It was the Ministry of West Bengal led by the Honorable Chief Minister Sushri Mamata Bannerjee who facilitated the final journey of the vapu (body of ISKCON-guru Bhakti Charu Swami, who passed away on July 4th in Florida, back to Mayapur.
Good communication brings about a healthy relationship, as ISKCON’s Governing Body Comission and ISKCON guru Hridayananda Das Goswami found this month. Hridayananda Maharaja’s Krishna West project began in 2013. But due to ill health, he had not had the chance to meet with the full GBC body about it until this October 15th and 16th, during their mid-term meetings in Ujjain, India.
A video by West Coast Monk.
In 1968, Prabhupada was issuing instructions about the community: “The Ashram may be named as "ISKCON-Nagari or New Vrindaban.”
ECO-Vrindaban (ECOV), the self-sufficiency wing of ISKCON’s New Vrindaban community in West Virginia, USA, is on the lookout for a general manager to oversee its steadily expanding operations. Today ECOV has a herd of 48 cows, oxen, and calves, in contrast to the 300 it started with at its inception. This may at first seem like a step back, but it’s actually an intentional move towards a far more sustainable model.
On the auspicious day of Radhastami, Jayapataka Swami, co-minister of the Congregational Development in ISKCON, congratulated the Namahatta devotees from Sridhama Mayapur for having reached out to a record number of 15 million people in their last 35 years of preaching Krishna Consciousness.
I'm born Jewish. I have identified as a Vaisnava three times longer than as a Jew in my life. I've been to Israel three times; Gaza once.
“Aha! I’ve got a name for our festival!” Citralekha Dasi called to ISKCON Communications Director Anuttama Das from her office across the hall. And she told him what it was. He grinned. “It’s perfect." The first annual Festival of Inspiration, held in 2001, quickly lived up to its name. It put New Vrindaban, which had recently rejoined ISKCON, back on the map as an important place of pilgrimage for North American devotees.
The 2014 West Coast Vaisnava Women's Retreat will be held April 25-27, 2014, at Radha’s Garden in the San Diego area.
When New Vrindaban, ISKCON’s first rural community, was first established in 1968, it became, for many years, a shining example of the best that ISKCON had to offer. After a series of well-documented legal transgressions and spiritual deviations in the 1980s, however, many devotees left. Now New Vrindaban is in the midst of a major transformation.
New Vrindaban, established in 1968 by ISKCON Founder Srila Prabhupada as his society’s first rural community, is continuing its transition into an exciting new phase. After a series of difficult pioneering attempts in the early years, the community struggled for decades with a dedicated skeleton crew. But since spring 2011, a renewed effort has been made to revitalize New Vrindaban.
The Palace of Gold was constructed during the ‘70s and opened in 1979. Time and weather have taken their toll over the last 35 years and Srila Prabhupada’s “Samadhi in the West” is in need of major renovation work.
Srila Prabhupada’s vision for New Vrindaban includes four main topics, one of which is holy pilgrimage. New Vrindaban is, of course, an ongoing and very important place of holy pilgrimage for many devotees and guests from all over the world.