BTG A WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE
One of my friend, who is a devotee gifted me a one year subscription of Bad To Godhead magazine. I went through the articles published in the last few issues like 'The Vedic Obsetver', 'Can you drive away the fog?' (November 2007). editorial section,etc. 'No Regrets' by Murari Gupta Dasa was the best article I found in the January 2008 issue.
Back to Godhead is a wonderful experience, espically for young devotees like me. It's refreshing and always new. The article published in the magazine are amazing. I am espically impressed by articles of Srila Prabhupada.
You always select good and exotic pictures for the cover page that attract devotees/non devotees to go for the magazine. Srila Prabhupada wanted this magazine to be even bigger than the TIMES magazine. I wish BTG all the best on its 60th Anniversary and 30th disappearence day of Srila Prabhupada.Please keep writing such good articles.
(Pranjal Joshi, Jaipur)
MOVIE MANIA
A recent BTG article entitled "Om Shanti Om" was based on a Hindi movie and it even contained a dialogue from the movie . Will this not encourage material interest arrong BTG readers? (Anonymous)
Caitanya Carana Dasa, the author of the article, replies:I myself didn't see the movie; I am a brahmacari at ISKCON, Pune and have neither the time nor the interert to squander a colossal three hours on a movie. A devotee friend told me about the movie, mailed me a review of the movie from the net and told me about the dialogue.
Why did I choose this movie as an article topic? Often people think of spirituality as abstract, irrelevant and unrelated to their daily ''real'' lives. Therefore the resourceful spiritual teacher tries to connect with Krsna the mundane things that people are enamored by. By talking about the movie, I could get the attention of people and then guide that attention towards spiritual wisdom. And the strategy worked; my website, thespiritualscientist.com, recorded many more visitors after this article was posted as compared to after the posting of other articles.
This is the principle of yukta-vairagya taught by Rupa Goswami: use material resources in Krsna's service, instead of rejecting as mundane. If somebody rationalizes his own materialistic agenda after seeing the opulence used for the Krsna, then this misdirected desire is due entirely to his own misuse of free will. If after seeing the magnificent architecture of a temple, people become greedy to to build a similar house for themselves, can the temple builder be blamed for causing greed among the visitors? If after seeing the gorgeous Dress of the deities, somebody wants to dress himself (or his spouse) similarly, can the pujans be blamed for creating material desires in them? The same logic holds true for my article.