Page 15 - GOTIL (ENG) Sample

Introduction

Sometime in 1993 in Dubai, while driving me back from
an evening lecture program, my good friend Raṅganāthan
started to tell me about his childhood in a traditional
Śrī Vaiṣṇava village in South India. Encouraged by my
1
interest he went on talking even after we reached my
apartment; and it was well after midnight when I finally
got out of the car. I lay down to rest thinking about the
pleasing life he had led, and how even now people could
again live like that if they would simply agree to.

My memory wandered over the years I had spent in
India and Bangladesh. In the course of preaching Kṛṣṇa
consciousness, I had traveled throughout the Indian
subcontinent and experienced the varieties of Hindu
culture prominent in each area. Having stayed in the
homes of many pious and cultured Hindus, I had gradually
come to learn something about real culture. I thought of
the many cultured persons I knew throughout the Indian
subcontinent, living representatives of a dying way of life.
I resolved to compose a book based on interviews with
such people, to try to convey a feeling of what life in the
old India was like, and what it could and should be like
even now. I began contemplating how man had gone

1. Śrī Vaiṣṇava — adherent of the bona fide Vaiṣṇava sampradāya
that worships Kṛṣṇa in His majestic form as Nārāyaṇa.

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