New Vrindaban Brijabasi Spirit

After the class Prabhupada leads an arotik kirtan and you can see Radha Vrindaban Candra, Jagannath, and a sweep of the assembled devotees, including multiple sannyasis, of  then and the future, and departed vaisnavas.

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Smaller Gaura Nitais.

Click here for a slideshow of more pictures.

New Vrindavan Community Vision Planning Team Presentation

Open program in the Lodge next Tuesday 29 November at 5.30 pm

Bhakta Tom Reinhardt will host a video program on Intentional Communities,
and speak on his experience with different Intentional Communities.

There will be pizza prasadam before the program, starting at 5.30 pm, video starting at 6.00 pm.

There will be a Q & A session afterwards.

Subject of video: “A New We”

Filming of ecological communities and eco-villages in Europe.

5 featured communities are:
1. Schloss Glarisegg, Switzerland
2. La Borie Noble, France
3. Krishna Valley, Hungary
4. Matavenero y Poibueno, Spain
5. Sieben Linden, Germany
total time: ~55 minutes

Open slide show presenting eco-villages in Missouri

1. Dancing Rabbit
2. Red Earth Farms
3. Sand Hill Farms

Brief description of Bk. Tom’s involvement with the “Fellowship of Intentional Communities” (FIC)

Everyone is welcome!

Bhakta Tom Reinhardt grew up in Wheeling, WV and joined ISKCON in New Vrindavan in 2007 through Tapahpunja prabhus’ small farm training center.
A graduate of a local high school, he served 6 years in the Marines.
Here in NVC he has done a variety of services for Radha Vrindavanchandra. He’s currently returned from an extended visit in Missouri, and will remain here for a couple of months.

YIS
Gaura Sakti das

Dear Brijabasis,

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!
We are happy to invite you for the Thanksgiving Dinner:

This Thursday, November 24, 2011
5:30 PM
Prasadam Hall

Radha Prabhu offered to be the head cook. A delicious meal will be served.

Your servant,
Jaya Krsna das

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Jayadevi’s son Dhanan has been coming to New Vrindaban on the weekends and spending some time with the cows. Here he is with a Jersey ox named Krishna

He has now started training with Balabhadra to work oxen. Here is Dhanan leading an ox.

Although they are both stubborn you can tell the difference between Madhava the ox and Balabhadra the trainer by counting the legs. Balabhadra only has two.

 
Originally launched as Krishna Camp in 2006, when younger ISKCON devotees from New Vrindaban established a presence at just two alternative festivals—West Virginia’s Rainbow Gathering and Nevada’s Burning Man—Krishna Kitchen has since evolved into a full scale prasadam catering company that hit fifteen events across the U.S. this year.

And it’s making prasadam—pure vegetarian food sanctified by being offered to Lord Krishna—more and more popular amongst people who don’t just find it delicious but also understand its value.

This year, Nitai Dasa, who joined ISKCON in New Vrindaban in 1998, distributed over 100,000 pieces of prasadam along with his crew, who have been on the road for a straight shot from mid July to mid October this year.

It’s an ambitious program, which aims for excellence in every area. Nitai’s fifteen-person core crew, for instance, consists of some of ISKCON’s top chefs and managers. There’s former Gita Nagari temple president Advaita Acharya Dasa, who currently runs an outreach center in San Antonio, Texas; Nanda-Nandana Dasi, former head cook of ISKCON Boston and currently running an outreach center in Northampton, Massacheussets; and Sunanda Dasa, former head chef of the Radha Damodara Traveling Sankirtan Party, Kalachandji’s restaurant in Dallas, and The Krishna House in Gainesville, Florida.

“We decided to invest in dependable, skilled devotees who run their own outreach centers, so that we are not just paying people to maintain themselves, but are also supporting worthwhile ISKCON projects,” Nitai says. “Our ultimate goal is to generate enough revenue through prasadam sales for them to maintain their centers year around.”

While in previous years, Krishna Kitchen staff cooked out of the back of trailers and trucks, this year, they’ve also aimed for top quality equipment, renting a twenty-foot kitchen trailer and using a thirty gallon propane-powered tilt-skillet that can cook enough subji for four hundred plates at one time.
Nitai has also gotten the best training in large scale catering that ISKCON has to offer.

“In 2009, I spent two months in Australia studying under the president of the New Govardhana farm Ajita Dasa, who has mastered prasadam distribution at festivals,” he says. “He and his team cater at over fifty festivals and make millions of dollars every year. So I studied their menu, production flow, and strategies on where to cut corners and where not to.”

Ajita’s formula, Nitai explains, is KISS: Keep it Simple, Stupid!—a reminder to those in catering who often get carried away with too many products and find themselves overwhelmed.

“Our menu is similar to theirs, with a few regional variations,” Nitai says. “We have a main course of royal rice, mixed veggie curry, savory kofta balls, tomato chutney and halava. Often in California, where people are very health-focused, we replace the halava with salad, and have several raw food items such as raw Thai curry and Nori rolls. Samosas, one of our few side options, are also very popular—we’ve sold upwards of 1,500 in three days. We also differ from Australia in that our whole menu is vegan. We find it easier to cook for a broad audience rather than having to provide multiple options.”

Krishna Kitchen caters at a multitude of yoga, sacred music, environmental and alternative festivals from coast to coast, including Oregon’s Beloved Festival and Bhakti Fest in Joshua Tree, California. But its two largest scale events, by far, are Vermont’s Wanderlust, the largest yoga/music festival in America, and Burning Man, a week-long festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert celebrating community, art, self-expression and self-reliance that draws over 50,000 people.

“We spent seventeen days there this year,” Nitai says. “The first week, before the festival, we fed the hundreds of artists who were out there constructing the temporary city and fabricating all the major art installations for the event. It meant a lot to them to receive this gourmet food while they were out there toiling under intense deadlines and weather conditions.”

Later, at the main Burning Man event, Krishna Kitchen delivered 1,000 plates of a special international menu every day. They also catered for the Burning Man administration—whom Nitai praises as being ‘responsible for producing the largest festival of its kind on the face of the earth’ with a twelve-course Indian feast including eggplant curd subji, opulent rice and urad dahl, strawberry avocado salad, spinach pakoras, samosas, two chutneys, and gulabjamuns.

Finally, they were invited to cater for Burning Man’s special TED conference, TEDx Black Rock City, a one-day event of talks and performances exploring the frontiers of human knowledge and experience.

“We served 1,000 sweet potato patras—a kind of swirly Gujarati fritter made with spinach and chickpea flour— along with apple chutney to the six hundred-strong crowd,” Nitai says. “The reception was very positive.”

Meanwhile at Wanderlust, Krishna Kitchen also catered a pre-festival event, the yoga teacher’s retreat Anusara Grand Circle, which saw several hundred teachers of the increasingly popular Anusara yoga gather from all over the country with founder John Friend.

Knowing the multiple offerings devotees had to contribute, Friend also invited them to produce a combined Krishna Kitchen and Kirtan Café in the Village Anusara section of Wanderlust.

“We created a kirtan/temple space with a full altar, decorated it with a fusion of Orissan cloths and South Indian brass lamps, and had a variety of kirtan artists from ISKCON and beyond perform,” says Nitai.

An extremely popular yoga teacher whose classes have been known to sell out 1,000 tickets, John Friend received a Bhagavad-gita As It Is in 1972 in a McDonald’s parking lot in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and never forgot the devotees.

“I just recently brought him prasadam at a program he was doing in Ohio, and he was super excited,” Nitai says. “He’s gone out of his way to express his desire to have prasadam at not only the Anusara Grand Circle, but at all his yoga retreats.”

Other major yoga teachers such as Shiva Rea, as well as Wanderlust’s impressive crop of widely-known music artists also repeatedly request prasadam by name. Michael Franti, who recently had a US Top 20 hit with his song Say Hey (I Love You), and just finished a tour with Carlos Santana, called Krishna Kitchen staff backstage to feed him and his band members prasadam after their performance.

“He was very expressive in his appreciation for the quality of the food, and went out of his way to thank us and invite us to other events he participates in,” Nitai says. “All these top tier people in the spiritual yoga scene—Michael Franti, John Friend, Shiva Rea—are very appreciative of and desirous of association with devotees. To them, we are not just some strange alternative sect—they have a commonality with us and respect us as bhakti yogis and deep spiritual practioners. And while they may not have taken to the process of Krishna consciousness themselves, it has definitely impacted them and added to their spiritual lives.”

To create an even more impactful experience of Krishna consciousness at the festivals he caters, Nitai has been gradually adding other interactive cultural elements to the Krishna Kitchen set-up.

At the last five festivals on this year’s tour, for instance, second-generation artists Gundica Dasi and Kuvaleshaya Dasa—whose father Nara-Narayana Dasa was the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust’s art director from 1975 to 1980—devised an interactive way to sell coconuts and other food products.

“They decorated our booth with custom fabric from Jagannath Puri, India, and transformed Kuva into the host, this character called The Coconut Baba,” Nitai says. “He wore a turban and glow-in-the-dark tilak, had his eyelids painted to look like another set of eyes, and sat on a vyasasana decorated with coconuts and lamps, chopping coconuts for hours. He drew large crowds, and would lecture them in Krishna conscious philosophy in an avant garde way—because he was playing a character, he could get away with anything. Meanwhile prasadam was being sold and kirtan was playing in the background. It brought the whole booth to life and made it so unique compared to the other stalls’ ordinary ‘Give us some money, here’s a pizza slice and a bottle of bubbly water’ exchanges.”

In the future Nitai hopes that the Krishna Kitchen experience will become even more interactive—he is working with other devotee-run projects to create a larger, more diverse space at festivals that will give people a more vibrant, powerful presentation of Krishna consciousness.

For now, however, he’s focusing on excellence in prasadam catering. Next year, he hopes that Krishna Kitchen will have its own custom-built kitchen trailer, created specifically for its needs.

“Already people see our food as not only consistent, flavorful, and top-quality, but they also recognize the Bhakti,” he says. “They understand that we have devotion integrated into our food that can’t be easily replicated. That’s why when event organizers book us to feed their event staff and artists, they specifically ask for prasadam by name. They understand the dynamic difference and the power behind spiritualized food.”

Nitai feels that the majority of the general public is initially drawn to devotees not by high philosophy, but by kirtan or prasadam. Prasadam, in particular, has the broadest appeal, and the greatest ability to give people a positive perspective of Krishna consciousness, and, ultimately, to transform their hearts.

“People are so much more interested in discussing philosophy with us once they’re totally addicted to our food,” Nitai concludes with a grin.

See article with pictures: http://news.iskcon.com/node/4030/2011-11-18/krishna_kitchen_makes_prasadam_fans_of_us_festivalgoers#ixzz1eAOvPzMj

Palace Restoration Committee

 Minutes – Conf call October 14, 2011

Present:           Gaura Shakti, Gopisa, Jaya Krsna, Tripad

Absent:           Malati, Ramesvara

Agenda:

1. Minutes last meeting

2. Update on the repair on the roof, the planning for the gift shop

3. Project manager, how to proceed

4. General planning for the overall restoration

5. Miscellaneous – decision on Parampara Prabhu as committee member

Minutes:

1. 1.  The minutes of conf call September 30, 2011, has been ratified.

2.  Update on the current work at the Palace

Material for the flat roof received and applied; two coats applied. Material for the domes has to be applied, arrived yesterday.

The roof still leaks, it means that there is another leak, which has to be sealed. Tripad checked the vent by the office; it is wet inside. The vent will be coated. Leak in this area showed up since about three months. The area around the vent was coated.

Gift shop: Clean out started at the old ghee factory. Clean out will be finished the upcoming weeks.

Stairs: Second mason will arrive on Monday to inspect the front stairs.

Gus provided a quote related to his work for the gift shop.  Gopisa is waiting for a response to the budget estimate.

1. 3.  Project Manager:

The members of the PRC see the need to elect the project manager for the restoration of the Palace in the near future. Gaura Shakti and Gopisa are the candidates for the service. A conf call with the other members of the PRC will be organized by Jaya Krsna to define the process related to the election. The joint board members are the authority to vote on the project manager.

1. 4.  General Planning

PRV wants to move forward on the overall restoration. The timeline depend on the availability of Gus. PRC has to decide the material to be used.  The topic will be further discussed when Gus responded to the gift shop topic.

1. 5.  The PRC members elected unanimously Parampara Prabhu as member of the Palace Restoration Committee.

JKd / 10/15/2011

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The goal for 2012 is to not buy any flowers for the Deities during the growing season.

An area has been set aside for this in the Garden of Seven Gates. Despite an unusually wet autumn,  some progress has been made. Here is Jayadevi standing in an area that has been covered with compost and had soft rock phosphate spread on it.

Most of this will be planted into annuals though some will be perennials.  20 mums and 20 peonies have already been planted.  The annual production will come up to speed in 2012 but it will take about 5 years to get the perennial garden fully planted. The eventual size could be about 5 times this area.

The gardens will be done organically. Chemical fertilizer is N-P-K which is nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. The nitrogen will come from cover crops and compost, the soils here are naturally rich in potassium and it can be supplemented with wood ash,  but they are weak in phosphate.  So we have supplemented with rock phosphate, an organic form,  at the rate of 2000 pounds per acre (2,200 k per Ha).  This is slow release so it will suffice for the next ten years.

The compost didn’t spread itself so Kalindi and her husband Adam did that.  They also spread some on some new terraces where berries will be planted next year.

Anyone wanting to contribute to support this project please let us know. One way is through the Contact Us form on the Home page of the Brijabasi Spirit.

We can also engage anyone who wants to donate time working in the garden so if you are planning a visit and want to do some hands on, let us know.

Another way to contribute is to grow some flowers in your own garden and donate them to the Deities directly.

If you have any divisions of perennials or flowering shrubs that you would like to share, we can accept donations of plants.  Before modern commerce and catalogs, that is how most gardens expanded, through gifts or trades with other gardeners.  You could also order plants through a catalog and have them sent to us but please contact us in advance so we would know what is coming.

Further plans for this fall is to  dig some daffodils in what used to be a picking garden for the  Deities but which is  a nonwalkable distance away and plant them in the temple area where the flower pickers can have easier access. Wouldn’t it be nice to do a thousand of them?

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The Brijabasi Spirit now has its own Fan page on Facebook for the convenience of our readers who prefer to have everything there.  Gotta keep up with the times.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brijabasi-Spirit/228623307204522

We have an ongoing desire for anyone wanting to write for the Brijabasi Spirit.  So much is going on in New Vrindaban and each person has an individual experience of that which we would like you to share.

Professional writing ability not essential and we can help with ideas or light editing if you want.  Regular reports from various departments, recipes, synopsis of classes,  guests stories,  unfolding natural events,  festival reportage — these are just a few ideas.

Current residency in New Vrindaban is not a requirement.  We have a category called “The Old Days” and anyone can write their memories from a time spent living here or as a visitor.  Or recount a story they heard from a current or previous resident.  The Holy Dham has no geographical boundaries.

The fact that mistakes were made in New Vrindaban in the past is well documented and widely disseminated — we don’t need to add to that body of work.  So we do request that stories and articles be of the category of the swan, positive and enlivening.

We don’t do straight up essays but will do discussions of philosophic nature if they actually happen in New Vrindaban.

We don’t do controversy. The internet is rife with places for weighing in on controversial topics we want the Brijabasi Spirit to be a safe haven.

Please contact Madhava Gosh if you feel moved to contribute.

Community Vision and Planning Team Meeting Tuesday 15 Nov at 6 pm.

Hare Krsna Devotees

It promises to be a very enlivening meeting, so please don’t miss it.

Your servant.
Gaura Sakti das