Praṇamāmi Guru Tīrtha Padaṁ

One time Guru Mahārāja (Śrīla Bhakti Dayita Mādhava Gosvāmī Mahārāja), Gaurāṅga Prabhu, and Tīrtha Mahārāja visited the appearance place of Śrīla Prabhupāda in Puri-dhāma to pay obeisances. Suresh Prabhu and I were also present then. All of us took darśana, paid obeisances, and were about to leave. 
There was a tenant named Nārāyaṇa Sahu who occupied 3-4 rooms upstairs. He used to sell pakoras (a type of fried food) that contained onion. In order to insult Guru Mahārāja, he began to plead with him in Oriya language to accept pakoras from a poor man like him. 
Guru Mahārāja smiled and said, “Nārāyaṇa Sahu knows very well that we don’t eat onions so we can’t accept it.” 
But Nārāyaṇa Sahu continued to plead. When he repeated the third time, Śrīla Tīrtha Mahārāja got very angry and his eyes became wide and turned fiery. He shrieked and chided that person. Whosoever was present got scared on seeing his fearful form and foam was coming out from his mouth on both sides. His entire form becam...

On the morning of Monday, June 26, 2002, Śrīla Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja had a meeting with Father Alfred Agius, a Catholic (Jesuit) priest, who served as head of the Westminster Interfaith group which encompassed greater London. This meeting was intimate, with only Mahārāja, Father Agius, and a few other devotees present. After exchanging introductions, Father Agius showed the devotees a number of nice publications he had assembled for the Westminster Interfaith group, demonstrating his sincere dedication to presenting religious perspectives from various faiths. After perusing these materials for some time, Mahārāja engaged in conversation with Father Agius.  He explained the vital difference between the idea of the modern caste system, which is based on birth, and the varṇāśrama system, which is based upon the character of a person. He showed how the varṇāśrama system is a natural thing.  He said, "If someone has the tendency to worship and study scripture, he ...

This morning, at around 9:30 AM, while Śrīla Gurudeva was taking his breakfast, I conveyed the heartbreaking message of Parama-pūjyapāda Śrīla Nārāyaṇa Mahārāja's departure from this world. As soon as he heard, he was shocked. "Left the body?" He asked, his mouth fell open in shock. He paused for a while and again said, "He left the body? I was informed that his health had improved. Is it not?" I said that there was an improvement after what he had heard about Śrīla Nārāyaṇa Mahārāja's serious health trouble in October but that he left the body at about 3:00 AM today. Śrīla Gurudeva then said, “Everyone has to leave one day. Anytime anything can happen. This cause, that cause is just instrumental.” He took his next spoonful of breakfast and said, "He roamed a lot outside India even at his advanced age. What is good is that he left his body in India and that too in a dhāma."  After a while, he asked about when and where the samādhi would take place....

I came to Śrīla Gurudeva Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja after becoming his first non-endian full-time disciple. I was initiated in 1995 at Śrīdhāma Vṛndāvana on Baladeva Pūrṇimā at the end of the Rādhā-Govinda Jhulan-yātrā festival of Sree Caitanya Gauḍīya Maṭha. On my second trip to India in 1996, I approached him with the idea to study Sanskrit. Gurudeva replied, "You did not come to me, you came to learn something." It meant I came with the desire not to serve the Guru but to learn something for myself. I clearly understood that Gurudeva gave me a choice to become an independent scholar in Sanskrit or to be his fully dedicated disciple.  I still insisted on my studies anyway. Gurudeva agreed with my desire and allowed me to live in Kolkata maṭha while I was attending Kolkata Sanskrit College, the same college where Śrīla Prabhupāda Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura studied one hundred years before. A professor of Sanskrit there asked me, “What do you want to learn...

One day Guru Mahārāja suddenly got very restless and started saying, "I have to go to Goalpara, I have to go to Goalpara!" So Prasād Prabhu asked me to please explain to Gurudeva that I think it's not right for him to travel at this point in time. "Why don't you wait?" I asked. Very sweetly Guru Mahārāja agreed, but when I went out, he started saying the same thing again; "I have to go to Goalpara, I have to go to Goalpara!" That night, I had a dream of Guru Mahārāja in which I saw my childhood school where I studied until standard six. I saw the assembly area of that school and Guru Mahārāja was lying there so very still. I went there and put his head on my lap and asked, "What is happening? Why are you lying here?" He told me, “I am going. I will go, but I will not go.” It didn't make any sense at that time to me. The next day, I came to know that he forced everybody to go to Goalpara. Prahlāda Prabhu informed me after some days t...

During those days when Guru Mahārāja was becoming restless, he decided he will go to Goalpara. At that time, he would stay awake all night and wouldn't sleep most of the time. He wasn’t particularly well from a doctor’s point of view, so we decided to take him for a one-day check-up. I was standing at the entrance to the hospital and Guru Mahārāja came with 4-5 people in his vehicle. He got down with a big smile on his face and didn’t look at all like he was sick. Later he went into a ward where he could sit and wait until the rest of the things for the tests were arranged. I learned later that he was told he was being taken to my house as my guest–the big, big hospital, otherwise, he would not have agreed to go. When they started injections and drawing blood, he immediately said, "I will go back, I will go back!" It was also difficult to get him into the MRI. He came out and said, let’s go back to the maṭha. From then on, when he felt a little unwell, we tried to see and...

I met Śrīla Gurudeva in 2010 through a long, circuitous network of phone calls and recommendations. When I first came to see Guru Mahārāja, he was in his room downstairs in Kolkata. When I saw him for the first time, the main thing that struck me was what a childlike and innocent face he had, not that of a grumpy sādhu. We usually get a feeling when we meet sādhus that they are very serious people, and we maintain distance. But he was very soft-spoken, smiling, and spoke very slowly.  On that first visit, I gave him some medication and then left. Some months passed before I was to return. I was unfamiliar with that part of Kolkata and got lost on the way. After I became familiar with how to reach it, I came more often whenever Gurujī called.  On one of those visits, Guru Mahārāja told his personal attendant to give me the book called Affectionately Yours. Previously I had absolutely no idea of Vaiṣṇava Philosophy. My family was associated with the Rāmakṛṣṇa Mission and worship...

Words cannot begin to describe the immense good fortune I had to host a kīrtan event for Śrīla Bhakti Ballabha Tīrtha Gosvāmī Mahārāja at an āśrama I was staying at in Hawaii. It was a kīrtan to end all kīrtans!  The divine atmosphere in his presence was full of sweetness. My heart was experiencing a dawning of nectar in his more than divine association. Adding to this surcharged atmosphere was the chanting of Bhūtabhāvana Prabhu, his kindhearted disciple whose voice emulated a purity that was more than delightful, and a soulful resonance that was deeply soul-stirring. As the evening went on, I felt like we were literally transported into a transcendental realm of incredible bliss, a sweetness beyond human conception—as if we were swimming in a vast ocean of pure honey-like bliss, an immersion that was manifesting due to his inconceivable holy presence; literally opening up the flood gates of the transcendental world of Goloka Vṛndāvana that was manifesting in this dimension. To sa...