720218 - Letter to Balavanta written from Calcutta

Letters by Date, 1972

Tridandi Goswami
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami

Date: February 18, 1972
Camp: ISKCON Calcutta

My dear Balavanta,

Please accept my blessings. I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of January 25, 1972, and I have no objection if the date for celebration of Lord Chaitanya's Appearance Day be moved up to April 15. The programme sounds very transcendentally satisfactory, and if I am in USA by that time I shall certainly come to see it. I am very pleased that you are running for Mayor of such important city as Atlanta, now you present to the populace the perfect example of Krishna Conscious person, and always be very clean and neat. You may present the simple programme to the citizens for becoming purified and regaining their lost happiness by meeting together frequently to chant Hare Krishna, that's all. We have no complicated political platform. Politicians today are simply pick-pockets, tricking the voters to pick their pockets. They make promises to gratify the public's senses, but then they only gratify their own senses and the public throws them out, repeatedly. So we can promise perfect peace and happiness, and we can fulfill our promise very easily. You and the other devotees are the practical demonstration, and whenever you speak in public they may be also present and hold kirtan and give speeches also. Actually, this world is like a hospital. We are all like sons of rich men running mad in the streets. Our Father, Krishna or God, is the wealthiest father, and we are all His sons gone mad. Someone is thinking, Oh, give him food, that will help, or give him house, or clothes, this or that--but the madness is still there.* So this kind of bodily welfare work will not help. The world is supposed to be a place for curing men of their varieties of diseases of madness and sending them back home, like a hospital. But men have now got the mistaken idea to make a permanent settlement in this madhouse! Just like the hog is eating stool and he is thinking, Oh, I am enjoying like anything, and when I am finished, then sex with any she-hog--wife, daughter, sister, it doesn't matter--and for so many children I shall have to have big house, and on and on like this, all because of his madness that he thinks "I am enjoying." So preach like this, and I think many people will appreciate our philosophy and gain respect for this Krishna Consciousness movement. Do everything very cleanly and nicely.
Hoping this will meet you in good health and happy mood.
Your ever well-wisher,

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami

*Actually, they have got sufficient of everything from their Father, but they have run off mad. [handwritten]