Impossible is a word in a fool's dictionary.
Ramesvara das : Prabhupada had become very disturbed. He had learned that his manuscripts that he had written through amazing sacrifice of sleep, he stayed up at night and dictated his books, they had been sent in to our New York BBT office and they had not done the production. He had written so many books with commentaries, and they were just lying there. So Prabhupada had flown into Los Angeles, and it was a very tense beach walk. He was discussing how important it was to publish these books and how upset he was that they were lying there, and he was demanding that they be published right away. He then asked, "How long will it take?" So Radha-vallabha from New York was there because he had been the production manager.
So we pulled ourselves back and we discussed, "How long will it take you to get me the books so I can send them to the printer?" And he told me that he thought we could do one book every two months. At this point, we were doing one book every four to six months. So we went back into the walk, we caught up again and we told Prabhupada, "We think we can do one book every two months." So Prabhupada turned around and said, "I want all 17 books done in two months."
I just blurted out, "Srila Prabhupada, that's impossible." At that point, Prabhupada stopped walking and he had a cane and he planted it in the sand, and he turned around and looked at me very gravely and said, "Impossible is a word in a fool's dictionary." And there was complete silence. We were all stunned. We were just completely stunned.
Here is Prabhupada, perfectly in touch with Krishna, telling us that this can be done. It seemed to defy the physical laws as we knew it. So after some very long moments of silence, Prabhupada started walking immediately and the senior devotees, they just turned and started staring at me like, "So what are you going to do?"
So this was a matter of just absolute blind faith. Either you believed or you did not believe. It was that type of moment where you commit, never mind what your intelligence is telling you is possible. So Radha-vallabha and I fell back again and we started talking, "We have to do this, this can be done," and all of a sudden we started coming up with ideas that we hadn't thought of. And we started getting ideas of different parallel production lines and turning the production lines into 24-hour production lines with two or three shifts and recruiting devotees from all over to help us with this and on and on and on.
And this was all happening in the span of just a few minutes that we were being flooded with these ideas, and we both realized that in order to do this we all had to be together in one central place. And it seemed more logical to do it in Los Angeles - we have the housing for everybody and we can expand easily.
So then we caught up to the walk and we said to Srila Prabhupada, "If we are going to do this, we have to move the entire BBT division from New York to Los Angeles - the art department, the production, everything." And Srila Prabhupada approved that. He said, "Fine. Do it immediately." And we started.
Ramesvara das: So the 17 books got published. The last book came out probably on the last day of the two-month cycle, and we called the secretary and we told him, "It's done." We gave up everything, and somehow it happened. This is a very happy time.
Everybody is feeling that there's nothing we can't do now. We can spread this movement anywhere in the world. There was no limitation on anything. That's how we were all feeling. Not just the devotees who immediately were involved, but devotees all over the world were feeling that there are no material restraints or limitations. So it was really a great moment for everybody to expand their book distribution and their convincing people to join the temples. It was just one of those great times.
Reference: Following Srila Prabhupada-A Chronological Series by Ramesvara Dasa
Recently Added
Trending Today