Room Conversation
with His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
June 8, 1976, Los Angeles
Prabhupada: […] Yes. So I did not say anything seriously, but perhaps he took it very seriously, Gopal’s father. So he might have written to Gopal that “Swami Bhaktivedanta wants to go to America. If you sponsor, then he can go.” So whatever the correspondence was there between the father and son, I did not know.
I simply asked him, “Why don’t you ask your son Gopal to sponsor so that I can go there? I want to preach there.” So after some months, three, four months, the No-Objection Certificate from the Indian embassy in New York, Gopal sent to me, yes, that he had already sponsored my arrival there for one month.
So all of a sudden I got the paper, No- Objection Certificate by the Indian embassy. After so much inquiry, I learned that so much inquiry was done and so on, so on. Then I tried to take a passport and paper process. So I got the passport. Then I approached that Śrīmatī Morarji. She once gave me five hundred rupees in exchange of my Bhāgavata book, so I approached her, that “Give me one ticket.”
They have got their shipping company, Scindia Navigation. So she said, “Swamiji, you are so old, you are taking this so responsibility. Do you think it is right?” “No, it is all right.” (laughs) At that time, I was seventy years old. So all the secretary, they thought that “Swamiji is going to die there.”
Anyway, they gave me the ticket, one return free ticket by their ship. Then arrangement was going on. So there is another process to get a P-form. You know.
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This is the nectar of the nectar. Thank you.