Prabhupada Chose to live in a humble way

Satsvarupa Dasa Goswami: I wrote this diary while again serving for one month as Prabhupada's GBC secretary. My turn began just after Prabhupada left the Kumbha Mela and went to Bhubaneshwar. Bhubaneshwar is the capital of Orissa, the poorest state in India. Our land was really out of the way at this time. If you went down the road from town, it was all bare land. Then suddenly on the side of the road there were three tents pitched, and a small, crude, cottage-like building. Srila Prabhupada's disciple, Gaura-Govinda Maharaja, had made this cottage himself with bricks and whitewash. It consisted of just two rooms and a roof of thatched straw, which wasn't even fit firmly onto the building. Srila Prabhupada was staying in one of those rooms, and the other room was for his servants. Although Prabhupada had big temples all over the world, he chose to live in a humble way. He liked it because he was not attached to any material facility. I regard this section of the diary as particularly potent because much of it is verbatim from Prabhupada, or directly paraphrased. This is the kind of diary I wish I had always kept when I was with Srila Prabhupada. It was a deliberate act on my part to go into the servants' room immediately after being with him, or at least whenever I had a chance, and type up what I remembered. One simply can't remember details like this weeks or years later. If only I had kept a diary like this from the beginning in 1966!