Places Prabhupada chose to build temples

Gargamuni Dasa: In 1977 in January Prabhupada wanted to do the stone laying ceremony in Bhuvaneshvara. I was at the stone laying ceremony in Bombay, in Mayapur and now Bhuvaneshvara. Hyderabad, I don’t know if I was there for the stone, but I was there for the opening. I can’t remember if I was there for the stone laying ceremony. Anyway Prabhupada was to go there by flight. I brought the vans down before, with all the men and the parties and the cooking and everything. And we actually slept at the site.

Now I have to say the places where Prabhupada chose to build temples. We didn’t have the vision that Prabhupada had. For instance Juhu. Juhu was a little fishing village. The road wasn’t even paved. It was a dirt road or a gravel road or something and nobody lived there. We had to go into Bombay city to make members and that took almost an hour each day by train. Slow train, commuter train, that was always stopping, and there was no air-condition. Devotees got sick just going by on the train because of the heat. People were crammed in. There were no seats, we had to stand up. And then walk around Bombay in the hot sun to make life members. It was almost impossible. Nobody could do it. Finally I just gave up because I was just getting sick, getting sunstroke. Not enough water. It was hard to find good clean water in Bombay.

Then I thought, “What about Vile Parle?” which is behind the temple. Most of it was sewer land. In fact, the sewer water came right up to the stone wall of the Juhu land. There was a horrible smell in the back. It was this black, thick sewage water and most of Vile Parle was like that. However there were a few streets with bungalows, lines of bungalows, mostly of rich people and Bollywood movie actors. I've met Vyjayanthimala and her husband Dr. Bali. There was Manoj Kumar, Dilip Kumar. There were so many people there, I just decided to go door-to-door and make life members in Vile Parle, where it is much easier to go. I didn’t have a car, I walked and it was quite hot, it was very difficult.

So we all questioned Prabhupada, “Why is he building a temple where there’s nobody?” It’s just fishing people. There were no high-rises, there were no residential, just rich people. And most of it was all land and sewage lands with bad smell. We couldn’t understand who’s going to come here, who’s going to drive an hour from Bombay, from Marine Drive to come to Juhu. Who?! You know, we didn’t have the vision that Prabhupada had. That Juhu was now the center of the whole Bombay practically, it’s so spread out. That was the first aparadha we did in thinking Prabhupada was doing the wrong thing. We were all thinking that way.

The second was Vrindavana. When we came to Vrindavana in Raman Reti, there was nothing here. There was just that old college but nothing else. No shops, no stores, it was all jungle. In fact a rickshaw man from Loi Bazar wouldn’t come here because he couldn’t get a fare back and he had to go, spend a half-hour cycling back with no money. So they said, “No, we don’t go.” We had to walk from Loi Bazar sometimes. Especially at night, they wouldn’t come at night. It was dangerous. There were wild animals at that time, wild dogs, it was dangerous, you had to carry a stick with you. So we were also questioning why Prabhupada is building in a place where there’s nobody! Of course, we didn’t have the vision that Prabhupada had. Now, they call it the Vrindavana City II. This whole area of Raman Reti is like a new city. There’s the old city in town and there’s the new city, Vrindavana City II. You’ll see, it’s all full of concrete, there’s no more land left. It’s all taken up.

Again, we didn’t have the vision that Prabhupada had. Prabhupada had the vision. He’s a shaktyavesha-avatara. He knows the future, he knows everything that Krishna wants to give to him, he knows. You can’t say he doesn’t know any subject matter. He can know every subject matter. And he did, he spoke on history, he spoke on science, he spoke the book Dialectic Spiritualism on thirty different philosophers. He defeated or agreed with them. How did he know their philosophies? He knows everything. There’s nothing Prabhupada does not know because he’s part and parcel of Krishna, so he has to know everything. He comes from Vaikuntha, why shouldn’t he know the material world? It’s an expansion from Krishna and so is Prabhupada, so are we as part and parcels. Again we didn’t understand Prabhupada’s vision. We didn’t understand the vision of a Vaikuntha personality, a Supreme Personality of Servitor Godhead. We didn’t know his vision. We didn’t understand.

And the third was the worst—Bhuvaneshvara. Bhuvaneshvara was on a national highway. But it was so far away, for 20 miles, you could see only, not even trees, just nothing, bushes. For you to see a car may take a half hour, for a car to come. And you wouldn’t see the car, you would hear it because this land was in the middle of nowhere. No villages, no trees, or very few trees, mostly bushes. I mean we said, “Who’s going to come here?” In fact, for the stone laying ceremony, just some children came from some nearby villages, we didn’t even see where they were. So we thought, “Wow! This place is… It’s going to be a difficult place to collect money because we were miles from the main city of Bhuvaneshvara.” But Prabhupada was insistent that this place will become a big temple. Again! Now it’s in the center of Bhuvaneshvara. Bhuvaneshvara has expanded. Again we kind of completely misunderstood the vision of a pure devotee. It’s difficult for us to come to that level but through faith, unflinching faith in Krishna and Prabhupada, then we may come to that level. 

Anyway, we came for the function and they built a little pandal, very small pandal where Prabhupada could sit on the vyasasana and he gave the lectures. We did the stone, we did the kirtanas. Electric supply, maybe he got some electric supply. Gaura Govinda was in charge. Gaura Govinda, it’s a very interesting story, there’s a film about it on Yadubara where Brahmananda tells the story how Gaura Govinda joined the movement. Gaura Govinda was in Vrindavana at the time. Maybe it was ‘73 or so and he used to come on Prabhupada’s morning walks in Raman Reti here. The temple wasn’t opened yet, it was being built. So Gaura Govinda, maybe it was ‘75, I don’t know, I can’t remember that, you have to look it up.

Anyway, he used to come on one, Brahmananda said two, three morning walks. Then Prabhupada invited him back to the temple and he said, “This person I’m going to initiate and we had to do a whole initiation because he came from a very high-class brahmana family in Orissa.” Prabhupada immediately, he was the first Orissan devotee and very educated, he came from brahmana family, so he was pakka brahmana. Prabhupada wanted him to go and open a center in Bhuvaneshvara, and he went there on his own. I did help him from Calcutta. I printed two books, small books which I paid for from Calcutta funds to get him started in his preaching. But he was there all by himself. Finally, devotees came. Then Prabhupada, of course, came and opened, did the stone-laying ceremony.