A surprising article about BVHA founding member Paramadvaiti Maharaj in the Washington Post, no less, by his nephew, 26-year-old Chico Harlan. I rather enjoyed it.
Excerpt:
Paramadvaiti crisscrossed South America setting up temples for the mission, and he was good at it, a talent that triggered his rise through the faith. But Krishna members, at the time, faced persecution across the globe. He was jailed in Argentina and Paraguay, told only that the government prohibited all religions except Catholicism, he said.
One guard with a particular zeal for torture dragged Paramadvaiti into the jailhouse bathroom and ordered him to wipe feces off the floor. Paramadvaiti clawed for his spiritual strength, until at last he realized that Lord Krishna must have willed this feces-cleaning, because it taught a lesson about pride, and no man should be too proud to obey orders. So Paramadvaiti... well, he kept on cleaning, and he even grew kind of happy.
"The torture guy came back, probably expecting some monk to be in there looking all miserable, and he sees me like this," Paramadvaiti recalled. "Yes, I was happy!" He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper: "I think I blew his mind."
There is a nice slide show of Maharaj in Vrindavan. Some of the photos of Vrindavan, like no. 3 of Govindaji mandir, are pretty spectacular. Nice to see something about Vrindavan in the Western media that is NOT about widows.
Those pictures tell me that PS sold his nephew on something, managed to give him a positive picture of Vrindavan. He does not dwell on the negative, but shows several pictures that bring out the beauty of the place. Which is not always that easy to do.
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