Today is the appearance day anniversary of my spiritual master, Om Visnupada Devamrita Swami, according to the lunar calendar observed by Vaisnavas (members of the Hare Krishna movement).

Since we are doing the Sunday Feast program today we observed it yesterday with an afternoon gathering at our house in Red Hill.

We shared a little bit of our experience and appreciation of His Holiness, watched a bit of a VCD that we made of the release of Perfect Escape in Spanish, where His Holiness spoke after an introduction by the Indian ambassador to Peru.

Then we had prasadam.

Vyasapuja offerings written by Maharaja’s disciples are available for viewing online at www.devaswami.com. Mine isn’t there. Some years I send it in for publication. Others I don’t. The others have written wonderful offerings that very nicely glorify His Holiness Devamrita Swami for his many great qualities, and I recommend reading them. Mine is not so good.

I’ve been writing on this site for over a year now, and that writing was motivated by repeated requests from senior devotees for someone to start a website to provide a positive alternative to the web content related to Krishna Consciousness available at the time.

My realization at that time was that the future lay not in “a website”, but a culture of writing for the web, and a network of devotees who prioritized publicizing their activities. In order to contribute to this I began to model this, following in the footsteps of His Grace Aniruddha Prabhu, by starting a weblog.

ISKCON News.net (www.iskconnews.net) is the outgrowth of that.

My personal writing is of whatever value it is, but I personally feel that its real value, and my underlying motivation in doing it, in spite of my shortcomings and misgivings, is in demonstrating to others what the potential is, and inspiring others more qualified than myself to take up the baton.

For the Vyasapuja offerings and their publication, there are already so many other devotees publishing their offerings, and they are of a much better quality than mine. Anyway, it’s not my dharma to be famously humble, so that’s enough of the self-deprecation. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…