Page 15 - GOTIL (ENG) Sample
P. 15

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
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         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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