I WASH MY HANDS OFF FROM ALL SUCH COMMERCIAL CULTURE AS CHARACTERISE PSEUDOSPIRITUALITY

I WASH MY HANDS OFF FROM ALL SUCH COMMERCIAL CULTURE AS CHARACTERISE PSEUDOSPIRITUALITY

The way you ISKCON monks accost people and do your commercial transactions in the name of Krishna by saying that you are offering a free gift of a book and thence proceed to ask for a donation is ethically blameworthy, and as India is at the epicentre of this movement from founder to many a follower, it is quite a shame for all of us. I dissociate myself from this aspect of your movement where you are patently pecuniary in your daily drive while pursuing a fanatical belief system that has hardly any sustaining rationality behind it. Though you seemingly espouse the cause of Krishna and Chaitanya, you hardly live by their teachings of renunciation and selflessness and you are more like the Christian and Muslim preachers in so far as proselytising is concerned with the sole and significant difference being that you are more vegetarian (read, milder) in your aggressive methods. Your commercial concerns more resemble the western material culture than that of moral and spiritual Asia, though. To accost and heckle people on the streets and to pursue them to their residence and office -- as my father and I have both faced -- is in no way a spiritual practice and this is exactly what you do, offering Life Memberships of ISKCON at an exalted price accompanied by the lure of free stay upto three days in an ISKCON temple anywhere in the world, selling photographs of your deities, books, matchsticks and the like, and that too univited at people's houses, offices and on the streets. You involve Krishna and Chaitanya in this mean monetary game which shames us Indians as a self-respecting, honourable civilisation. This is not going to be of much help eventually in the cause of propagation of Indian spirituality which abjures all such material contamination as characterises much of your movement. That you engage in disciplined chanting of the 'Hare Krishna Mahamantra' is grand, that as foreigners you exhibit such exceptional zeal to propagate Vaishnavism of your kind is also praiseworthy but the methods of accosting and mild heckling that you use to do so is certainly not a practice that may be recommended in decent civil society. May fanaticism give way to reason! May true spirituality emerge from your ranks, bred in renunciation that is shorn of all such material contamination! 

Written by Sugata Bose