Absolute fashion.

After the GBC meetings, the van was again packed up Ratha Yatra bound. NYC, here we come! Again.

We arrived in Brooklyn around 9 pm. With just enough time to catch a quick shower and powernap, we headed down to Washington Square Park for late night set-up starting at midnight. Good times with the local entertainment and four hours of tent and pole placement later, we jumped on the subway around 4am, got back to the temple just before mangala arati, but slept through the morning program anyways. We were up and showered, however, by 8am and in the van soon after for a quick stop at 26th & 2nd Avenue, the historic site marking the first Hare Krishna pad and bhajan kutir in North America.


The Ratha Yatra began in Central Park at noon. The crowd was in the thousands, all scrambling to help pull Lord Jagannatha’s chariots some 50 blocks down 5th Avenue. I think the pictures say it all. Check out this rockstar Vaisnava mama keepin’ it reals with triplets.

H.H. Praladananda Maharaja (who weeks ago in Srimad Bhagavatam class explained how we all worship a deity, meticulously dress, bathe, and feed them nicely and very opulently, but in most cases the deity is our own bodies), and H.H. Bhakti Caitanya Maharaja led great sessions in the question & answer tent at the festival landing site, where I proceeded to help serve out free vegetarian prasadam to what seemed like thousands of folks. I kept on asking myself, as the line grew longer and longer, “How to go about feeding NYC?”

In all the excitement and madness, I left my backpack in the Brooklyn temple and was forced to leave it when my ride to Gita Nagari informed me that it would be too far out of the way to retrieve it. What to do? Me, my sari, and my humble fanny pack arrived in Harrisburg three hours later and spent the night at Motha’ Lila Katha and Tamal Krishna Prabhu’s lovely new home. Lila geneoursly hooked me up with some necessities so that I arrived at Gita Nagari in Port Royal, PA, the following afternoon, with a fresh sari and toothbrush in hand.