After many years, the Hare Krishna Festival team returned to the historic city of Cambridge, UK, to host a festival at Cambridge University, in the West Road Concert Hall.


The hall was very grand, with state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment, and a very large stage, which would play a role in prominently displaying the devotees. A couple hundreds of guests turned up, most of them were English, but there were many other nationalities such as Japanese, American, Italian represented. There were lots of students, but many other people such as lecturers, businessmen and retired people as well.

The program was similar to the traditional festival format, short bhajans, bharat natyam dance, lecture, video of Srila Prabhupada and a final energetic kirtan, fully intense chanting, with the whole audience jumping up and down and dancing.

After that, the guests were served some light Prasadam, such as samosas, spring rolls, and mango coconut sweets.

The format and presentation was fairly chaste to the style, which Srila Prabhupada personally taught his disciples in many respects, but had a slight modern edge to it, such as in addition to the traditional bharatnatyam dance, there was a contemporary western style dance depicting reincarnation.

The festival was sponsored by Devaprastha dasa, in tribute to a festival in Cambridge a few decades ago where he met the devotees, when they did a festival at the Guildhall in Cambridge in 1989. He was a young student at the time and after meeting the devotees at that festival, he later joined the Hare Krishna temple, Bhaktivedanta Manor in Watford and spent around a decade as a full time monk.

Click here to watch the video of the event:

http://news.iskcon.org/video/hare-krishna-festival-in-cambridge-uk,525/#.UoT1nqVVgk8