Jul 31, 2011, Alachua, Florida
Hare Krishna. Jaya Srila Prabhupada.
I am Madhavananda das in Florida. I’ve been around Krishna Consciousness for about 18 years all of the time as a Prabhupadanuga.
One of the things which I believe would be helpful is more of a network of likeminded devotees. Your website is a good spot for like minded devotees to connect, although there there is not really anyway to connect directly it seems.
What I propose is a way where devotees can get more of a sense of what the Prabhupadanuga devotee community looks like on a map. For example, I live in Florida. I will soon take a trip up the east coast to Massachusetts and it’s possible I could visit like minded devotees on the way. But if I don’t know where they are or who they are then it won’t happen.
If we can build a network on a map I believe it would be very instrumental in helping like minded devotees to directly associate together. My idea is that you put some kind of ad in your right hand column which announces – “Join & connect with the worldwide community of Prabhupadanuga devotees.”
From there devotees can sign a form with contact information like phone#, email, home address. Some people may want to keep all that info confidential, understandably, but at the very least everyone can put in their country, state and city, along with an email address. As the information of country, state and city is input it will somehow automatically display a point on a map showing where on earth that devotee is located.
The map will accumulate and display all of the locations of the devotees at once, so that any devotee can look at this map and instantly see where the different Prabhupadanuga devotees are located throughout the world. Ideally you’d be able to zoom in on the map just like any Google map, and if there are more than one devotees in any one city, it will either have multiple points or display the number of devotees.
Now of course this will take some smart programming, perhaps there is already a WordPress plugin that does this, but either way, it starts with the idea and if you are interested we can work on this.
Either you or I could keep the database of email addresses and personal info as that would not be available to everyone. Someone would have to mediate the contact info for devotees who request contacts in any particular place.
Currently devotees are scattered all about the world and very separated without much direct contact. For example I just saw one post on your website of a devotee looking for contacts in Germany. Surely there are devotees everywhere who would like to connect to others.
I think this is an important project to help bring like-minded devotees worldwide together and to have a greater sense of what our community looks like. Please do let me know if you are interested in this project.
yours in service to Srila Prabhupada,
Madhavananda das
Hare Krishna,
Please accept my humble obeisances,
All glories to Srila Prabhupada,
I fully agree. I left Fiskcon 10 years ago, but i hardly now any ritviks. Some festival in India in Kartik would be helpful. Also we could organize a little protest in front of some temples if there were enough devotees participating. Just some ideas.
I am sure here are others, but at our website, we have tried to establish just such a map. Map was there, but despite asking repeatedly, hardly anyone bothers to cooperate with such a progrm, I do not know why, unless there is some fear? Nonetheless, opportunities to interact etc are there in full, with an emphasis on just such social networking, direct devotee contacts and attempt to establish a sankirtana paty network as our membership increases. Srila Prabhupada’s ISKCON ; SPIrit-net. http://puredevoteeseva.ning.com/ HK.
Thanks Madhavananda prabhu, these are good points and as far programming concerned not a big deal to have a global Prabhupadanuga map plugin with contact info.
Presently the underlying community forum of prabhupadanugas.eu is istagosthi@googlegroups.com, a google group with hundreds of Prabhupada devotees worldwide where you can ask all kind of questions.
Hare Krishna,
Please accept my humble obeisances,
All glories to Srila Prabhupada,
I like this idea.
Your servant
Aprakrita dasa
I’ve shared a map with you called Prabhupadanugas:
You can view and edit this map at
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&authuser=0&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=202560062564171041233.0004a97dc02cb5799e453
Based on Madhavananda das’s idea as in http://www.prabhupadanugas.eu/news/?p=21759. I have created this public Google map. Please share this on your website.
Hare Krishna. Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada. I do not agree with all the ritvik ideas, but i took initiation from His Divine Grace in 1972 in San Diego and consider myself a Prabhupadanuga. Many thanks to Nitin prabhu for providing a map so quickly. i would enter my address in Fiji but i am not sure i fit the profile of your group closely enough. If you could provide a short list of what your members must believe i might be able to make a more informed decision. All glories to Srila Prabhupada, our eternal well-wisher.
Thanks Rasamanjari dd! Somewhat ritvik has become a four letter word because it might not be a name of God but rather a term like tapasya.
As you noticed there are meanwhile 30 fallen ISKCON gurus. Were they “destroyed” by ritviks? So far they were shreddered by the modes of material nature. Since 30 were removed by the material energy, why this should be the end of the story?
Why after 30 fallen gurus there will be no more others to follow who were appointed on the same hands up vote? And so it will go on and on by those who teach, “I do not agree with all the ritvik ideas”. Why blame the ritviks for a truckload of fallen “as good as God acaryas”?
Always remember it was the epidemic fall down of pseudos what caused present status quo, not vice versa.
Concerning the Prabhupadanugas to make look like a parallel movement, no, the “ritviks” is a reform movement, not a parallel movement.
As soon there is a parallel movement the reformation ends.
There are as mentioned above lots of Prabhupadanuga forums where all questions are answered.