Day 16 in Vrindavan
After morning puja and sadhana, I decided to go for Vrindavan Parikrama. By nature, I’m very observant. From a young age, I enjoyed observing people, their habits, decisions, mistakes, happiness and distress. Observing others helps me gain realisations for my internal growth.
There is a lot to observe on the streets of Vrindavan; devotees with all sorts of colourful clothes, hairstyles and unusual behaviour.
If you think that Paris Fashion Week is good, wait till you see people on the streets of Vrindavan!
There are brahmins with long sikhas and bright, flashy kurtas and lungis with thick borders.
Then there are sadhus with heavy dreadlocks and huge markings on their foreheads.
Ladies wear all varieties of colourful saris in an unlimited number of styles.
Even animals have style. Dogs, however cold it is, with pride, sit on the edge of the road and observe everything that is happening on the streets. Monkeys are playfully hanging down over damaged overhead cables on the streets. Cows – whose bodies are decorated with natural colours and minerals – are digesting their food in the middle of the road, totally oblivious to all the chaos around them.
Rickshaw drivers who are waiting for customers are not shy to take a nap inside the rickshaw with their legs hanging out, and sadhus on the side of the street are performing dandavats parikrama, ignoring the danger of the fast cars driving by and streets covered with all sorts of dirt and sharp items that could harm them.
After two hours on the streets of Vrindavan, I returned to my room. Sitting in front of my laptop, I reflected on how I have only one week left in Vrindavan.
I’m getting attached to this place.
I remembered the following passage from the book, The Journey Home:
Srila Radhanath Swami writes:
I saw a sadhu sitting in the hollow of a tree near the riverbank whom, I was told, was a hundred and ten years old. He wore only a burlap loincloth and his matted hair wrapped his head like a crown. His aged face drooped with folds of skin and he had to lift his heavy eyelids with his fingers in order to see.
With a stroke of the hand, he beckoned me. I soon discovered that he was a mauni baba, one who has taken a vow never to speak, and his only means of communication was a piece of broken slate and a clump of chalk.
As I squatted down beside him, he scratched two large words on the ten-inch slate: “People think.” Then he erased the words with his bare fingers and continued writing, “that the people,” he erased again and wrote, “of Vrindavan”—erase—“are crazy,”—erase. “It is true”—erase. “We are crazy”—erase.
Then he wrote in big letters, “for Krishna.” This, too, he erased, then wrote, again in sections, “If you stay here you will become crazy, too.” Then he smiled, as if he knew something I didn’t.
Am I also getting crazy?
Ananta Gopal Das
15.12.2023
Bhakti Wisdom 