believed we weren’t really lying and stealing from them; we were saving them from hell and blessing them with the priceless treasure of devotional service. We were liberating Laksmi (Lord Vishnu’s consort, the goddess of fortune, a.k.a. money) from people who had stolen her from Krishna. We were taking their money, not to use on our own sense gratification, but to return to Krishna, to glorify God, to help build New Vrindaban.
Only when I believed this transcendental trickery from the core of my heart could I look a suspicious potential donor in the eyes and say with complete conviction, “No, I’m NOT with the Hare Krishnas! This money is going to help needy children.”
Transcendental trickery
Brijabasi Spirit published a darshan with Kirtanananda Swami in which he defended lying on the pick:
Devotee: Maharaja, can a disciple be asked by the spiritual master to do something that seemingly breaks a moral code?
Kirtanananda Maharaja: Yes, Krishna has people break the moral codes. He asked Yudhisthira [the son of the god of death and justice, Yamaraja, and Queen Kunti] to tell a lie. . . . The gopis [milkmaids of Vrindaban] were ready to break all the principles of morality for Krishna. . . . [But] we cannot break a moral principle without instruction from higher authority.
Devotee: Maharaja, how do we explain this apparent immorality to non-devotees, to common people? . . . Sometimes the devotee acts in such a way that it appears that he is breaking the law . . . for instance, to distribute literatures.
Kirtanananda Maharaja: Ordinarily we don’t break the law, we should not do anything that is illegal.
Devotee: But sometimes sankirtan is illegal; book distribution.
Kirtanananda Maharaja: No. Sankirtan cannot be illegal, no matter what any policeman or government says. Sankirtan cannot be illegal. That is higher law. . . . They may say it is illegal, but it is not illegal. [Endnote 8]
Bhaktipada disliked the term “deception,” and preferred to call it “transcendental trickery.” He said, “Even if it [our collecting money] is a little tricky, that isn’t bad.” [Endnote 9]
One part-time picker, Kanka devi dasi (Susan O’Neil Hebel) elaborated:
We were hiding our identity, because if we went out in the garb of the Krishna community, dhotis and saris, people would not contribute as much money as we got when we were wearing our regular street clothes. . . . We asked for donations for our Nandagram School for underprivileged children. . . .
I complained to Bhaktipada that what we were telling the people on the road was not what he was using the money for. He said that it is okay to tell a little lie, it is like giving candy to a child when you are trying to administer medicine to the child. He said that they would use their money for cigarettes and alcohol, and it was better for them to be cheated and give the money to us so that we could build a spiritual community. [Endnote 10]
Bhaktipada rationalized stealing for Krishna:
Even if a devotee, due to over-enthusiasm or lack of discretion, does something that is questionable to get someone to make a donation, that actually is not harmful to the person [giving the donation]; it is to their good that they are engaged in God’s service. In Sanskrit it’s called ajñata sukrti, to unknowingly perform pious activity. This is what’s behind our sankirtan activities: going out and begging from the public to engage them in God’s service, in God’s work. This is actually the highest form of welfare work, because it’s doing what is ultimately good for everyone. If a man gives just a penny, he benefits eternally; his path back to Godhead has begun. [Endnote 11]
But this was not a new development in fundraising. ISKCON had been collecting money by false pretenses since the earliest days at 26 Second Avenue. Rayaram dasa (Raymond Marais), one of Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s first disciples (initiated in September 1966), who served as managing editor for Back To Godhead for nearly three years, criticized ISKCON for collecting money at a peace rally and telling people the money was going to be used to promote peace, when it was actually being used to print Prabhupada’s books. He said the end does not justify the means.
One of Rayaram’s godbrothers years later recalled his criticism and his subsequent defection. Prabhupada did not consider Rayaram’s complaints as legitimate, and dismissed him. Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, who joined ISKCON in 1966 and shared an apartment with Rayaram in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, explained:
We all looked up to Rayaram because he was one of the most senior devotees. He was also the most learned in the philosophy. When Prabhupada first went to San Francisco, only Rayaram was competent enough to give the evening lectures. He could stand off the whole Lower East Side crowd and their sometimes wild questions. He impressed us. He and I were friends. We had lived together in my First Street apartment in 1966, and although he joined only a few weeks before I did, he was confident in his relationship with Prabhupada. He helped me ease into the life of a devotee and to deepen my connection with Prabhupada. [After Rayaram defected (blooped) from ISKCON] I wrote him out of concern.
His letter [in response] was full of criticism. . . . He criticized the fact that we had recently attended a peace rally in Washington, D. C. and collected hundreds of dollars. He said that our collection was fraudulent because the devotees had claimed they were collecting for the peace movement when they were actually raising money to print Prabhupada’s books. . . . Rayaram said that he didn’t agree that the end justified the means. Printing Prabhupada’s books was sacred, he said, but if it were important, the money would have come in another way. . . .
Later when I asked Prabhupada how such a strong devotee could leave, Prabhupada said simply, “He was not serious [about spiritual life].” [Endnote 12]
Years later, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada again approved that his disciples cheat people to collect money for Krishna. In the early 1970s ISKCON made hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars collecting money which they said would help the starving Bangladesh refugees whose homes had been destroyed by the Great Cyclone of 1970, one of the deadliest humanitarian disasters ever recorded, but the money went toward temple maintenance and printing more books. In a letter to the GBC representative for New York City ISKCON, Bali Mardan (William Berke), Prabhupada wrote:
I am in due receipt of your both letters dated December 21 and 22, 1972, along with the copy of income statement for six months ending November 30, 1972. I am most pleased to note from that income statement that since June your monthly income has doubled and that for six months you have collected $245,000. That is very much astonishing to me, and I can understand from seeing these figures just how much suitable you are for heading up the responsible position of senior man in the New York temple affairs. That means you have made the most substantial increase in financial status anywhere in our Society. Krishna has blessed you with the best business sense. . . .
Yes, if it is enhancing our distribution of books to wear warm clothes like coat-pants in winter, I have no objection, you may wear them. Of course we may take money for Krishna using any method of beg, borrow and steal, but more advanced understanding of Krishna consciousness process is that by telling the truth in a very palatable way, that is the most successful system. Your mentioning Bangladesh feeding of refugees, of course we are feeding sometimes the local inhabitants, up to 1,000 persons on some occasions, but there is no organized program of feeding the refugees at Mayapur. In fact, so far I have seen, all the refugees from Nadia District have gone back to Bangladesh, there are no more refugee camps. So it will not be the truth to say to people like that [that the money is going to feed starving Bangladesh refugees], but I have no objection if they [non-devotees] give more [Laksmi after] hearing such thing. Let them [our Laksmi collectors] say [whatever they want, regardless if it is fact or fiction]. Who will check us?
We may tell any damn thing to induce people to give us money on Krishna’s behalf, that is not the point. The point is that by saying lies, the less advanced neophyte devotees may become entangled or disturbed in their minds by it. [In other words, only the most “spiritually advanced” devotees can tell lies without becoming disturbed in their minds.] Of course by their collecting more money and giving to Krishna, he will relieve them of all anxiety of telling lies. But not everyone is able to catch the big fish without themselves becoming wet. I am convinced that if you simply glorify Krishna and our books in the best descriptive manner, that anyone and everyone, no matter even atheist or otherwise, they can be convinced to purchase.
Of course that is a great art and not everyone can do it, but gradually by practice of preaching in this way, striving to so much present a wonderful picture of our books to the people, gradually you will master the trick how to do it. Being the senior devotee there, you may give the younger students all good instruction and advice how to do this, but not for any reason shall we decrease the book sales and collection monthly over some small lying about Bangladesh or other things. [Endnote 13]
When public interest in the Bangladesh disaster began to decline, New Vrindaban devotees discovered that they could collect big at rock concerts by telling potential donors that the money they collected was going to help reform the laws against the possession and sale of marijuana. Dharmatma explained:
One of the things was some of the devotees, not all of them, just a small group of devotees . . . they were working the rock concerts, so they produced an I. D. that said “NORMAL” on it. NORMAL is the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws. A lot of these concerts they were going—it was in the early days, a lot of people were taking marijuana and that—so that was a real easy way to collect money. So they had this identification that had a little marijuana leaf on it and they passed out flowers and things . . . and got pretty good donations with that. [Endnote 14]
In December 1976, devotees impersonated Salvation Army collectors by wearing Santa Claus suits and collecting under fraudulent pretense, and many were arrested by police. Jayatirtha dasa Adhikari, an important GBC member, said, “It [the ISKCON Santa Claus fraud] was published in practically every newspaper in the word; a picture of Santa Claus being arrested by a policeman in America. . . . Also the President of the United States [Gerald Ford, Jr.] questioned one boy in a Santa Claus outfit.” [Endnote 15]
Newspaper cartoon poking fun at the New Vrindaban Santas fundraising on the streets and in the subways of New York City (December 1976).
Hare Krishna Santas being booked at a police station (newspaper photo, December 1976).
During an interview with CBS correspondent Jane Wallace, Rev. Norman Hewlett (formerly Namacharya dasa from Cleveland, Ohio) [Endnote 16] and Mallika (a female sankirtan devotee) talked about some of their experiences collecting money for New Vrindaban:
Hewlett: I was going out, making four or five hundred dollars a day, and we were sending it to build the Palace of Gold.
Wallace: How were you making four or five hundred dollars a day?
Hewlett: A lot of ways. Like this flower here. Let’s say I give you the flower, and tell you “I’m helping crippled children today.”
Mallika: We would use the words “orphan,” “slow-learners,” anything to get this sentimental feeling. We never said, “We’re with the Hare Krishnas. We have this big farm project. We’re trying to fund it.” We’d never say that.
Hewlett: Crippled children was one lie. On Veterans’ Day, we’d say we’re helping the veterans.
Wallace: Another lie.
Hewlett: Yeah. [Endnote 17]
During a television interview with CBS correspondent Jane Wallace, Bhaktipada explained why it was acceptable for Krishna devotees to trick non-devotees into giving them money: for their own benefit.
Wallace: Are there any rules as to what is allowed for Krishnas to raise money? Under deceptive ways? Is that okay?
Bhaktipada: Well, that depends. Just like a mother may give a pill to a child with a sugar coating and say, “Here, this tastes real good.” That is love. Sometimes devotees appear a little deceptive. They try to put a sugar coating on the act of getting people to give in charity.
Wallace: All’s fair in love and fundraising?
Bhaktipada: Well, when people are ill informed, when people are under the modes of ignorance, they do not know what is good and what is not good.
Wallace: Deception isn’t going to make them better informed, sir.
Bhaktipada: I’m not saying deception. But I’m trying to say we can sugar coat it for them. [Endnote 18]
Cheating for Krishna
Srimad-bhagavatam teaches that only greedy materialists consider “money is as good as honey.” A devotee, on the other hand, only accumulates enough money to keep body and soul together. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada explained:
The honey gathered in the comb is taken away by force [by the bee keeper]. Therefore one who accumulates money should realize that he may be harassed by the government or by thieves or even killed by enemies. Especially in this age of Kali Yuga, it is said that instead of protecting the money of the citizens, the government itself will take away the money with the force of law. The learned brahmin had therefore decided that he should not accumulate any money. One should own as much as he immediately needs. There is no need to keep a big balance at hand, along with the fear that it may be plundered by the government or by thieves. [Endnote 19]
However, when money is used in Krishna’s service—to provide funding for ISKCON or the BBT—Prabhupada said that one could collect millions of dollars. He said, “Just like in our movement we collect millions of dollars, but it goes for Krishna’s service, for constructing temple, for providing the devotees, for publishing books, for spreading this knowledge, in so many ways, not personal expenditure.” [Endnote 20] Prabhupada said:
For the service of the Lord you can collect millions of dollars, but for your livelihood you cannot take one dollar from any person. [Endnote 21]
We don’t use anything for my personal comfort; everything for Krishna. That is called renouncement, not a single farthing for my personal comfort, but millions of dollars for Krishna. [Endnote 22]
“Money is the honey” goes so far as it is employed for Krishna consciousness. [Endnote 23]
ISKCON devotees became fond of quoting, “Money is the honey,” and they often used illegal means to acquire it. Dharmatma concluded: “The ends justified the means.” [Endnote 24]
In this statement, Dharmatma directly quoted his spiritual master, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who explained:
Book selling, there is no question of moral and immoral. We must sell. Just like in fighting. Where there is fight, the soldiers, to gain victory, there is no question of moral and immoral. He must gain victory. . . . We want that book selling must be increased as much as possible. This we want. The same principle: let the child take medicine, never mind the father is speaking lies. That is... Because as soon as he takes the medicine he’ll be benefited. End justifies the means. End is that everyone should have a Krishna literature. Doesn’t matter what is the means. Because he has taken one Krishna literature, that justifies everything. This is the principle. [Endnote 25]
Although we were lying and cheating the karmis (non-devotees) to get their money, we thought we were doing them the highest service, engaging them in Krishna’s service. We were not keeping the money for ourselves; we were giving it to New Vrindaban, to a great cause, to satisfy the Lord.
In Bhagavad-gita (10.36) Krishna called himself “the gambling of cheats.” This indicates that cheating comes from Krishna; cheating is Krishna. Prabhupada explained: “There are many kinds of cheaters all over the universe. . . . As the Supreme, Krishna can be more deceitful than any mere man. If Krishna chooses to deceive a person, no one can surpass him in his deceit. His greatness is not simply one-sided—it is all-sided.”[Endnote 26]
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada also explained that great devotees sometimes cheat others: “Great souls cheat others for a great cause. . . . To satisfy the Lord, anything is good, for it is in relation with the Absolute Truth.” Prabhupada explained:
That great souls cheat others may be astonishing to know, but it is a fact that great souls cheat others for a great cause. It is said that Lord Krishna also advised Yudhisthira to tell a lie before Dronacharya, and it was also for a great cause. The Lord wanted it, and therefore it was a great cause. Satisfaction of the Lord is the criterion of one who is bona fide, and the highest perfection of life is to satisfy the Lord by one’s occupational duty. That is the verdict of Gita and Bhagavatam.
Dhritarastra and Vidura, followed by Gandhari, did not disclose their determination to Sanjaya, although he was constantly with Dhritarastra as his personal assistant. Sanjaya never thought that Dhritarastra could perform any act without consulting him. But Dhirtarastra’s going away from home was so confidential that it could not be disclosed even to Sanjaya. Sanatana Goswami also cheated the keeper of the prison house while going away to see Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and similarly Raghunath dasa Goswami also cheated his priest and left home for good to satisfy the Lord.
To satisfy the Lord, anything is good, for it is in relation with the Absolute Truth. We [Prabhupada] also had the same opportunity to cheat the family members and leave home to engage in the service of Srimad-bhagavatam. Such cheating was necessary for a great cause, and there is no loss for any party in such transcendental fraud. [Endnote 27]
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said that cheating “for Krishna’s satisfaction, then it is all right.” He explained, “So sometimes God has to do such cheating of affection. That is not cheating actually. But the cheating propensity is there in God. Otherwise where we get it? (laughter) But we use cheating for our personal sense gratification. But if you use that cheating propensity for Krishna’s satisfaction, then it is all right.” [Endnote 28]
We interpreted these verses to mean that cheating for ourselves is sinful, but cheating for Krishna is divine. Yet Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada sometimes insisted that only a pure devotee could do these things; cheat for Krishna. Ordinary devotees were not so advanced and they should refrain from dishonest or illegal activities. But because Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (and later Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada) had encouraged his devotees to cheat for Krishna, we were protected. Just as a soldier is not prosecuted for killing on the battlefield because he is simply following the orders of his commander, similarly we, under orders from the pure devotees of Krishna, would not incur bad karma from lying and cheating for Krishna, because it was authorized.
Quickly, after I learned to lie and cheat for Krishna, I did big on “The Pick.” and eventually became a maharathi, a big gun, a respected party leader for the New Vrindaban men’s traveling sankirtan soldiers. I began collecting $2000 per week, then $3000. My sankirtan buddy Dasarath christened me “The Professor,” perhaps for my skill in map reading, or training up new pickers. Soon nearly all the New Vrindaban sankirtan men referred to me as “The Professor.” When Devamrita Swami came to New Vrindaban in 1986, he dubbed me the “Prince of The Pick.”
After I had learned the tricks of the trade, the necessary detachment from results (it is amazing how much money a person can make if they act as if they can walk away from it all) and oral skills (flattery was a great tool, especially with women), I really started to enjoy life on the road. One year I collected $150,000. I didn’t keep a penny for myself; the money belonged to Krishna.
I won the “Golden Van Award” at the 1981 Christmas Festival for collecting more than any other New Vrindaban man that year. (The women always collected more than the men.) In 1981, New Vrindaban pickers collected $2,000,000. After winning this award, I became somewhat of a New Vrindaban celebrity.
I was invited to write an article about how I came to New Vrindaban which was published in the February 1982 Brijabasi Spirit, along with an illustration of me playing the harmonium at the Bahulaban temple drawn by the New Vrindaban artist Krishna Katha dasa ACBSP (Chris Carlson). In addition, I was invited to travel with Bhaktipada in March 1982 to India for the big annual ISKCON Gaura Purnima Festival in Mayapur. I was recognized as an important person at New Vrindaban.
One pleasant byproduct of my sankirtan success was the attention I received from my spiritual master. Of course, I felt he had always given me whatever attention I needed, but now the relationship became even sweeter. I enjoyed serving my spiritual master, massaging his feet and running menial errands for him. I had developed, by gradual increments, a very deep and sincere love for my spiritual master.
I loved him so much that I think I would have done almost anything for him. And Bhaktipada reciprocated by his sweet words and affectionate smiles. He rarely chastised me, but more often he simply encouraged me to do my best, to be all that I could be, to grow and mature in Krishna consciousness.
When I was out on the road, every Sunday evening when the day’s picking was finished, I called Bhaktipada at his home from a pay telephone. I reported to him my weekly Laksmi point score, and also spoke about any interesting events which might have transpired during the past week. He in turn spoke to me about his health and new developments on “The Farm.” He always ended his conversations by saying, “And don’t forget Hrishikesh; I love you!”
Following in the footsteps.
Bhaktipada always allowed the visiting sankirtan devotees to follow him around when they returned for the three-day monthly sankirtan festivals. Here we see Bhaktipada and devotees inspecting the Palace wall and exterior, c. 1981. 1st row: unidentified devotee, the author, Dasarath; 2nd row: Krishna Chandra, Jaya Nitai; 3rd row: Jagannath Mishra, Nityodita.
Books Out; Paraphernalia In.
New Vrindaban traveling sankirtan devotees, who began collecting funds for the community in 1973 by distributing Prabhupada’s books on the road, gradually abandoned book distribution in the late 1970s in favor of picking, which brought in much greater profits. Sankirtan devotees disguised in wigs and non-devotee clothes distributed a plethora of items, such as flowers, cutout record albums, candles, buttons, stickers and baseball caps in return for donations. Bumper stickers displaying the image of the beagle Snoopy from the Peanuts comic strip was a favorite picking paraphernalia.
Professional and college football games were excellent places for picking, as sports fans would pay five and ten dollars respectively for a bumper sticker or baseball cap emblazoned with the logo of their favorite team. It was not unusual for devotees to collect more than $1,000 each during a Saturday or Sunday football game.
Money is the honey
Money was never far from Bhaktipada’s mind and he liked to have huge quantities of it; the more the better. He learned the value of money from his spiritual master, who taught that although money may be the root of evil for conditioned souls, pure devotees fear it not because they use money for preaching Krishna consciousness; therefore they remain unaffected by its evil effects. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada said:
Money is sweeter than honey. [Endnote 29]
Money is so sweeter than honey. [Endnote 30]
“Money is the honey” goes so far as it is employed for Krishna consciousness. [Endnote 31]
Satsvarupa dasa Goswami (Stephen Guarino), an important ISKCON GBC member and one of the eleven ritvik priests, confirmed, “Prabhupada said that money is honey for a liberated soul.” [Endnote 32]
One time Bhaktipada joked about money. New Vrindaban News reported, “The other day as Srila Bhaktipada was looking over the new master plan presentation, Mother Sanatha [Endnote 33] was busily drawing. Murti [Endnote 34] asked, ‘Srila Bhaktipada, is there anything new you’d like to see in it?’ A little smile appeared on Srila Bhaktipada as he turned to walk away, ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Money trees.’” [Endnote 35]
Bhaktipada expected his disciples and followers to give him money, and when, on occasion, they took money from him, he became upset. Gopinath noted in his diary one instance when Bhaktipada cursed a disciple for selling him her house instead of simply giving it to him, “February 29, 1984: Sacimata [Endnote 36] sold ‘her’ house to Bhaktipada [actually to New Vrindaban, Inc.] for $95,000. Srila Bhaktipada said earlier she will take one birth for every dollar she took from him.” [Endnote 37] “March 2nd: Sacimata is pressing to have another $3,000 on top of the $95,000, saying she left a stove, washer, refrigerator in her house. Srila Bhaktipada says, no. If worse comes to worse, put a noose in the oven when she comes.” [Endnote 38]
Everyone had to comply with Bhaktipada’s thirst for money. No one was immune. After big festivals, Bhaktipada routinely visited Prabhupada’s Palace, the Palace Restaurant, the Palace Gift Store, the Guest Lodge, etc., and took thousands of dollars from the cash register and the safes and gave it to his secretary to deposit in his bank account. This practice became a problem for those who managed these businesses, as they could not pay their bills. Invoices for merchandise, books and bhoga, and bills for advertising and electricity had to be paid. How could they pay their bills if Bhaktipada took all their hard-earned money?
After one festival, the managers of the Palace and the Guest Lodge—in jest—hatched a plan to kidnap a child of a wealthy Hindu visitor and demand a large ransom in order to pay the bills. The Guest Lodge manager actually spoke of this “plan” during a Srimad-bhagavatam lecture at the temple. Bhaktipada, who was sitting in the temple, interrupted the class and snapped, “Sit down! I want to see you later.” One New Vrindaban resident remembered:
Kripamaya [John Sherwood], the manager of the Lodge, told a story at the morning program of how, after a weekend during which hundreds of Hindus had made a pilgrimage to the community, Bhaktipada had driven down in his Cadillac to both the Palace and the Lodge and made off with all the weekend’s receipts. . . .
Kripamaya called his story, “The Money is the Honey,” after one of the Swami’s favorite aphorisms. Kripamaya told how he and Garga Rishi, the manager of the Palace, decided they could pay their bills in light of Bhaktipada’s “theft.” They would kidnap the child of a Hindu, then pay their bills with the ransom.
At this point, Bhaktipada interrupted and demanded, “What’s the point of this?” “Simply that the money is the honey,” answered Kripamaya. “Sit down!” snapped the Swami. “I want to see you later.” It was quite some time until Kripamaya was again permitted to give the sermon at the morning program. [Endnote 39]
Beginning in 1980, “The Pick” became New Vrindaban’s main source of income. Kuladri confirmed, “The pick was Bhaktipada’s number one priority.” [Endnote 40]
Bhaktipada liked “The Pick.” During a lecture in Bombay in 1988, when I inaugurated Sticker Sankirtan using “I 💖 Bombay” stickers, Bhaktipada explained:
[“The Pick”] is the greatest way to engage people in Krishna’s service. . . . There’s no better way . . . than taking little donations from many people. I’d rather have a million donations of one rupee than one donation of a million rupees. Why? Because if they give only one rupee to Krishna, their spiritual life has begun! Because they’ve engaged in Krishna’s service. . . . So don’t think this isn’t preaching; this is the biggest preaching! . . .
And it will get nicer and nicer and easier and easier the more you do it. Don’t think that after a few days people will get tired of it. I used to think that in the United States. Actually, people get trained up to give; when they see you coming they will reach into their pockets and pull out a rupee—without your even asking! . . . There’s no other service higher than this service! This is the highest service! [Endnote 41]
Bhaktipada constantly preached to his disciples and followers to surrender more and more to Krishna, to collect more and more Laksmi to help build New Vrindaban more and more and attract more and more conditioned souls to experience the bliss of Krishna consciousness. Although Bhaktipada, over the course of time, wrote a half-dozen letters to the New Vrindaban sankirtan devotees, one letter in particular, the letter dated June 27, 1980, I treasured, because in the letter Bhaktipada mentioned my name and praised me:
To all the New Vrindaban Sankirtan Men. . . .
As you probably know the Palace marathon is on; when was it not on, but now it is on even more. Those of us who are in the midst thank Krishna for it every day. I only wish that this marathon could continue twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and I also realize that you Sankirtan devotees are out there making this possible by your marathon, and so I thank you just as much as I do the boys who are working on the Palace. It is truly a great Sankirtan effort, because together we are preaching the glories of Lord Krishna and his pure devotee Srila Prabhupada.
So I can simply pray to Lord Krishna to bless you more and more and give you more and more realization of this glorious mission of Krishna consciousness. Please keep up the good work more and more so that we can build Prabhupada’s Palace more and more and get more and more of the conditioned souls to come here and experience Krishna consciousness. . . .
P. S. My special thanks to Hrishikesh who writes me every week with his realizations and reports, and I wish all the devotees would write to me like that.
Bhaktipada’s June 27, 1980 letter to “All the New Vrindaban Sankirtan Men.”
Bhaktipada encouraged husbands to send their wives out on “The Pick” and once indicated that a husband’s strength increased when his wife was out on sankirtan. During brick-laying marathons, devotees competed to see who could carry the most bricks. When Kripamaya—whose wife Krishna Bhava was a regular “Weekend Warrior” picker—broke the record and carried twenty-seven bricks: 216 lbs., New Vrindaban News reported: “When Bhaktipada heard of his feat, he commented, ‘Just see how much strength you get when you send your wife out.’” [Endnote 42]
Sometimes devotees were not allowed to come and live at New Vrindaban unless they agreed to go out on “The Pick.” Once Kuladri was informed that one young woman wanted to come and live at New Vrindaban with her children. There was no housing available for her and her children, but he explained that if she was willing to go out on sankirtan, her children could live at the gurukula. Kuladri explained, “We have no facilities available for this woman. There is a possibility however, considering all of her children are gurukula age and would enter the ashram, if the woman is capable of doing sankirtan work, we could consider accepting her at New Vrindaban, otherwise, come back and see us after the season is over.” [Endnote 43]
One devotee who lived at New Vrindaban for twenty years remarked, “If you lived here and didn’t go on sankirtan you were just basically scum. Sankirtan people, anyone who brought in money, they had value. If you didn’t bring in money to the community . . . you were worthless. And you were treated much differently than the others.” [Endnote 44]
The Citation Line
Some New Vrindaban devotees sold cut-out 33-rpm records while pretending to be radio disc jockeys, while others dressed in business suits, presented themselves as art dealers, and sold cheap mass-produced Korean paintings door-to-door in residential neighborhoods for a handsome profit, [Endnote 45] but most of us raised money by various scams in shopping malls, parking lots and sporting events and concerts. The full-time sankirtan pickers developed innovative and creative techniques, such as the Citation Line, to increase donations which brought in millions of dollars per year.
As I recall, my buddy Dasarath and I invented the Citation Line. We worked a rock concert at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island around 1982 and Dasa noticed that when he approached a car filled with teenagers smoking marijuana, they often became fearful and hid their joints and paraphernalia. Dasa, a brilliant and quick-thinking salesman, decided to capitalize on their anxiety and began pretending he was a security guard. When he approached a vehicle he walked with a swagger, flashed a frown and indicated to the person sitting in the driver’s seat to roll down the window. Then Dasa said, “I’m sorry, but I have to place you under arrest.”
Dasa waited a moment while the teenagers’ hearts sank and then he laughed, “You’re under arrest for having too much fun!” and he’d pass them bumper stickers through the window and ask for donations for the Nandagram Boys School. The youngsters were so relieved when they realized it was a joke they started laughing and reaching into their pockets for money. After a few concerts we were arrested by Stadium Security for impersonating a law officer, trespassing and soliciting without a permit, but we knew we had a winning line on our hands; we just had to refine it.
The next time we returned to New Vrindaban, I met with the director of New Vrindaban’s Direct Mail Fundraising Department, Bhavisyat dasa (Burton Smith), [Endnote 46] and we designed a citation pad with a cartoon drawing of a police officer at the top. The word “Citation” at the top of each page was misspelled with a backwards “C.” Instead of opening with, “I’m afraid you’re under arrest” we opened with the less-threatening “I’m afraid I have to give you a citation.” There were four “charges” listed on the “citation”:
1. Girl watching
2. Smiling without a permit
3. Being with a pretty girl
4. Other
Eventually other “charges” were added, such as “Having too much fun” and “Failure to party.” The Citation Line was an incredibly successful technique for raising money and we used it at concerts and sporting events and at shopping malls and plazas. I even used it when I worked inside restaurants hitting up diners sitting at tables.
The Citation Line made picking fun, and it increased collections. In 1981, New Vrindaban pickers collected $2,000,000. In 1982 we increased to $2,436,000. In 1983 we collected $3,857,000. In 1984 our total collections were $4,106,000, and in 1985 we collected $5,472,000. Our total sankirtan revenue from 1981 to 1985 was $17,871,000.
Citation pad used by New Vrindaban traveling sankirtan “pickers.”
Bumper stickers printed at Palace Press featuring Peanut’s cartoon characters Snoopy and Woodstock.
Three women collectors relax in their motel room after a hard day on “The Pick.” Two Bhaktipada disciples: Maharani dd and Shalagram dd, and one Prabhupada disciple: Gopalasyapriya dd.
Not only New Vrindaban pickers used the Citation Line, soon it was being used by pickers throughout ISKCON in America. During one May/June 1983 trip to Los Angeles and San Diego, I was personally requested by Srila Ramesvara, the guru for southern California, to teach this fund-raising technique to his sankirtan boys.
1984 was my biggest year as a picker: I collected $150,000 for New Vrindaban; most of it in $5.00 donations. That year I talked 30,000 people into giving me $5.00. My average collection was $3,000 per week. I was good at it and I really enjoyed it. I got to travel all across the United States from Maine to California, from Texas to Florida and even three trips to Hawaii. And Bhaktipada showered me with affection. During our weekly phone calls he often ended our conversations by saying, “I love you, Hrishikesh.”
During periodic sankirtan marathons sometimes over a hundred devotees were sent out on the road. The ISKCON New Vrindaban Community Financial Status Report for the week ending Sunday, December 8, 1985, stated that the community grossed $210,047.34 in income during that week. More than two thirds of that amount ($141,681.94) was from sankirtan pickers. The Palace gate earned only $2,536.50 that week (1.2%).
During the forty-four-day 1985 Christmas marathon, New Vrindaban pickers collected an average of $22,071.82 per day, and ultimately collected nearly one million dollars. The 1985 Sankirtan Marathon Final Compilation stated that $971,160 was collected between November 21, 1985 and January 4, 1986. The New Vrindaban Community Income Statement for the Year 1984 stated that sankirtan devotees collected $2,853,899.94, or 71% of the total income that year. Another source indicated that sankirtan devotees collected over five million dollars in 1985. [Endnote 47]
Dulal Chandra, the comptroller for New Vrindaban, confirmed: “I would say that eighty percent—seventy-five to eighty-five percent—of the income was sankirtan, the solicitation of funds by the devotees in the streets.” [Endnote 48] Even devotees without talent in sankirtan, such as those working in construction or the garden, were sometimes forced to go out on “The Pick,” because even a novice sankirtan devotee could usually collect enough to pay the wages for three or four karmi (non-devotee) workers.
Working on the East Coast.
In 1980, when I began full-time traveling sankirtan, we mostly worked the states in Bhaktipada’s GBC zone: Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, Western New York, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. We learned pretty well how to get people in the mid-west to give us money. But my first trip picking in New Jersey was a disaster. I’m from New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey, but I was unable to get New Jersey people to give me a donation. Not much.
My first SKP trip to New Jersey was with my godbrother Nrsimha Guru dasa (Martin Lyons), originally from England. He left home as a teenager and traveled to India where he wanted to become a yogi. He took sannyasa from a Hindu guru. During his travels, me met the ISKCON devotees and was impressed. He was especially impressed when he heard Kirtanananda Swami give a lecture in Vrindaban, India. Martin requested diksa from Kirtanananda Maharaja, and was initiated in Vrindaban India in March 1979, shortly before the big Gaura Purnima festival.
I remember when my godbrother Nrsimha Guru first came to New Vrindaban, shortly before the Palace dedication in September 1979. He was a talkative, but likeable fellow, in my opinion. About a year later, I trained him up on the pick and Dharmatma sent us to New Jersey. We very quickly discovered that the people in New Jersey did not respond favorably to the mantras which we used to get donations from Ohio and West Virginia people.
New Jersey was a happening place, with lots of excitement. People were always in a hurry. Going here and going there. They did not want to stop and talk to us. In the mid-west on the other hand, the atmosphere was more laid back. People were not in such a hurry. They wouldn’t mind chatting with a stranger. But not in New Jersey. I think we only stayed there a week or two, before heading back to New Vrindaban.
The one thing I remember from our trip to New Jersey was Nrsimha Guru’s porridge. Instead of kitchari, he made this rich English porridge, like oatmeal, but thick and heavy with large quantities of cream and butter and brown sugar. I thought it was delicious. After eating such a heavy breakfast, sometimes it was difficult to rev up into gear and hop out of the van and hit up potential donors.
About a year later, in 1981, I traveled again to New Jersey, this time with my godbrother Jagannath Mishra. This time, however, we had become more experienced pickers, and the two of us discovered how to make money in New Jersey. We shortened our mantra and cut to the point immediately. We made about $2,000 each per week.
When we worked in Middlesex County, we often stayed nights at my parents’ house in East Brunswick. My Roman Catholic parents were tolerant of my religious views, and I never tried to convert them to the Hare Krishna faith. I had a good relationship with them, especially after my daughter was born in 1988, and my son in 1992. I wanted my children to get to know their grandparents, so three or four times a year, I’d take them on a seven-hour drive from West Virginia to New Jersey to visit my parents for a week vacation.
While working on the East Coast, we met many ISKCON devotees from other temples at big events, such as the Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pennsylvania. I remember hanging out with disciples of Satsvarupa dasa Goswami Gurupada, and one disciple of Bhavananda Goswami Vishnupada named Adi-Purusha. We had a nice comaraderie and enjoyed meeting each other from time to time. This was a few years before New Vrindaban pickers got the reputation of doing the pick in other zones without permission.
When we worked the Pocono Raceway, and also when we worked rock concerts at the Spectrum indoor arena in Philadelphia, we’d always see about a half dozen old men wearing side caps, a military cap that can be folded flat when stored. These old men, probably in their 60s and 70s, worked the parking lots alongside of us. They would approach a car which had just parked and pass the driver a tiny American flag on a toothpick. I don’t think they needed to say a word. The driver would automatically pull out a dollar or two and give it to the veteran. I assume they were World War II veterans, as I never spoke to them. I’m sure it was good business for them. Each of them made hundreds of dollars per event. I guess they were professional pickers, like us. We never had a conflict with them, as I recall, as there was plenty of people to hit up. We avoided them, and they avoided us.
The Spectrum Arena (center), Veteran’s Stadium (right) and the Philadelphia skyline in the distance. Photo by Centpacrr at English Wikipedia.
“Moonies.”
In addition to World War II veterans, sometimes we’d run into followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012) working the shopping center parking lots. We called them “Moonies.” They were unwelcome, as we thought they were taking Laksmi away from us, and giving it to a charlatan. Once in the Spring of 1979, a party of Moonies came to visit New Vrindaban. I was a new Bhakta at the time. I wrote about this in Gold, Guns and God, Vol. 3:
During the spring of 1979, some visitors came to the Bahulaban temple and requested a tour of the community. It was discovered that the guests were “Moonies”—members of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.
ISKCON devotees detested the “Moonies” because they worked the parking lots and shopping malls and directly competed with the Krishnas to take money from non-devotees. Sometimes veteran New Vrindaban sankirtan devotees harassed the “Moonies” in the parking lots and attempted to steal their money with the “change up.”
A senior devotee, Parambrahma (Paul Ferry), took the visiting “Moonies” on an extended tour of the community, while Vrindapati (Walter Parry), an enforcer who worked in the New Vrindaban blacksmith shop, broke into their van and removed the safe from their vehicle. (A few years later, New Vrindaban sankirtan parties also began installing safes in their vans to protect their collections.)
The “Moonies” enjoyed their private tour and departed with smiles and warm handshakes, only to return angrily later. Tapahpunja (Terry Sheldon), an expert “picker” who later served as the leader of the New Vrindaban men’s sankirtan parties, remembered with glee, “The ‘Moonies’ demanded the return of their safe and their money, but everybody just played dumb. ‘Huh? You say your safe and money was stolen? Must have been some local hillbillies. Welcome to West Virginia!’”
This was not a crime secretly committed by one individual; it was authorized by community leaders and enjoyed by many members of the community. Although I was a new devotee, I was proudly told about the theft, even while it was happening. Yet, we New Vrindaban residents never thought we were criminals; we thought we were serving God by stealing from the “demons.”
I was taught that the Moonies were our mortal enemies, especially in the parking lots, as they competed with us for the best spots. Muktakesh (Ronald Burstein), one of New Vrindaban’s biggest pickers, taught me what to do when I saw a Moonie in a parking lot: approach them innocently, offer to make a donation, show them a big bill like a fifty, ask for $40 in change, grab the money and run.
When I got the opportunity to try this, the Moonie refused to let go of his cash after I grabbed it, so I just drove off out of the parking lot into the street still holding his money. The Moonie held on to the money with his right hand and with his left hand he hung on to my side mirror with all his might. I thought I’d shake him off if I speeded up to 50 or 60 mph, so I gunned the gas and zoomed down the road while my sankirtan partner laughed heartily.
But we did not get the last laugh, as a police officer just happened to be sitting there on the corner and noticed the Moonie hanging on to the side of my van for dear life. Within a few moments sirens wailed and red and blue lights flashed in my mirrors, and I had to pull over and stop. We were escorted to the local police station where the cops had a big laugh when they listened to our stories: “The Krishnas ripping off the Moonies! This is one for the books.” The police made me give the $40 back to the Moonie, then they let us go and told us all to get out and stay out of town.
Reverend Sun Myung Moon and disciples at a mass wedding ceremony.
A big rock concert in California.
On May 28, 1983 (Memorial day Weekend) at the four-day 1983 US Festival (held in a huge field near San Bernardino, California, about sixty miles west from Los Angeles), I drove a New Vrindaban traveling sankirtan van filled with a half-dozen pickers and thousands of “I Love Rock and Roll” stickers through the back stage entrance security gate. Pickers and stickers.
I simply flashed my Nandagram Boys School badge at the security officer who was guarding the back stage entrance and announced firmly, “We’re making a delivery.” He let us inside and I parked right behind the massive stage.
The three-day festival featured twenty-six famous bands and performers including Men at Work, The Clash, Los Lobos, U2, Joe Walsh, Stevie Nicks, David Bowie, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, and Van Halen. The temperature peaked at a stifling 95 degrees F, and the air quality was the worst in years, what with pollution and car exhaust blowing in from the Los Angeles basin. The total attendance was reported at 670,000. Two people died at the event, I think from drug overdoses. New Vrindaban pickers collected a lot of money, I don’t remember how much. Several thousands dollars I believe.
The US Festival, San Bernardino, California
While working the US Festival, I happened to observe one of the hundreds of Port-a-John portable potties rocking back and forth. My curiosity was aroused. What was going on inside the toilet? Eventually the Port-a-John toppled to the ground, and two people emerged, a young man and a young woman, both with their pants down. This is when I coined the phrase, “The dregs of human society,” referring to the people I saw at the rock concert who were stoned on drugs and under the influence of the Mode of Ignorance (Tamas Guna).
After “The Pick” was over (we didn’t stay all four days as we got nipped by security sometime on the first day), we returned to the Los Angeles New Dwaraka ISKCON temple. There, for the first time I met Ramesvara Maharaja, the ISKCON zonal acharya for Southern California. He was a very, very important man, a pure devotee (we were told) who accepted extravagant worship in the temple. He was very friendly to me. (I was, after all, one of biggest pickers on the New Vrindaban’s men’s sankirtan team.)
Ramesvara asked about the US Festival and we spoke a few minutes. He was especially enamored of the term I used when referring to the low-class human beings sunk in the modes of passion and ignorance, addicted to sex and intoxication, who frequented heavy metal rock concerts: “the dregs of human society.” He chuckled and repeated that term several times “the dregs of human society.” He found the phrase so appealing, that the next morning he used my phrase, “the dregs of human society,” during his Srimad-Bhagavatam lecture. Ramesvara also asked me to train his Los Angeles and San Diego pickers in the “Art of the Citation Line.”
My May 1983 visit to Los Angeles was a landmark event for New Vrindaban sankirtan. In the past California devotees had slashed our tires when they caught us working their zone. But now things were different; we had something they desperately wanted: a quick and easy way for uneducated and unskilled laborers to make hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
The ISKCON-approved guru, His Divine Grace Ramesvara Swami, during a rare visit to New Vrindaban (Summer 1985).
Doing “The Pick” in Hawaii.
On December 26, 1983, I worked the Aloha Bowl, a college football game at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii. The game pitted the Washington Huskies of the Pacific-10 Conference and the independent Penn State Nittany Lions against each other. 37,212 football fans attended the event.
The previous day, on Christmas day, I accompanied two of New Vrindaban’s best female pickers, Sumati and Harinam, on a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu, arranged by New Vrindaban’s Sankirtan Leader Dharmatma Prabhu. This was my first visit to Hawaii.
We arrived in Honolulu during an extremely heavy tropical downpour. We rented a car, and found a cheap motel to spend the night. The ladies stayed in one room, and I stayed in a separate room.
After a half hour or so, I heard a knock on my motel room door. As I was laying in bed, on top of the bed actually, I called out, “Come in.” The two ladies entered the room and explained, “Hrishikesh, we’re leaving this place and moving to another motel. We don’t want to sleep in a room infested with cockroaches. Do you want to come with us?”
At that moment, one of the women turned on the light in my tiny room, and dozens of large crawling insects scurried across the floor and the walls into dark crevices. I reflected on their offer, but as I was tired from our long day, I didn’t want to get up out of bed. I replied:
“No thanks. I’m comfortable staying here. I hardly notice the little fellas; they aren’t bothering me at all. They stay off the bed, where I’m laying; they seem to respect my space. Besides, they live here. This is their home. I am the intruder.”
The ladies took off and found another motel, and I drifted off to a peaceful and sound sleep. The next day—a beautiful sunny day—we worked the football game, passed out Aloha Bowl bumper stickers to football fans, and collected a few thousand dollars in donations, which we dutifully cashed in at a bank for a cashier’s check and mailed it to Dharmatma, to help build New Vrindaban into a magnificent place of pilgrimage in the West. All in a days work for Krishna, in my opinion.
Aloha Stadium
“The little fellas aren’t bothering me at all. They stay off the bed, where I’m laying; they seem to respect my space. Besides, they live here. This is their home. I am the intruder.”
I visited Hawaii twice more on “The Pick.” One time, I flew to Hawaii with my old sankirtan traveling buddy and godbrother, Krishna Chandra dasa (Curtis Humphreys). In Honolulu we rented a car. To save money in Hawaii, instead of renting a motel room, we slept on Waikiki Beach in our sleeping bags. In the mornings, we’d chant our sixteen rounds while walking along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, or walking through the shallow water, and sometimes sitting in the water. One night while we were dozing off on the beach, a homeless man came over to me, and apparently thought I was a log on the beach. He wanted to sit down on the log, but as it was quite dark, he wasn’t sure it was a log, so he kicked me first. When I groaned, he apologized and stumbled on.
We mostly worked in the Waikiki tourist areas, although sometimes we tried picking in the shopping plazas elsewhere on Oahu. We bought a $25 air ticket to Maui, rented another car, and worked the historic whaling town of Lahaina on the west coast. We also worked the big resorts.
I visited Hawaii a third time on the pick, and after working Waikiki, my partner (I forget who) and I took an airplane flight from Oahu to the big Island of Hawaii. There we rented a car and drove to the west side of the island and worked the big tourist resorts in Kailua-Kona. The climate was wonderful and we enjoyed visiting. We didn’t make tons of of money, but we certainly made enough to make the trip worthwhile and profitable.
A national celebrity gives me a donation.
On May 3, 1984, on the evening preceding the 110th running of the Louisville Kentucky Derby, I convinced the famed American ABC television sports journalist, broadcaster and author, Howard Cosell, to give me a $5.00 donation. Actually, it was Cosell’s wife who convinced her husband.
Howard Cosell
The Kentucky Derby
My godbrother and sankirtan picking partner, Jagat Pate dasa (James Fleming), told the story in an article published in the magazine New Vrindaban As It Is. Jagat Pate explained:
Once upon a time, not very long ago, it was my pleasure to pick the Kentucky Derby with Hrishikesh Prabhu. The day preceding the Run for the Roses is traditionally one of festivity and a parade in Louisville. That evening, Hrishikesh and myself were working in large hotels. We were chipping away at the upper crust in lobbies and restaurants when, in the plushly-furnished lobby of one such establishment, I beheld an unusual sight.
Across the room sat a gentleman in a lovely high-backed chair, surrounded by his adorning retinue, and his good wife. All of the accompanying gentlemen wore sky blue sports blazers, beautified by their TV network’s sports insignia, as did their lord, and they paid reverential heed to his every word. Upon scrutinizing that worthy assembly, I realized that before me was none other than the illustrious HOWARD COSELL, famed sportscaster, along with his TV sports crew. Turning to my dear brother and the hero of our tale, I informed him of the great personality’s presence. “Naw,” Hrishikesh objected. “But, I’m not joking, just see,” I insisted. Upon my persistence, he was convinced.
Hrishikesh approached the famed sportsman, flanked by his standing protégés, and fell down upon one knee before him, as if in respectful homage. He placed the Derby sticker on Howie’s knee and recited his divine mantra. [“I’m sorry sir, but I have to give you a citation for being with a pretty girl! Rather than go to jail, won’t you pay a small $5.00 fine for charity and you can go free?”]
Mr. Cosell attempted to appear as if above the whole experience, although his face betrayed his astonishment. A tense moment followed with the Prince of the Pick and the Sultan of Sports-Speak eye-to-eye in the sacrificial arena. Then Mrs. Cosell encouraged her husband, “Let’s give a little,” [Actually, Mrs. Cosell said in no uncertain terms, "Howie, give the man five dollars! He said I was pretty!”] to which Howie nodded his consent. All the other sportsmen matched his five dollars. Hrishikesh thanked them, [pocketing about $50 for one or two minute’s work] and stood.
Howard Cosell and his wife Mary Edith Abrams Cosell (known as "Emmy")
Finally Mr. Cosell raised his hands, stood, and in a stately gesture, spoke, “You have a good scam going here kid, but there’s one thing you’ve got to learn: You’ve got to take the money and run with it!” to which replied Hrishikesh, while executing a classic “Exit Stage Left,” complete with flailing elbows and shake of the leg, “I’m running!”
The cartoon character Snagglepuss, who helped popularize the phrase, “Exit, stage left!”
Our journey to Montreal, Ontario.
In April 1984, Dharmatma sent about four or five pickers to Canada to work the April 19, 1984 Van Halen concert at the Montreal Forum. At the time, I was stationed at the New Vrindaban satellite center at 1025 Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. I served as the party leader.
On April 18, the day before the concert, we received a shipment of “I ❤️ Rock and Roll” stickers from Palace Press early in the morning, and stowed our gear in the van. I began driving our party of five pickers north on the New York Throughway towards Montreal, nearly 400 miles distant. After about seven hours, we arrived at the Blackpool/Champlain Canadian Customs Checkpoint.
This is a major entrance point to Canada, as all the vehicles on I-87 pass through here. We waited in line in our vehicle. When we finally got to the head of the line, the customs officer looked at us suspiciously. He asked to search our van, and I gave permission. We exited our van and walked into the waiting room, where we sat patiently quietly chanting on our beads for perhaps an hour. Then the officer approached us and said we were not allowed to enter Canada.
What did they find in our van? Our little brass Gaura Nitai deities on the altar? Boxes and boxes of “I ❤️ Rock and Roll” bumper stickers? Five guys with shaved heads that looked like members of a religious cult? We traveled 335 miles to get this far. We’re only 40 miles from our destination! I was pissed, and I told them so. “If you won’t let us in, we’ll just have to drive to the next checkpoint, and maybe we can get in there!”
I should have kept my mouth shut. Two hours later, when we arrived at the next Canadian Customs Checkpoint, the Seaway International Bridge which connects Massena New York with Cornwall Ontario, the customs officers knew we were coming and they denied us entrance. What a pain! I realized these Canadian customs officers were just like the police, always trying to obstruct Lord Chaitanya’s Sankirtan Movement. They, as Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had said years earlier, were “Maya’s Pigs.”
We continued driving west and two hours later attempted to enter Canada at the next border crossing, the Thousand Islands Bridge at Interstate 81. We again, were denied entrance.
I opened up our Rand McNally road atlas (the traveling sankirtan leader’s best friend) and studied the border crossings to the west. I decided to drive directly to Buffalo, New York and attempt our crossing at the Peace Bridge, which connects Buffalo with Fort Erie, Ontario. This is a very, very busy crossing, with many lanes of traffic, and many customs officers. The Peace Bridge across the Niagara River is one of the busiest crossings on the Canada-United States border. Thousands and thousands of vehicles cross that bridge every day. I figured the customs officers were just like police men. In the big cities, the police don’t care if you’re soliciting without a permit. But the small-town police officers care greatly about that.
I drove south on I-81 to Syracuse, then west on the New York State Throughway to Buffalo. We waited in line on the Peace Bridge for over an hour before we got to Canadian Customs. We all held our breath when the officer asked a few questions.
“Citizenship?”
“United States, sir.”
“Destination?”
“Montreal, sir.”
“Purpose of visit?”
“Vacation, sir.”
“Enjoy your visit to Canada.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We all rejoiced upon entering Canadian soil. But now we had to drive all the way back to Montreal! Another 435 miles to go! Geez! Our original 375-mile trip turned into a 1,200-mile marathon! Our estimated 7-hour trip tripled in length to about 24 hours! We took turns driving on The King’s Highway 401 in Ontario so that I could get some sleep, but we eventually arrived in Montreal just in time to work the concert. Sometimes Maya tries to stop the brave devotees from spreading the mercy of Lord Chaitanya, but the fearless devotees eventually find a way. That was my motto.
Michael Anthony, David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen at the Montreal Forum (April 19, 1984).
Our 1,200 mile journey from New York City to Montreal (April 18, 1984).
Part Four: Some pickers I have known.
From the beginning of my traveling sankirtan career, I served as the party leader. As noted above, my godbrother Dasarath was my first picking partner. After a few months with Dasa, I learned to adapt my picking mantra according to time and place, and I didn’t need to follow him around anymore. Then Dharmatma, our sankirtan leader, began arranging other partners for me. I went out with my godbrothers Krishna Chandra, Narasingha Guru, Jagannath Mishra, Janardhan, Ramachandra, Kumar, Bhakta Dean, Jyotindra, and many others. I went out also with some Prabhupada disciples such as Muktakesh. I trained up quite a few sankirtan pickers, such as Sahadeva, Mathura, (black) Mukunda, Dhananjaya, and others. As far as I remember, I never had a problem with them. They all respected me as the party leader and surrendered to my direction. Here I will tell a few stories about my sankirtan buddies.
Krishna Chandra dasa (Curtis Humphreys) was educated and intellectual, and he had a dry sense of humor. I liked him a lot. One summer morning, while doing the pick in Maine, we parked our van in an empty beach parking lot. We were sitting in our van chanting our rounds, minding our own business, when a convertible car pulled into the parking lot, and stopped in front of us. A young man was driving, and a young woman sat in the passenger seat.
He asked us, “You guys want a blow job? Only twenty dollars!”
I was speechless. This was totally unexpected. But Krishna Chandra didn’t miss a beat. He responded immediately, “No thanks. We’re celibate monks!’
The fellow drove off in hopes, I assume, of finding more agreeable customers.
After a few years, Krishna Chandra left his sankirtan service and began serving as a teacher at New Vrindaban’s school for boys. He appears in a photograph taken at the dedication of New Nandagram at Wilson Valley in November 1982.
Swami Bhaktipada, teachers—including headmaster Sri-Galim (Gary Gardner)—and students at the gala open house festival at New Nandagram (c. November 1982). Krishna Chandra appears on the far right, cleaning his eye glasses.
Some months later, when I returned to New Vrindaban for one of our monthly three-day sankirtan festivals, I noticed Krishna Chandra was gone. I inquired about him, and I was told, “Krishna Chandra went nuts. I think he stopped taking his meds. He disappeared one day from the gurukula. We found him naked in the woods. He had painted his genitals blue. After that, we took him to the Wheeling Greyhound bus station.”
I was quite surprised. He always seemed so level headed. I had no idea he took medications for psychosis.
Jagannath Mishra dasa (James Michael Bulsa) (June 14, 1956-April 26, 2022) grew up in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland Ohio. Soon after graduating from Normandy High School in 1974, he left home, moved to California, and became a hippie. He told me he lived in a hollow redwood tree in the mountains near Santa Cruz. Once a week, James hitchhiked to the Santa Cruz pier, where he spent the day panhandling, begging donations from tourists. Then he’d purchase groceries and marijuana, and return to his hollow tree in the forest.
James was friends with Chakradhari (Charles St. Dennis), a Prabhupada disciple who lived in Santa Cruz and made his living by buying and selling recreational drugs near the pier. When James came to town, the two hung out together and smoked weed. Years later, James told me:
Chakradhari was one of my buddies in Santa Cruz. He was the second devotee I met in California. I loved him; he was like a damn good buddy. Chakradhari and another devotee named Indra were probably the reason I came to New Vrindaban, or I would have stayed in California. He told me to go and live at New Vrindaban. He told me that New Vrindaban was a cool place and there was a pure devotee there: Kirtanananda Swami. He said that Prabhupada said so; Prabhupada said that Kirtanananda was a pure devotee. No material desires.
As an aside, Chakradhari came to New Vrindaban in 1980, but was murdered on June 10, 1983 by two New Vrindaban devotees.
In 1978, James moved from Santa Cruz California to New Vrindaban West Virginia where he took diksa from Kirtanananda Swami during a Christmas Day 1978 fire sacrifice. Maharaja gave him the name Jagannath Mishra dasa. After working in the garden for a time, he became a traveling picker. He was a big picker. Mish and I served as picking partners for many months, and traveled across the country, to Maine, to California, and to New Jersey where we worked parking lots, shopping malls, concerts and sporting events. We sometimes spent nights at my parents’ home in East Brunswick. We had a good time together.
At the Christmas Sankirtan Festival at New Vrindaban in 1981, Mish and I received “The Golden Van Award,” as we were the two highest-scoring pickers on the men’s parties for that year. Consequently, we were invited to accompany our spiritual master on a February-March 1982 trip to India to visit the ISKCON Hare Krishna temple at Juhu Beach in Bombay, and also attend the ISKCON Mayapur Festival in the Nadia District of Bengal which commemorated the 496th anniversary of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s birth. Mish and I enjoyed hanging out with Bhaktipada in his suite in the guest lodge, massaging his feet, serving him, running little errands, etc. We thought this was the perfection of our lives.
Mish and I worked in Maine during the summer one year, I think in 1982. We were a good team. One Sunday the stores were closed—in those days some states had Blue Laws whereupon shopping centers were closed on Sundays—and so we decided to take a day off and go to the beach. The air temperature was warm, perhaps 80 degrees. We parked our van, changed into shorts and t-shirts, and started running towards the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe 50 people were sunning themselves on the beach, and perhaps a dozen people were swimming in the ocean, playing catch with beach balls and Frisbees, etc.
After running across the sandy beach, we ran into the North Atlantic Ocean, and we felt a shock of ice cold water on our feet and ankles. We got up to our knees and we started shivering. When the water reached our chests, we started to turn blue. My teeth were chattering. The water was freezing! We looked at each other with shocked expressions, and ran back through the water to the beach. We were truly amazed at the frigid temperature of the water, and we couldn’t understand how all those people were still up to their necks in the water, laughing and playing.
A little while later, I asked a young blond girl who was running the concession stand, “We think the water is freezing! We couldn’t even stay in for a minute! How can all those people in the water tolerate the ice-cold temperature?” She replied, “Oh, they think the water’s warm. They’re from Canada!”
Mish had a fondness for attractive young women, and he liked to charm the ladies on the pick into giving him a donation, especially the young, attractive, sexy ladies who frequented high-end shopping malls on Friday nights. We both did big in the shopping malls, flirting with the single girls. Maybe we made $50 per hour. At this time we were only asking a dollar or two.
One time at the Paramus Park Shopping Mall in Paramus New Jersey, he told me that he had to go back out to our van and change his underwear. While hitting up an incredibly hot and sexy woman, he had an ejaculation, just standing there and talking to her. I guess he was an incredibly horny guy. I used to have nocturnal emissions at night, maybe twice or thrice a week, but never had an ejaculation when I was awake.
Mish possessed a fine appreciation for the female form. One of my godbrothers remembered:
When Kuladri [Arthur John Villa—the New Vrindaban temple president and a married man], and Kanka [Susan O’Neil Hebel—a young and uncommonly attractive divorced woman with young children] were having their affair in the early 1980s, she was the talk of the town at New Vrindaban. I once remarked to Mish, “Everyone is always talking about Kanka. Kanka this, Kanka that. What’s the big deal?”
Mish quickly replied, “She has a nice posterior!”
In 1985, while Mish, Dasarath and I were doing the pick in the San Francisco Bay Area, I heard the New Vrindaban temple president, Kuladri dasa, offer Mish a child bride. Mish replied, “I only want someone of drinking age.” In other words, “No child bride for me! If I’m gonna be married, I want an adult woman.” At the time, New Vrindaban administrators paired young teenage girls with adult men, as was recommended by the ISKCON Founder/Acharya. About a dozen girls married older men, including my sankirtan buddy Dasarath. None of the marriages lasted more than a year, although a few girls got pregnant.
I wrote about this pastime in an article, “Srila Bhaktipada In California,” which was published in the May 1985 issue of Brijabasi Spirit:
The next stop [on Bhaktipada’s California tour] was the Berkeley [ISKCON] temple. After an ecstatic kirtan, one of Bhaktipada’s disciples [Jagannath Mishra] exclaimed, “Wow! Did you see those boys dancing and spinning?”
“Were you also spinning?” Kuladri asked.
“He spins for pretty girls,” said Srila Bhaktipada. All the devotees chuckled. “So, when are you getting married?” Srila Bhaktipada continued. The devotee was silent.
Another devotee spoke for him: “He’s waiting for the right dish.”
“Give him a cracked plate,” Srila Bhaktipada replied. “Prabhupada said the taste is the same.”
Then he [Bhaktipada] sang in a sweet baritone voice, “Gol-den dish”; then in a growling bass register, “I-ron bowl.” All the devotees cracked up laughing. Bhaktipada finished with, “When the lights are out...”
“Prabhupada didn’t say that, did he?“ asked Kuladri.
“Yes.” said Srila Bhaktipada.
“This is embarrassing,” stammered the poor boy.
“Yes,” Srila Bhaktipada replied. “It is a great embarrassment for the soul.”
Despite Bhaktipada’s chastisement, Mish really loved his spiritual master, as did I. When Bhaktipada visited California, Mish, Dasarath and I followed him around everywhere he went, like small children follow a parent. At the end of our spiritual master’s visit, we followed Bhaktipada to the San Francisco International Airport, but his flight was delayed. I describe this pastime in “Srila Bhaktipada In California.”
At nine o’clock, Atreya Rsi [Faramarz Attar, the ISKCON GBC representative for Northern California] drove Bhaktipada and Kuladri to the airport. Devotees followed in their cars. At the airport, when Kuladri announced that the plane would be delayed, Bhaktipada told everyone to go home and take rest. The others paid obeisances, and wished Bhaktipada a safe trip. Soon, the room was empty except for the three of us and our beloved Guru Maharaja.
Bhaktipada was tired. Dasarath asked him if he would like to take rest in our van, parked outside. Bhaktipada agreed, and we rushed out to get things ready. Quickly, we laid down a soft foam mat in the back and found a sweater for a pillow. When Bhaktipada asked for a blanket, I produced my sleeping bag—the only thing available—unzipped it, and laid it over Bhaktipada, tucking him in as best I could. To have our spiritual master as a guest in our sankirtan van was a memorable event in our lives.
I said softly to Dasarath, “Remember two years ago when we won the Christmas marathon and Bhaktipada promised to go out on sankirtan with the winning party? We wondered when he would. Now, Krishna is fulfilling our desire.”
“Why don’t we kidnap Bhaktipada so he can go on traveling sankirtan with us,” Dasarath said jokingly.
Bhaktipada overheard our conversation and replied, “Yes. I can do the cooking.” We all laughed.
We were tired and soon fell asleep. An hour later, Bhaktipada woke me up, “Hrishikesh, see if the plane is on time.”
“It appears that Bhaktipada rests his body, but his mind is always awake in Krishna consciousness,” I thought. When I stepped out of the van, I noticed a profusion of flower petals sprinkled on and around the van. “The demigods are watching over Bhaktipada,” I mused.
It was time for Bhaktipada to leave. He walked regally up the carpeted ramp and entered the jetliner. Our hearts felt devoid of life. We stared at the airplane as it left the terminal and taxied, and ascended into the night sky. Finally, it merged into the mass of stars and disappeared. Not a word was spoken. I wondered how the gopis felt when Krishna left Vrindaban. We looked at one another, stunned. Resigning ourselves to Bhaktipada’s inevitable departure, we walked slowly to the van.
As we drove down the deserted highway, Jagannath told us, “You know, Hrishikesh, Bhaktipada really loves us.”
“He loves us more than we can ever imagine,” I answered. After a few moments, Mish stated with conviction, “How fortunate we are. All we have to do is hold on to Bhaktipada’s feet tightly, never let go, and he’ll take us all the way back home, back to Godhead.”
There was no reply. Only a well-worn tape recording of Bhaktipada’s voice, singing sweetly, and filling our hearts with the transcendental sound vibration: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare; Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
A couple years after our California trip, Mish married Gandhari devi dasi (Frances Villemarie), an attractive adult French-Canadian Bhaktipada disciple, who also served on the pick. But she eventually left him. My godbrother Damodar remembered, “He [Mish] was very frank and forward about the fact that his attraction to women constantly rattled his brain. When his first wife left him he became suicidal. He described to me the herbs he took to battle depression.”
After Mish left New Vrindaban in the late 1980s, he worked in construction and home remodeling. He moved around a lot. He lived for a time in Sanford, Florida, and in Van Nuys, California. In 2005 he lived in San Francisco and worked as a manager in a downtown hotel. He met a non-devotee French lady, Ann Marie, and got married. He visited France with her. Unfortunately, he got mugged and was beaten so severely that he lost his teeth. He was in the hospital for some time. His second wife, Ann Marie, also left him. Clearly he wasn’t having much luck with women.
Mish moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he did odd jobs in construction and home remodeling. I met him in Fort Lauderdale on April 26, 2011. He was homeless and living in his car, as construction work was slow at that time. He had no concept of how to save money. Whenever he got money, he spent it partying with his friends.
He used to call me on the phone about once a month. One time he asked me to loan him some money. I mailed him a money order for $400. It took him a year or two to pay me back, but eventually he paid me in full.
Three big former New Vrindaban pickers—Jagannath Mishra (James Bulsa), Compassionate (Rosalyn Fejes) and the author—enjoy a humorous moment during a reunion in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (April 26, 2011).
After struggling in Fort Lauderdale, Mish moved in with his younger brother Jeffrey, a geologist who owned a farm in Isonville, Kentucky. 31 years earlier, Jeffrey had established a company, JCB Downhole Vision, specializing in oil well site geology and mud logging services. For several years, from about 2011 to 2015, Mish lived in Isonville. Jeffrey gave him free room and board and an extremely generous allowance of $800 per month for doing a smattering of menial chores on his farm.
I talked to Mish usually once a month on the phone. He seemed to want me to validate his belief in Krishna, but I could not provide that to him. One time I mailed him a birthday present: a Cohibo Cuban cigar and a fifth of a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. I didn’t know his brother was paying him $800 per month.
Jeffrey later claimed Mish once ate a piece of fried chicken. Jeffrey told me, “Jimmy’s health was not good; he was skinny and sometimes sickly. I encouraged him to see a dentist and get his teeth fixed, and I volunteered to pay for it, but he refused. I told him his health would improve if he ate some meat instead of that Krishna vegetarian diet. Once he ate a piece of chicken right off my dinner plate. I told him: Jimmy, just let me know ahead of time and I’ll fix you up a piece of chicken too!”
When profits from Jeffrey’s company began to decline, he sold his Kentucky farm in 2018 and moved north, back to Ohio. Mish moved south, to the New Raman Reti ISKCON community in Alachua Florida, because he was a Krishna devotee at heart. He got a job with room and board working for a wealthy former disciple of Satsvarupa dasa Goswami from New York named Krishna Bhakta dasa.
Mish served as gardener and keeper of the cows on Krishna Bhakta’s expansive estate. Mish told me his employer was always late in paying him. I knew Krishna Bhakta when he lived with me and other brahmacharis c. 1984-1985 in the basement of Adwaita's New Vrindaban satellite center at 1025 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a Polish and Latino neighborhood.
Mish passed away on July 30, 2022 in Alachua. He had been depressed for a long time. His body was discovered hanging from a rafter with a noose around his neck. The county sheriff declined to conduct an investigation, as it looked like Mish had killed himself. A devotee who knew Mish in Alachua reported, “I believe he took his own life because he was experiencing health issues and he did not think he would get the support he would need. And I do not believe the community was ready and able to help him with his issues,” as noted at Krishna1008 Blogspot.
Damodar and I posted some of our memories of Mish at Dandavats.com.
Nityo Dito dasa (Carlos Ordonez, b. April 8, 1953) went to Kenmore East High School in Tonawanda New York, a suburb of Buffalo. Nityo explained how he came to New Vrindaban:
Even back then [1974], your fame was known. As one friend at the Ann Arbor ISKCON temple told me, “Kirtanananda Swami is the oldest and most advanced disciple of Srila Prabhupada. He stays at New Vrindaban. If you are interested in finding out about Krishna consciouness, that’s where you should go.”
So I came to New Vrindaban just to “check it out” as a possible alternative life style, and I remember the first time I came up to your cabin at Bahulaban. You were sitting in your rocking chair next to the wood stove; you looked so unattached, renounced, yet satisfied also. I told you I had been there for three days and that I would like to stay and learn about Krishna consciousness. You smiled invitingly and said, “That’s very nice. Just chant Hare Krishna, work hard, and be happy!” And that was it. From that point on you accepted me as a father welcomes back his son.”—Nityo dita dasa, 1982 Vyasa Puja Book.
Bhakta Carlos took diksa at New Vrindaban in August 1975 and became Nityo dita dasa. When I first came to New Vrindaban, he served under Atmabhu Swami in Palace construction. He was a fired-up brahmachari and lived at the Old Vrindaban Brahmachari Ashram. Nityo was featured in an article by Dravida dasa, “The People Who Built the Palace,” published in the July 1981 issue of Back To Godhead.
As I recall, after the Palace dedication in September 1979, Bhaktipada sent Nityo (and many others, including me) out on the pick. He was a big picker, and he was also intelligent. The two qualities do not always go together. Muktakesh was a big picker, but he was not very intelligent. I don’t recall that Mukta ever served as a party leader. But Nityo was intelligent, so he served as a party leader.
Sometimes Nityo served as Bhaktipada’s personal servant when Bhaktipada traveled overseas. In a 1985 Vyasa Puja homage, Nityo wrote, “Although you have let me tag along with you on our overseas preaching tours, I haven’t been a good servant. In Delhi, this year, you asked me to tie up one trunk. After watching my clumsy efforts for a few minutes you declared, ‘You are useless!’ Then you bent over and proceeded to expertly tie up the trunk yourself. You concluded, ‘No, not exactly useless, but you’re only good on sankirtan!’” Once Bhaktipada said Nityo was “a pain in the ass.”—Darshan during house arrest broadcast in the New Vrindaban temple (May 1, 1991)
Nityo was one of the first New Vrindaban men’s collectors to work in California. California was a dangerous place for New Vrindaban pickers, because the California ISKCON devotees hated us. Factually, nearly all ISKCON devotees in the United States and Canada hated us, because we went into their zones without permission. The ISKCON Governing Body Commission wanted all the different temples in different zones to cooperate. After all, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada allegedly said, “After my demise, your love for me will be demonstrated by how you cooperate together.” But we at New Vrindaban thought we were the only temple which followed Prabhupada’s orders strictly. Some of the other ISKCON acharyas had fallen down from their sannyasa vows, but we believed Bhaktipada would never fall from his vows. He was a pure devotee, and Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had said so, more than once.
So we boldly went were no one had gone before, into other zones. Of course, we had to sneak around a bit. We never visited the temples in other zones, lest they would see us. But we worked their events. Dharmatma told us to “Blast away!” Bhaktipada even had a vanity license plate made which read: “Easy Journey to Other Zones.”
When Nityo first worked in the Los Angeles area, he worked a big event, maybe a NASCAR race. But the Los Angeles pickers saw him and his partner working the parking lot. As I heard the story, the Los Angeles pickers requested a New Dwaraka Ksatriya Enforcer (Ksatriya means “warrior”) to find the New Vrindaban van and teach us a lesson. It probably wasn’t all that difficult, as there weren’t many vehicles in the parking lot with West Virginia license plates, and it was always easy to spot a sankirtan devotee van: they always had bananas or some other fruit on the dashboard. When the Los Angeles Ksatriya discovered our New Vrindaban van, he slashed our tires. After the event, Nityo had to go out and purchase four new tires at considerable expense.
As Nityo and I were both party leaders, we rarely got to serve on the same party. But once, Dharmatma sent Nityo, Jagannath Mishra and myself to California. I was given the job of party leader. Both Nityo and Mish were big pickers, which is why we got sent to California. Dharmatma kept the less-experienced pickers close to home. We drove all the way to California.
I respected Nityo, although I didn’t always agree with him. I think he (mostly) respected me, even though he was a Prabhupada disciple and my senior. I think we had only one conflict during our two months on the road together. Devotees in California didn’t get to return to New Vrindaban once a month, because of the great distance involved. We returned only after two or three months.
I remember the incident: I was driving our van through the streets of Los Angeles, probably on our way to an event. We had just finished chanting our rounds, and to save time, Nityo—the official cook for our party—squatted in the back of the van cooking up a pot of kitchari. Unfortunately, the traffic on the city street was stop and go. I had to stop at many red lights. This made it extremely difficult for Nityo to keep the pot of boiling water on the camp stove from sliding off the stove and spilling all over. He angrily chastised me a couple times and admonished me to drive more carefully. However, I felt I WAS driving carefully! Sometimes due to traffic, I had to put on the brakes from time to time and stop short.
Nityo only chastised me twice. The third time, Nityo saved the pot from spilling, but he was so pissed that he picked up a full gallon water jug and poured it over my head, while I was driving. It took about 15 seconds to empty, splashing on my head and dripping down my neck, shirt, chest, back and eventually soaking my pants. When the jug was empty, I was sitting in a gallon of water on the van seat.
I could tell of course that Nityo was angry at me, but I also knew that he was raring for a fight, so I wisely kept my mouth shut. I accepted his chastisement in silence. It appeared that Nityo was disappointed that I didn’t raise hell, and he smirked, “Hrishikesh thinks he’s SO SMART! He just keeps his mouth shut.” It wasn’t a big deal for me. I’m normally a tolerant person. It takes a lot to get me angry. When we arrived at our destination, I just pulled my duffel bag out from under the wooden van bench, and changed into dry clothes.
Another time while we were working in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the East Bay, we worked a big Kmart parking lot. Nityo and Mish worked outside in the parking lot, and I blitzed up the inside of the store. We gave people citations, passed out bumper stickers and requested $5.00 donations. The following story, which reveals Nityo’s boldness, appears in Gold, Guns and God, Vol. 4:
Devotees always had to watch for security guards and police. We knew soliciting without a permit was illegal, as was fraud or misrepresentation, but we believed Krishna—through Bhaktipada—had authorized us to lie for him. We regarded police chases and court charges and even jail time as nothing more than occupational hazards; all to be accepted in our line of work. The New Vrindaban sankirtan weekly report sheet even listed one line in the expenses category for “fines.” We were paying so many fines for illegal activities that it was printed on the report as an expense.
Devotees sometimes shoplifted to save money. For a while when grocery shopping, I customarily put a package of Kraft cheese down my pants under my belt before I went to the checkout, until an undercover security guard caught me. Only then I abandoned the habit. Once while working the pick in California with Nityodita (Carlos Ordonez) and Jagannatha Mishra (James Bulsa), I was astounded by Nityo’s boldness.
We had been working a Kmart lot for about a half hour. Nityo and Mish worked outside in the lot and I worked inside blitzing up customers in the aisles. After 20-30 minutes, I noticed a few men wearing white shirts and black ties (store managers) walking quickly through the aisles with determined expressions on their faces. I knew a customer I had hit up had complained and they were looking for me!
Without wasting a moment, I left the store and signaled to my partners to meet me at the van. It took only about a minute for me to walk through the lot and hop into the driver’s seat. Within a few seconds Nityo and Mish also entered the van. I told them, “The place is hot; it’s time to leave,” but Nityo checked me. He said, “Okay, but first pull alongside the front of the store. They have some really beautiful ice chests on display on the sidewalk.”
Against my better judgment, I did as he requested, passing right in front of two store managers who were standing outside looking into the parking lot searching for solicitors. I stopped the van by the coolers, Nityo jumped out, grabbed the biggest one, threw it into our van and hopped in. Then he ordered, “Step on it, Hrishikesh! Let’s get out of here!” I thanked my lucky stars that we never got caught.
Nityo, Mish and I traveled extensively during our Far West tour. In addition to working California, we drove to Boise, Idaho, where we worked a July 7, 1983 concert at the BSU Pavillion on the campus of Boise State University featuring Loverboy, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. The following evening we worked a Kenny Loggins concert at the same venue.
A month later, we drove to the newly-opened B. C. Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked the August 9, 1983 David Bowie concert, during his worldwide “Serious Moonlight Tour.” 54,000 fans attended the sold-out event. We didn’t do well, however, as we got nipped by security early on.
Poster for David Bowie’s performance at B. C. Place.
Nityo became a Swami at a New Vrindaban fire sacrifice on June 4, 1986. I got married at the same fire sacrifice. I heard that Bhaktipada had issued him an ultimatum, “Either you take sannyasa, or get married.” Nityo apparently decided that he’d suffer less as a sannyasi than a grhastha.
Years later, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Nityo renounced his sannyasa title and married a pretty, dark-skinned Hindu girl, Radha devi dasi, from Trinidad. He purchased some property right on Palace Road, and built an enormous house with money, I heard, from working on the pick. We called it “Nityo’s Palace.” I attended his big house-warming party. I recall the prasadam was superb. There was lots of kirtan.
For a long time, Nityo supported himself by working the pick, but since signing a contract with the gas fracking company, I assume he doesn’t need to go out on the road so often. In November 2025, one of my New Vrindaban friends sold Nityo some Buckeye stickers and hats at a rock-bottom price, so my guess is that Nityo still goes out, at the age of 73, to do the pick now and then.
Nityodita Swami (c. 1990)
Bhaktisiddhanta dasa (William Crockett) was one of our biggest pickers. He came to New Vrindaban after 1982 sometime. He was a staunch brahmachari and followed all the regulative principles strickly, I believe. I don’t think we ever went out together, at least I don’t remember going out with him. This is to be expected, because he was a party leader, and I was also a party leader.
He was one of the first to do big doing hats, instead of stickers, at sporting events. He became a bigger picker than me. In 1988, Bhaktipada awarded him with the title Swami and he became known as Bhaktisiddhanta Swami.
One of New Vrindaban’s biggest pickers, Bhaktisiddhanta dasa (William Crockett) in his sankirtan van.
Bhaktisiddhanta counts his daily Laksmi points.
Part Five: I Lose My Mojo.
It is said, “All things must pass,” and my career as a New Vrindaban maharathi collector gradually passed into memory. Two factors contributed to my decline:
(1) I lost my voice for a month or two and it never recovered fully
(2) My health took a turn for the worse.
I think it was in the summer of 1984 I worked a NASCAR race at Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina. The big money was in the parking lot as spectators poured in and parked their vehicles on the expansive lawn. Speedway employees directed the cars to the assigned parking spaces, and we were there hitting up the patrons even before they had a chance to get out of their vehicles. Sometimes we could make $200 per hour.
Eventually, when the time for the start of the race approached, the parking lot pick slowed down, and we had to leave the parking lot, as with less activity, security guards could spot us more easily. At this time, we went inside and worked the infield, where all the overnight campers parked their recreational vehicles. Many people sat on the roofs of their RVs to better watch the excitement of the race. In order to reach these people who were partying on the roofs of their vehicles, we climbed up the ladder to the roof and hit everyone up with stickers.
Unfortunately, with such close proximity to the deafening roar of the NASCAR engines, we had to shout into a prospective donor’s ear, or else they could not hear us. NASCAR races are extremely loud, with sound levels ranging from 100 to over 140 decibels, which is comparable to a jet taking off at an airport. The noise is physically felt, shaking bones, and can cause immediate hearing damage, unless a person uses ear plugs or other ear protection devices.
To make a long story short, I damaged my vocal chords working this race. I became hoarse, and my voice grew weaker and weaker. Finally I had to return to our van, as nobody could hear me anymore. I was very disappointed, as I had lost hundreds of dollars. Within a couple days, my voice disappeared entirely. I could only whisper. My vocal chords had become inflamed and they no longer were able to produce sounds needed for speech. Most cases of laryngitis last only a few days. My disability lasted for over a month, and my voice never recovered completely.
In the past, I had been able to enthusiastically lead kirtan for an hour or more, but now, even after my voice came back, I could only sing for ten or fifteen minutes. Then my voice began to weaken and I had to stop singing. Even today, 40 years later, my voice has not yet recovered to its previous strength.
When I lost my voice, I became terribly depressed. Without a strong voice, a picker couldn’t make much money. A picker’s voice was the all-important factor in his success. Some of New Vrindaban’s biggest pickers had incredibly strong and loud voices, such as Muktakesh. Mukta, and some other collectors, could work noisy environments like the NASCAR races without any strain on their voices. I, on the other hand, did not have a huge voice. I essentially damaged my voice beyond repair.
I felt I could no longer please my spiritual master by big scores anymore. What was to become of me? Big sankirtan collectors were greatly respected at New Vrindaban; while small collectors were often belittled by others. I would no longer have the respect that I had commanded for four years. I had gone from the highest to the lowest.
I take out a party of five pickers.
Back at New Vrindaban, Dharmatma and I devised a plan: I would take out four novice pickers and train them up on how to collect money in the parking lots. Our members were: myself, Bhakta Steve Crisp from England (soon to become initiated as Sahadeva dasa), Mathura dasa (Matthew Reid), and two black devotee godbrothers: Mukunda dasa and Dhananjaya dasa. (This was not Darren Anton, who Bhaktipada also named Dhananjaya a few years later.)
I took them to Ohio and at night we slept at the Columbus ISKCON temple. During the day, I taught them the intricacies of picking in the parking lots, and I dropped them off in individual parking lots. In an hour or two I’d drive back to see how they were doing. Mathura got so good at the pick, that within a month, Dharmatma took him off my training party and put him on a party with experienced pickers.
Unfortunately, in January 1985, while on a three-man party with Cediraja (Mark Bass—initiated in Buffalo, New York in 1971) and my Puerto Rican godbrother Kevala Bhakti (Carlos Núñez), Mathura (and Cediraja) died in his van at a Kentucky truck stop on a below-freezing night. They had turned on their portable propane heater but forgot to crack the van windows open. Cedi and Mathura were asphyxiated in their sleep, but Kevala Bhakti, who was sleeping on the floor where there was more oxygen, survived with severe frostbite on his toes. Bhaktipada cried tears of sorrow at the New Vrindaban memorial service for the two deceased pickers.
After Mathura left my training party to join the big leagues, Chandramauli dasa Brahmachari (Frank Chiefa), a long-time New Vrindaban resident initiated in August 1973 (Chandramauli later took sannyasa in 1986), joined us. We drove to Buffalo New York on traveling sankirtan. Our van was quite crowded. As I recall, at night, I slept on the bench where we stored our cooking equipment and personal items, Chandramauli slept across the two front seats, Mukunda and Dhananjaya slept on the floor of the van tightly squeezed, and Sahadeva slept in the way back, on top of boxes of stickers.
We came back to New Vrindaban after a month. None of my students became great collectors, with the exception of Mathura and Sahadeva. I was happy that I could still render some small service to my spiritual master, but I sorely missed the excitement and thrill of working big events and collecting lots of money.
Picking innovations.
Eventually, my voice returned sufficiently for me to go back on the pick again, but my voice never returned to its former strength, and my voice tired more quickly. I could no longer work the long hours I used to work, nor work noisy events. Fortunately, what I lacked in brute strength, I compensated for in intelligence. I experimented with new venues where I could still collect money: such as upscale restaurants and high-end hotel lobbies. I also began asking for larger amounts of money, such as $5.00 or even $10.00. People who ate at expensive restaurants and took lodging in expensive hotels had money; much, much more than the budget-conscious housewives who clipped coupons from the newspaper and shopped at the neighborhood Kmart or Kroger supermarkets. I was amazed. I was still collecting $3,000 per week!
There weren’t many other sankirtan collectors who could do what I was doing: successfully working restaurants and hotel lobbies. It took a more sophisticated approach to get wealthy people to give you money. You also had to dress smartly. For about a year-and-a-half, my base of operations was the New Vrindaban satellite center at 1025 Manhattan Avenue in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. We sankirtan devotees lived in the basement.
The New Vrindaban New York City satellite center, a 4-story building at 1025 Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. I lived in the basement of this building with a few other brahmacharis for about a year-and-a-half around 1984-1985, when I did The Pick in the New York City environs.
Sometimes when I had a partner, I’d drive to high-end shopping malls. At other times, I worked alone. I’d drive through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel from Long Island City into Manhattan and work the luxury hotel lobbies. I worked the Waldorf Astoria, The Ritz-Carlton, the Algonquin, the Plaza hotel, and others. I especially loved the Waldorf Astoria, because they had a resident string quartet playing classical music in the evenings. When I arrived at a hotel, I’d park my van in the hotel driveway, enter the hotel, work the lobby and the bar for maybe twenty minutes, make $100 and then leave. It was lots of fun and it wasn’t difficult for me to make $300 per day.
Manhattan traffic was not fun, but I learned that when you want to make a right turn onto another street, you do not get in the right lane! Everyone in that lane wants to make a right turn and you’ll have to wait a long time. In addition, you do not get in the second from the right lane. You get in the third from the right lane, and then you can just zoom up to the traffic light, and turn right anyway, as the avenues are one-way streets which are four or more lanes wide and you can pass all those cars in the right two lanes.
I believe Adwaitacharya dasa (Emil “Eddie” Sofsky), a Prabhupada disciple initiated at New Vrindaban in July 1974, owned the building at 1025 Manhattan Avenue. He lived in a second-floor apartment with his wife Madri (Mary Campbell), a Bhaktipada disciple initiated on March 13, 1979. I, along with the other brahmacharis on the pick, lived in the basement, where there was an altar with small brass Gaura Nitai deities. Every morning we’d have a short morning program and sing the Samsara Prayers, the Prayers to Lord Nrsimhadeva, and Jaya Radha Madhava. We did our own cooking on a portable propane stove in the basement; mostly kitchari. Upstairs, Mother Madri was a fine cook, but we rarely got to taste her delicacies.
In the basement, I found a little, secluded cubby hole to sleep in. It was located directly under the sidewalk outside. During the day, the sun shone through cracks in the sidewalk above, illuminating my cubbyhole. At night, I could hear the conversations of drunks above on the sidewalk. I did not enjoy living there and it was not easy getting a good night’s sleep, but we tolerated the inconvenience as an austerity for Krishna.
For some reason, a disciple of Satsvarupa dasa Goswami Gurupada named Krishna Bhakta dasa also lived in the basement. He was a jolly fellow originally from Ireland, and we used to tease him while chanting kirtan. We Bhaktipada disciples monopolized the kirtan and chanted “Jaya Bhaktipada, Jaya Bhaktipada, Jaya Bhaktipada, Jaya Bhaktipada!” incessantly, and we wouldn’t let him chant “Jaya Gurupada.” I don’t think he ever got angry at us. He seemed to be a mellow fellow. Years later, he moved to New Raman Reti in Alachua, Florida.
Jyotindra dasa
While living at our New Vrindaban New York satellite center, I went out for a couple months with a fellow, Jyotindra dasa (James Manning), a Prabhupada disciple initiated in Portland Oregon in December 1976. He was a likeable fellow, but often spaced-out. One time during the Christmas marathon, I think in 1985, we drove an hour to the Mall at Short Hills, a wealthy New Jersey town. The mall was packed with people with money. We worked there several hours, until the mall closed. I made several hundred dollars. I walked to our van in the parking lot, a good distance and waited for Jyotindra. And I waited. And waited.
I walked back into the mall to the security office to see if Jyotindra had been arrested. No sign of him.
I walked to a pay phone and called Dharmatma. He answered the phone, although it was close to midnight and past his bedtime. Dharmatma always answered his phone, day or night, as sometimes sankirtan devotees got arrested by police and needed to be bailed out. We didn’t have cell phones in those days, so we had to communicate with each other through Dharmatma.
I asked, “Have you heard from Jyotindra? I seemed to have lost him.” Dharmatma answered, “I haven’t heard anything.”
I waited some more. Finally, I got fed up and drove back to Greenpoint, about 30 miles distant. I went east on I-78, then north on the New Jersey Turnpike, then under the Hudson River through the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, then under the East River through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, and back to Greenpoint, where I fell asleep in my sleeping bag in my cubby hole under the sidewalk. The next day Jyotindra showed up, looking a little sheepish. I don’t think he ever explained to me what happened. If he did, I forgot what he said. I assumed he couldn’t find our vehicle and had to take a cab home.
Dasa disappears.
The Mall at Short Hills wasn’t the first place I lost a picking partner. A few years earlier, I was working in Knoxville, Tennessee with my godbrother Dasarath. Since the parking lots were slow, we split up. I dropped him off at one parking lot, a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, and then I drove a mile or two to another lot, where I worked for a few hours. After maybe three hours, I went to check on Dasa. I drove through the parking lot, but I couldn’t find him. Maybe he was in the bathroom. I waited fifteen minutes. No sign of Dasa.
I called Dharmatma from a pay phone, but he had not heard from Dasa. After a while I called the Knoxville police and asked if they had arrested a David Van Pelt. No dice. I went to work another lot, and came back again to the Piggly Wiggly. Finally, the sun set and I called Dharmatma and then the police again. No luck.
The next morning, I drove back to the Piggly Wiggly lot, and there was Dasa sitting on the curb in front of the store! I asked him what happened, and he made up some cock-and-bull story. I don’t remember what he said. I only remember it was a lame excuse. Unbelievable. Only years later, I found out what had really happened: he met a sexy babe in the lot, they flirted, the babe liked him, and she took him home to her apartment where he spent the night making love to her. Lucky guy!
I heard Dasa was a superb lover. Dasa was quite precocious in the sexual department; he once told me that he started having sex with girls when he was only eight years old. Muktakesh told me Dasa was extremely well endowed, as Mukta said he saw Dasa’s private parts once while showering, and Mukta was shocked to see the enormity of Dasa’s male organ.
Nothing like that every happened to me on the pick; meeting a hottie and going to bed with her. I guess I just wasn’t very good looking or sexy. When I was a little boy, I once asked my mother, “Mom, why wasn’t I born rich instead of good looking?”
My mother replied, “Henry, the good Lord cheated you on both!” [Endnote 49]
Or maybe Krishna was just protecting me; after all, I really did want to follow the regulative principles strictly. And I did. Sometimes I’d meet a really hot babe on the pick, and I’d usually say something inappropriate.
Once I hit up the hottest babe I ever personally met in my life in a Detroit inner-city supermarket. She must have been a very expensive escort girl, or something. Dressed to the max. Super-model porn-star figure. Gorgeous hair and makeup. While giving her my line and asking for a donation, I happened to say something inappropriate. Probably a compliment about her amazing figure. She got turned off immediately and left the store.
Another time, in a store parking lot, I hit up a woman with a slender waist and unnaturally-enormous, but extremely beautiful breasts. During my pitch, I made an inappropriate comment, and she disappeared. A minute or two later, her boyfriend appeared on the scene, and he was furious. He said something like, “Nobody says stuff like that to my girlfriend!”
I told him, “Gee whiz! I just gave her a sincere compliment.” But he didn’t buy it. He grabbed me by the arm and started punching my head. He was a big guy, bigger than me at least. I knew I couldn’t win a fight with him. I only had one fight in my life, in first grade against a second grade bully, and I lost terribly.
So I just turned myself into a wet noodle and slid to the ground. Once I was laying on the pavement in a helpless condition, his manhood was satisfied, and he and his girlfriend departed. I’m glad he didn’t start kicking me. I wasn’t hurt much. Maybe a couple bruises. After that, I refrained from complimenting women about their bodies, at least for a while. I suppose most women consider that is inappropriate talk when a guy first meets a girl, but I don’t understand why. I personally like it when a woman compliments me on my looks! It doesn’t happen very often, but it happens sometimes. I’m always flattered.
On the other hand, I guess extremely attractive women are often harrassed by crude men and boys who whistle at them, make lewd remarks, etc. I suppose an attractive women might get dozens or even hundreds of these unwelcome comments if they appear in public. In that case, I can understand why a woman might feel uncomfortable if a strange man compliments their appearance. That must be why royal and wealthy women in the past were secluded from the public eye. They only traveled in a secluded palanquin or horse cart escorted by servant guards, who might severe the head of a disrespectful citizen who dared to make a lewd comment.
Brahma dasa
Another time my godbrother Brahma dasa (Robert Storch) was my partner in New York. He took diksa from Bhaktipada during the big New Vrindaban festival for Lord Nrsimhadeva in December 1980. He was a big picker. We worked the shopping malls mostly, as I recall. We parked our van on the street outside the building at 1025 Manhattan Avenue, but we were careful to always lock the hood shut with a chain and padlock, as thieves often stole batteries from unlocked cars and sold them at the nearby pawn shop. Once a thief cut through our chain and stole our battery. We found it the next morning at the pawn shop on the corner and bought it back.
Brahma dasa appears second from left, with black bead bag hanging from his neck.
Photo from Bhaktipada’s Sri Vyasa Puja book (September 2, 1985). From left to right: Nityodita, Anirudha, Devadatta, Brahma, the author, unidentified black devotee (probably Dhananjaya), Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada, Cediraja (behind Bhaktipada), Ramachandra, Jagannath Mishra, unidentified boy, Gaurashakti, Pavitra.
One morning at 1025 Manhattan Avenue, I walked out of the front door of the building to get something out of our van parked on the street, but our van was gone. I figured Brahma must have taken the van to the coin Laundromat a few blocks away to do laundry. I waited a couple minutes. Suddenly Brahma walked through the door of the building and stood next to me on the sidewalk. “Where’s our van?” he asked. “I thought YOU TOOK IT to the Laundromat!” I exclaimed.
Just then, I looked south on Manhattan Avenue, and at that same moment I saw OUR VAN crossing the Avenue a couple blocks distant! “There’s our van! Someone stole it!”
We ran back into the building and knocked on Adwaita’s apartment door. He answered and we shouted, “Our van’s been stolen, and we just saw it crossing Manhattan Avenue a few blocks south!”
Adwaita immediately jumped into gear. He grew up in that neighborhood and he was incredibly street smart. He could be tough, if necessary. He rounded up a few other devotees, including Sankirtan (Andy Frankel) and we hopped into a few other vehicles in speedy pursuit. Eventually, we caught sight of the van and followed it. The driver recognized that he was being followed, and he began speeding and making sudden turns. We followed the best we could.
After making a turn on a side street just below the Pulaski Bridge which crosses Newtown Creek (the boundary between Brooklyn and Queens), we saw the van parked on the sidewalk. We stopped our vehicles, jumped out and ran up to the van. Nobody was there. The culprit had eluded us.
Just then, someone looked up at the bridge above us and yelled, “There he is! That must be him! He climbed the stairway up to the pedestrian lane on the bridge, and now he’s escaping into Queens!”
Some of us began running up the three flights of stairs to chase him, while others jumped into their vehicles to drive a few blocks to the vehicular entrance to the bridge.
I heard Adwaita caught up to him, ran out of the car and tackled him on the sidewalk. “You goddamn car thief! You’re gonna be sorry you messed with us!” (or something similar).
The fellow, who appeared to be Puerto Rican, was deathly frightened. But the fellow also recognized Adwaita, and begged, “Don’t hurt me, Eddie! Maybe you don’t know it, but we’re related! My cousin married your cousin!” (or something similar).
Adwaita didn’t believe him, but the fellow insisted, “Talk to your aunt Bessie! [I don’t remember the name of Adwaita’s aunt, but it might have been Bessie.] She knows who I am! She was at the wedding.”
Adwaita dragged the guy into his car, drove a few blocks, stopped, dragged the guy out of the car, and knocked on his aunt’s door. She opened the door and Adwaita told her what happened. She said, “Yes, Eddie. He’s correct. You guys are related by marriage, so don’t hurt him too much.”
I don’t know if Adwaita roughed him up a bit, but I do know that when we returned to our van, the keys were in the ignition, the car stereo was gone, along with some personal items, such as Brahma’s expensive fur coat. (Yes, Brahma had a luxurious knee-length fur coat!)
The fellow returned the stereo and other items which we replaced in our van, but Brahma never got his coat back.
Model with fur coat, similar to Brahma’s fur coat.
Cintamani dasa
Jean Claude joined ISKCON in Montreal, Quebec, and took diksa from Bhaktipada at a fire sacrifice in Montreal in November 1980. He received the name Cintamani dasa. A couple years later, when Bhaktipada called all of his Canadian disciples to move to New Vrindaban, Cintamani was one of the first to heed the call of the spiritual master. Within a short time, he showed himself to be an excellent picker. I went out on the pick with Cintamani for a few months.
On our three-man party, he served as our cook. Cintamani loved cooking. He derived a special pleasure in preparing food for Krishna and watching his godbrothers eat the remnants. As I recall, in the mornings he made a steamed rice dish with vegetables. We marveled at the sweetness of his preparations, and when we complimented him on his cooking, he replied, “You can thank Srimati Radharani, Lord Krishna’s consort. I meditate on her when I prepare our meals, and she makes my preparations very sweet and tasty.”
After a few weeks I discovered the real reason why Cintamani’s rice dish was so sweet: he added an entire cup of sugar to the preparation while cooking! I was shocked, as I understood too much sugar is not good for the body, and I chastised him, “You’re not allowed to add sugar to our rice prep as long as you’re on my party!” After that, our breakfast was not as sweet, but it was healthier.
Another time, Cintamani and I traveled to Minnesota to do the pick in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. As I recall, our scores were satisfactory, but we ran into a problem when we got arrested in a small town outside of St. Paul. I don’t remember the name of the town.
Normally, when we were stopped by police, we acted frightened, “Oh no! Sorry, officer. Please don’t arrest us! We didn’t know we were breaking any laws. Please let us go and we won’t bother you anymore. Please?” After some time, we discovered that cops in the big cities would let us go with a warning, but small town cops liked to bring us in to the police station. I guess in small towns they don’t have much to do, as the crime rate is normally lower than in the cities. But even when the cops brought us in to the station for questioning, they usually let us go with a warning: “Stay out of our town and don’t come back!”
But the cops in this small town outside of St. Paul must have thought they had a major crime case on their hands. They locked Cintamani and me in jail, where we stayed for THREE DAYS! They must have searched our van thoroughly in hopes to find something major to charge us with. But they couldn’t find anything incriminating. In jail, Cintamani and I had separate adjacent cells. We couldn’t see each other, but we could hear each other, and we talked quite a bit. If I put my face against the bars of my cell, and if Cintamani stuck his arms out between the bars of his cell, I could see his hands.
Our days were not unhappy, although the time passed slowly. Upon rising in the morning, we chanted our rounds, and sang the Samsara Prayers, Prayers to Lord Nrsimhadeva, and the Jaya Radha Madhava prayers, dancing in our cells. When the jailers fed us, we ate whatever was vegetarian, after first offering it to Krishna. We passed the time by telling each other pastimes from Krishna’s childhood, which we remembered from reading Prabhupada’s Krishna Book. On the third day, the jailers released us. No explanation. No charges. No nothing, as far as I remember. Perhaps they might have confiscated our stickers, I don’t remember. Cintamani was a good partner. We got along well.
Bhaktipada and Cintamani dasa during kirtan at the temple. Photo from Bhaktipada’s Sri Vyasa Puja book (September 2, 1985).
Bhakta Dean
Bhakta Dean never took initation, but he was a big picker. He appeared to be about 20 years old, very handsome, with a blond crewcut. I don’t think he ever shaved up. On the pick he was HUGE! He collected more than me. When he was on Nityo’s party, or Bhaktisiddhanta’s party, he used hats as paraphernalia, something I never was able to do. Sundarakar at Palace Press printed our stickers, but after a time, Sundarakar began printing caps. They were white, made of cotton. Not as substantial as a baseball cap, but Sundarakar printed logos and names of sports teams on the front of the hat. Dharmatma purchased the hats from Taiwan and Sundarakar printed the logos on the hats. Pickers asked $10 per hat. Many pickers increased their collections by selling hats at big events. Somehow, I never took up selling hats, as I was doing quite fine asking $5 for a bumper sticker.
Bhakta Dean was my picking partner for about month. We were traveling to an event, I think in Washington D. C. from Connecticut, I believe. I drove our van through Connecticut and crossed into Manhattan. I drove across the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge, and pulled off on the shoulder. I asked Bhakta Dean to drive, as I was very tired and wanted to take a nap. I instructed him to take the New Jersey Turnpike south and when he crossed the Delaware River into the State of Delaware, to wake me up. I fell asleep in the back of the van quickly.
I woke up an hour later. When I looked out the front windshield, I saw a road sign: Delaware Water Gap! Bhakta Dean totally missed the exit for the New Jersey Turnpike some 75 miles earlier! We wasted over an hour. I told him to let me take the wheel and I’d get us back on course.
In those days, we liked to save time. Instead of pulling off the freeway, stopping the vehicle, and switching places, we’d change seats while driving 70 mph down the road. Of course, we wouldn’t do this if there was traffic, but if the road was clear and no other cars around, we’d switch seats while driving.
First the driver scooted up against the steering wheel. Then the relief driver climbed into the driver’s seat immediately behind the driver. It was a little tight, but do-able. Then the driver slid over about a foot to the right while the relief driver put his hand on the steering wheel. The driver then let go of the steering wheel and slid out of the seat keeping his left foot on the gas pedal. Finally the relief driver put his right foot on the gas pedal, and took complete control of the vehicle. We were quite proud of our efficiency. I was also proud of our safety record. On my parties, we didn’t do anything stupid or foolish, although there were times we drove all night long to get to an event hundreds of miles away the next day.
We learned a few tricks to help us keep awake. Of course, we’d lower the windows especially in winter. It’s difficult to fall asleep when you’re freezing. Another trick was standing while driving. We straightened our body in the driver seat so our rear end did not touch the seat. This was strenuous, but it made falling asleep impossible. If nothing else worked, we finally pulled over, found a place to park, climbed into the back of the van in our sleeping bags, and took rest. Too many New Vrindaban devotees were injured, and some even killed, in late-night car crashes. My wife, while on the pick was involved in a car crash near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She was taken to the hospital, but luckily had no major injuries.
Once during a long drive from Buffalo to New York City, I pulled over on an exit on State Highway 17 to take rest. The area was hilly, near the Catskill Mountains, with much forest. After sleeping a few hours, I heard some unusual noises from the front of our van. After a moment, the vehicle starting jerking, moving upwards in small increments. SOMEONE WAS JACKING UP OUR VAN! I got out of my sleeping bag and threw open the curtain hanging behind the driver and passenger seats. There in front of us was a car parked in front of us, and a young black man jacking up our car. I imagine he intended to steal our tires. I yelled, “Hey! Get outa here!"
He was surprised to see me, and he looked disappointed. Without saying a word, he dropped our vehicle back down, picked up his jack, got in his car and drove off down the highway.
Part Six: The End of My Picking Career.
Earlier, I mentioned that there were two reasons why my collections decreased: the injury to my vocal chords and a decline in my health. I was able to continue doing big on the pick by compensating for my decreased vocal ability and energy level by working quieter venues where wealthier people congregated, such as high-end restaurants, luxury hotel lobbies, and vacation resorts. I could still collect big without expending lots of energy. But when my health declined further, there was no way I could continue to pick big.
When I joined New Vrindaban in August of 1978, I was a healthy, 160 lb. 22-year-old, five-foot-eleven-inch-tall male. I had lots of energy and stamina, qualities which were needed to do the pick at the time. However, after a few years, I noticed that I was losing weight and getting sick more frequently. At one point, my weight had dropped to 148 lbs. When I took my five-man training party to Buffalo, I got a nasty case of bronchitis and I was sick for a month or two.
Every winter I’d catch a cold, and the resultant cough would last a month or two. I just didn’t have enough energy to run around in the parking lots all day. I needed to stop and rest more frequently. The pick, which I once enjoyed so much, now became a misery for me. I was thirty years old, and already feeling like an old man.
I was unable to regularly do big on the “pick” anymore because my body had lost much strength, I believe, partly from the stress of the service itself as well as our customary abuse of and disregard for the body’s needs. We never took a day off and hardly rested. Seven days a week, from 11 a.m. or noon until 9 or 10 p.m. we were out collecting money to help build a new temple for Radha-Vrindaban Chandra (the presiding deities of the New Vrindaban community), which, coincidentally, was never built. On big days when there was a football game or car race we would often start picking at 8 or 9 a.m. and finish late at night, sometimes after midnight. I think my diet was also inadequate; which is why I lost so much weight.
Finally in September of 1985 Bhaktipada, perhaps realizing that my days as a big collector were over, asked me to move back to New Vrindaban and help set up an office for the publication and distribution of his books: Bhaktipada Books, later known as Palace Publishing. During this time I became a “Weekend Warrior,” I went out on the pick every Friday morning and returned Sunday night. I worked events and lots in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cleveland, and other nearby cities.
In late February 1986, I traveled to India for the 500th anniversary of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s appearance (March 26) and actually shipped twenty-two cases of books (probably weighing a half-ton) from New York to Calcutta for free on an Air-India jetliner by asking Indian passengers in the ticket line if they would kindly check a case of Hare Krishna books for me on their ticket. (This was 25 years before the security measures were tightened after 9/11.) When the jet arrived in Calcutta I had to rent a pickup truck to get the books to Mayapur, where nearly all of them were sold.
When I returned to New Vrindaban in April, Bhaktipada had a surprise for me: a wife! He didn’t ask me to marry the particular girl he had in mind; he ordered me. [Endnote 50]
The author at New Vrindaban, about age 30 years. This photo must have been taken after my June 1986 marriage. I never wore fancy kurtas like that when I was a brahmachari.
When I refused, saying “She’s not my type,” [Endnote 51] he gleefully demoted me as co-director for Palace Publishing and sent me back on the road on traveling sankirtan. After a month, the daily grind of the “pick” got to me again and I begrudgingly surrendered, “Okay, Bhaktipada. I give up. I’ll marry her.” I was actually inspired to do this by my grand-guru Srila Prabhupada, whose father had arranged for him to marry a girl who did not appeal to him.
“But father,” Abhay protested, “I am more attracted by the beauty of another girl. Why must I marry this one?” His father philosophically replied, “If you marry a girl who is too beautiful, you will not be able to leave her later in life to take up spiritual practices.” [Endnote 52]
However, after getting married on June 4, 1986, I still had to go back out on the “pick” full time! Bhaktipada got me married and had my sankirtan collections also.
After I got married and moved back to the farm, my Indian wife sometimes prepared wonderful Indian-style vegetarian dinners, but I still couldn’t put on the weight I had lost. Clearly something that my body needed was missing from the Krishna diet. Yet some of my godbrothers got fat from eating the same things. It was a mystery to me.
By this time (June 1986) there was already a hint of change in the air at New Vrindaban, radical changes which would eventually result in a complete restructuring of the fundamental temple worship services and the predominant dress and appearance of the community. Bhaktipada had begun his most controversial mission: the de-Indianization of Krishna consciousness.
Chant and be happy! New Vrindaban outdoor kirtan, ca. 1989.
Left to right: Truthful (Jay Whitehead), Mahati Mataji (Murti Swami’s former wife), Peaceful Swami (Dennis Moreau, with guitar), Dhananjaya (Darren Anton), Vishvamurti (William Stachowski), Dhruva (Dwayne Shaw, with recorder), Murti Swami (William Walsh), the author (with accordion), Bhaktirasa Swami (Brooke Brody), Bhakta Steve, Bhaktisiddhanta Swami (William Crockett), Sarvabhauma dasa from Pakistan, Dhirodatta (David Soliday, with guitar), True Peace (Thomas McGurrin), Madhava Ghosh (Mark Kjos Meberg)
In October of 1986, Bhaktipada once again called me back to the farm; this time to start a choir which would sing great classics by Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc. with Krishna-ized texts: lyrics which had been rewritten to express the philosophy and emotional sentiments of the Vaishnava’s unique perspective on God.
New Vrindaban’s Minister of Music from 1986 to 1993, Hrishikesh dasa (1988).
New Vrindaban “City of God” Temple Orchestra (January 1991).
Accordions: Bhakti-Joy, Dutiful Rama, Chakravarti Swami, Dhruva; Organ: Radha-Vrindaban Chandra Swami; Violins: Yamuna, Good Hope; Double bass: Herapanchami; Harps: Bhavisya, Brihan Naradiya Purana; Trumpets: Vishvatamukha, Sudhanu; Percussion: Harikirtan, Wonderful Love.
I loved my service as Director of Music at New Vrindaban, but I still had to go out on the pick from time to time. By this time, Dharmatma had left New Vrindaban, and others took over as Director of Sankirtan. My godbrother Herapanchami dasa (Helmut Goth) served in that capacity, as did Devamrita Swami. By this time, I did not go out with the big pickers, I went out with less-experienced collectors, as I just could not keep up with the big guns.
For a month or two during the summer of 1987, I trained up a new godbrother from India, Kardama Muni dasa, on the pick. I believe he was studying at a college in the U. S. We worked shopping center parking lots in Maryland, as I recall.
During the 1987 Christmas Marathon, I traveled with Ambarish dasa (Anthony Monge) to the San Francisco Bay area, where we worked parking lots and shopping mall. He was not a fired-up picker, but he was a pleasant traveling partner. We didn’t collect much money, but we collecting some.
I spent a lot of time during that marathon in a recording studio in the hills near Oakland, California, recording a prototype cassette of the music which our choir sang at New Vrindaban. I hired four singers: a soprano, alto, tenor and bass, and played the studio’s electronic keyboard for the accompaniment. I guess I spent four hours daily in the studio, and four hours daily on the pick. Our New Vrindaban choir recorded the same album during the summer of 1988.
As I had lost my mojo as a picker, New Vrindaban administration sent me out to Washington D. C. on Mother’s Day selling roses on sidewalk tables. My godbrother Janmastami dasa (John Sinkowski) established that business which brought in probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to New Vrindaban. On Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, a flower vendor in a good location could sell $5,000 worth of roses.
Eventually I stopped picking for the community entirely, although my Indian wife still went out almost every weekend, collecting for the community. She kept out some money for our household, as we had a daughter in 1988 and a son in 1992. Our rent was $175 per month. I took care of the children during the weekends when she went out picking.
In 1990, after Bhaktipada began promoting accordions at New Vrindaban, I purchased a beautiful, second-hand concert accordion from a professional classical accordionist in Canada. The instrument cost $3,000. My wife paid for it by collecting on the road. I didn’t mind in the least that I was no longer able to do the pick. My service as Director of Music at New Vrindaban was satisfying and enjoyable.
When I rejected Bhaktipada as my spiritual master after the September 1993 Winnebago Incident, I still lived at New Vrindaban with my wife and children, at least until May 1994 when I moved permanently to Pittsburgh. During the summer of 1993 I had recorded my first compact disc, A Classical Christmas, featuring myself as accordion soloist with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The album cost a lot more to record and produce than I expected: I think close to $50,000, which was a huge sum of money for me. I borrowed a large sum from Mike Westbury, a local Wheeling musician (originally from New York City) who hired me on weekends to play accordion for wedding receptions with his jazz quartet.
From November 1993 to January 1994, I went back out on the pick, selling my CDs in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The best spot was at the corner of Walnut Street and Maryland Avenue in an upscale shopping/restaurant district in the Pittsburgh Shadyside neighborhood. I’d give passersby a citation, put a CD in their hands, show them my picture on the cover, and ask for $20 to help homeless people. I didn’t feel dishonest, because at the time, I was living on the sofa in the Northside apartment of my friends George Exoo (a Unitarian minister), and my godbrother Thomas McGurrin (True Peace), both who used to live at New Vrindaban. So I was, in a sense, homeless.
Nonetheless, I gave a donation of four hundred dollars (a miniscule amount) to the East End Cooperative Ministry of Pittsburgh, as they did relief work for the homeless. That year (1994) I sold 1,466 CDs, 82 cassettes, and collected $34,009 in tax-free cash dollars. This helped pay the rent for my wife and children’s house at New Vrindaban, and my own studio apartment in Pittsburgh. After a couple years, when I began getting regular work as a church organist and free-lance accordionist, I stopped doing the pick entirely. I don’t miss it in the least. I’m glad that part of my life is over.
Do I regret my time on the pick? Yes, and no. For a while, after I discovered that New Vrindaban may have been more a criminal enterprise than a spiritual community, I regretted my involvement with the community and my alleged “spiritual master.” However, after my first Hare Krishna history book, Killing For Krishna, was published in 2018, I received many email messages from former ISKCON members who had been traumatized by their time in ISKCON. They wrote to me to express their appreciation for my book (later to become a 12-volume series) because it helped them to heal and process their emotional trauma.
Since then, I have not regretted my fifteen years with the Krishnas. Sometimes I wonder if Krishna might have sent me to ISKCON back in 1978 so decades later, through my Hare Krishna history books, I could help people recover from the abuse they experienced while they were members of the ISKCON cult. Hare Krishna!
Endnotes
This arrangement was approved by Prabhupada, who wrote, “Concerning the outhouses, if they are not approved, then you can have a septic tank, or pass stool in the open field. I was doing that. I never liked to go to the nonsense toilet so I was going in the field.”—Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, letter to Kirtanananda (March 23, 1976).
4. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Morning walk, Mayapur (April 4, 1975)
5. About Sundarakar: Stephen Justin Fitzpatrick (December 12, 1954–March 9, 2017) grew up in Vermont. After he met the Hare Krishna people, he took initiation in Buffalo, New York in May 1975. He married Premamanjari devi dasi (Patricia), who was initiated a year after him (May 1976), also in Buffalo. She was tall, blonde, attractive, fair-skinned, and a big picker, and I believe she served for several years on full-time New Vrindaban sankirtan. In 1980, and probably before and after, Sundarakar served as president of Cleveland ISKCON.
Sometime in the early 1980s, the couple moved to New Vrindaban and Sundarakar served as manager of Palace Press. In addition to printing Bhaktipada’s books—Song of God, Christ and Krishna and Eternal Love—and Prabhupada’s books—The Bhagavat Dharma Discourses and Dialectical Spiritualism—he printed bumper stickers and hats for the traveling pickers. He printed millions of stickers on the Palace Press four-color press.
No other commercial printer would print these stickers, which featured images of the cartoon character Snoopy, and many other stickers with copyrighted names and logos of professional and college football and baseball teams. This was illegal and no other printer would print these images without paying royalties to the copyright owners, but Sundarakar printed them anyway, to help build New Vrindaban into a holy place of pilgrimage in the West and spread Krishna consciousness throughout the land.
Sundarakar in prison. But on May 24, 1990, a federal grand jury returned an eleven-count indictment charging Kirtanananda Swami Bhaktipada with racketeering: conspiring to murder, running a fraudulent charity scam, mail fraud, and the kidnapping of Hayagriva’s eldest son in 1979. Also named in the indictment were Terry Sheldon (Tapahpunja); Steven Fitzpatrick (Sundarakar); New Vrindaban Community, Inc.; Govardhan, Inc. (also known as the Govardhan Dairy, Inc.); and the Cathedral of Healing, Inc.
Sundarakar was convicted on the racketeering charges, printing copyrighted images and logos without paying royalties to the copyright owners. He spent some time in prison. The New Vrindaban sankirtan leader, Dharmatma dasa (Dennis Gorrick), also spent a year in prison for copyright infringement, and Tapahpunja (Terry Sheldon) was imprisoned for five years due to his involvement in the 1985-1986 conspiracy to murder Sulochan dasa (Steven Bryant). Bhaktipada was confined to house arrest for two years.
However at great expense, Harvard University professor attorney Alan Dershowitz presented oral arguments in Bhaktipada’s defense before a three-judge panel of the 13th Circuit Court in Charleston, South Carolina on June 18, 1992. Attorneys for Tapahpunja Swami and Sundarakar also presented their arguments. On July 1, 1993, the Fourth U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia overturned the 1991 Martinsburg West Virginia conviction on the basis of irrelevant testimony being introduced which may have swayed the jury.
After being discharged from prison, Sundarakar moved back to his home state, Vermont, and lived in a picturesque small town of about 1,200 people: Townshend, set amongst the rural hills, mountains, rivers and meadows in the southeast corner of the Green Mountain State. I believe Townshend is where he was born and raised.
Sundarakar writes to the author: Years later, I sent Sundarakar (and others) a copy of my obituary for Swami Bhaktipada by email. (You can read my obituary: here.) Sundarakar responded:
September 28, 2011
Hare Krsna HD [Henry Doktorski/Hrishikesh dasa]
We take the gifts we [were] given, leave the wrappings & ribbons & bows to the trash, and move on. I appreciate your music, your verve and the special place you hold in trying to make this right. My personal sense (w/guidance from Gita) is take the fire and leave the smoke.
It is the nature of this world to always have some fault. It is based on a faulty conception. Who can know? Who can know what each individual soul needs to experience, until we realize the futility of existence apart from God, the conductor?
I would say our interactions with one another may be like food. We savor its flavors and freshness, gather some nourishment from it and pass out the waste. We need not spend too much time trying to dissect yesterday’s garbage.
Pray to fill ourselves with awareness and love today this moment and everything can be seen in harmony.
I have a sister who has a very, very different conception of my father and mother. Sometimes I wonder if we grew up in the same household. I cannot deny or ridicule her position though it is quite different from mine. That path is for her steps alone.
Hope you are well and the sound of the fifth note is resonating in your heart. Surely there is an Almighty Father who lovingly guides each lost child back home, however painful that journey may be.
All glories to Nrsimhadeva. Prahlada finds joy in Him alone. (You should record this again, it has some sakti.)
[Author’s aside: Here, Sundarakar speaks of my musical composition Prayers to Lord Nrsimhadeva, a setting of the English translation by Umapati Swami of Jayadeva Goswami’s Sanskrit poem from Sri dasavatara-stotra which was sung at the New Vrindaban morning service with organ and orchestra accompaniment from 1988 to 1994.]
Thanks for the nectar.
Jaya Radhe Jaya Krsna Jaya Vrindaban
Sundarakara das
11. Keith Gordon Ham (Kirtanananda Swami), cited in Holy Cow! Swami.
12. Stephen Guarino (Satsvarupa dasa Goswami), “Selected Writings.”
13. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, letter to William Berke (Bali Mardan) (December 31, 1972).
14. Dennis Gorrick (Dharmatma), cited in Trial Transcript 2, Day Four (March 14, 1991), 869-870.
17. West 57th.
18. West 57th.
19. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-bhagavatam, 7.13.36, purport.
20. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, lecture on Bhagavad-gita, 2.17, in Mexico (February 17, 1975).
22. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, lecture on Bhagavad-gita, 5.3-7, in New York (August 26, 1966).
23. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, letter to Hans Kary (Hansadutta) (October 13, 1967).
24. Dennis Gorrick (Dharmatma), cited in Trial Transcript 2, Day Four (March 14, 1991), 928.
25. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, room conversation, Honolulu (May 5, 1976).
26. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita 10.36, purport.
27. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-bhagavatam, 1.13.37, translation and purport.
30. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Garden conversation, June 10, 1976, Los Angeles)
35. “A Final Comment,” New Vrindaban News (April 24, 1985), 4.
37. Ronald Nay (Gopinath), “Diary” (February 29, 1984).
38. Ronald Nay (Gopinath), “Diary” (March 2, 1984).
40. Arthur Villa (Kuladri), cited in Trial Transcript 2, Day Three (March 13, 1991), 492.
1981—$2,000,000
1982—$2,436,000
1983—$3,857,000
1984—$4,106,000
1985—$5,472,000
Total sankirtan revenue from 1981-85: $17,871,000.
48. Howard Fawley (Dulal Chandra), cited in Trial Transcript 2, Day Two (March 12, 1991), 351.
49. Actually my mother said no such thing. This was a joke that my father liked to tell about his mother.
50. Bhaktipada explained how the disciple should obey the spiritual master: “The spiritual master is the representative of Krishna. If the spiritual master tells me to stand on my head, I stand on my head. If he tells me to marry this girl, I marry this girl. If he tells me to do this work, I do this work.”—“Srila Bhaktipada Darshan: Noon, September 26, 1990,” The City of God Examiner, No. 37 (October 3, 1990), 2.
51. The spouses of New Vrindaban arranged marriages were often mismatched. Vrajeshvari dasi wrote, “Marriages are arranged by a genius at arranging materially hellish situations (I won’t say who). I mean obviously (it has been said) if it wasn’t for the mahamantra, we wouldn’t, or better couldn’t, be within 50 miles of each other."—Vrajeshvari dasi, “Spiritual Awakening,” Brijabasi Spirit, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1976), 23.
Mahamaya Devi dasi described her New Vrindaban marriage, “I felt upset when I learned that Kirtanananda Swami wanted me to marry Tribanga dasa, a Spiritual Sky salesman working Indiana, lured to New Vrindaban by promises of a wife, house, maha-prasadam [special foodstuffs offer directly to the deity] and whatever he wanted. . . . Although especially not wanting to marry him, I could see no way out. The next Sunday we were married at a New Vrindaban ‘flower ceremony,’ in which we exchanged flowers on the temple porch at Bahulaban [the devotee farm community on Limestone Road closest to route 250]. Everyone cheered and considered us married. We were given the Deities’ maha-prasadam afterward. The marriage went downhill from that point. . . . It was embarrassing to be married to this man. My unforgiving feelings are most accurately described by a crude expression I learned while growing up: I hated his guts. . . . After eight months of hell, married to Tribanga, I decided to leave him.”—Mahamaya Devi dasi, Srila Prabhupada Is Coming! (Holy Cow Books, Alachua, Florida: 2000), 97, 103.<.p>
52. Conversation between Abhay and his father, Gour Mohan De, cited by Satsvarupa dasa Goswami in The Life Story of His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Bala Books, Brooklyn: 1983), 4.
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