Then all of a sudden I heard a huge verbal argument
Madhavananda das: Palika and Yamuna and Malati, in the kitchen they were preparing prasadam for Srila Prabhupada and I was in the front room, and then Srila Prabhupada was in another interior room on the ground floor behind his desk. His servant brought in a sadhu from South India, and he sat down in Srila Prabhupada's room but I didn't hear any conversation going on between them. Why aren't they speaking to each other?
Then all of a sudden I heard a huge verbal argument, and they were screaming at each other at the top of their lungs in Hindi. All of a sudden I was really concerned, what's going on? Then all of a sudden this guy storms out of the house. And for the next two weeks, Srila Prabhupada was so grave and if you listen to those lectures, he's talking about catur-varnyam maya srstam, guna-karma-vibhagasah, Krishna has established a natural system of varna and ashram, brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya, sudra.
It is something that happens within society naturally, and people are judged to be in one of these categories- brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya, sudra by their qualities and by the work that they do. Never in this verse does Krishna mention anything about birth.
So we found out later on that what this argument was about was this guy was coming in and saying, "You can't do this. You can't take mlecchas and yavanas from the West, meat-eaters, and convert them into brahmanas, give them the sacred thread, give them the sannyasa tridandi." Of course, this argument had been presented in different ways to his acharya, his Guru Maharaj, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta.
So this was a fight that was going on for a long time, and Srila Prabhupada in the next two weeks quoted all the different verses from all the different shastras explaining that Krishna consciousness is a universal movement, it is not just for India, it includes the entire world.
Reference: Following Srila Prabhupada-A Chronological Series by Madhavananda Dasa
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