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Boat Program - Book distribution along the Ganges

Sravanananda Dasa: When we were on the boat program… I hadn't really written too many letters to Srila Prabhupada before that; didn't want to burden him. Also from Madras, I think, there was just a couple of letters. But when I went to the boat program since Prabhupada personally asked me to do it, I wanted to keep him informed on what was going on. We had 16,000 Gitar Gans, a little book that Srila Prabhupada had poetically composed. He loved it and wanted it distributed in Bengal.

So in one month, we distributed that on our boat program. The boat program, you could talk hours about it, was an amazing preaching experience. We would get off the boat and distribute in the villages and sometimes get on trains - whatever we could do to distribute the books. I wrote a letter to Srila Prabhupada and told them about that. I still remember, he said, he was very pleased and he said, "That was, that is very… results. I love that. I still have that letter and a few other letters.

It was glorious to go around and do that on the boat on the Ganges - every town and village. Sometimes devotees, when we were stuck in a river, like the Rup Narayan, which disappears for about a week to ten days based on the moon phases; and the boatman that was running our boat, the majhis as they are called, they knew exactly when to prop the boat up in the middle of the river, and the whole river disappeared, so it was all dry. We could get out, walk on the riverbank, and go on the train and go back to Mayapur and go distribute books everywhere we could and then they said, "Be back in the afternoon. Because by the evening the river is coming back." We got back there and we climbed back on the boat and you could see miles away reflection of the water starting to come back. I don't know how that happens. It was pretty amazing. We'd distribute a lot of books and Prabhupada was very pleased with that.

Eventually, we also went on buses up to Darjeeling and Cooch Behar, and all over India, I mean, all over Bengal and Guwahati. We were only allowed to go as far as Guwahati. Even though in Assam they use the same Bengali script, the language is different. So we were wondering why not too many people were buying our books, but finally, we found out that Bengali and Assamese looked the same but they're a pretty different language. Still, they were buying them, even though they're… they wanted to see why we were there.

We had a big open truck, bus minibus, open up the window and music playing. We would stop everywhere to distribute books. It was pretty much the most ecstatic time of my life in Bengal. I guess that's why Prabhupada had me leave Madras because it was the most memorable, ecstatic time in my life.



Reference: SPF Interviews