Crown Prince of Udaipur Rajasthan His Highness Prince Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar visits Melbourne Temple
By Sukadev Das
It was our great honour to receive the visit by Crown Prince of Udaipur Rajasthan His Highness Prince Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar who comes in the lineage of great king of Mewar (Rajasthan – capital is Udaipur) Maharana Pratapa and great devotee Meera Bai. I had the opportunity to receive him to our temple, took him around our temple area including our Tulasi house, he was very impressed with how Tulasai Maharani was well cared and looked after in Melbourne (cold place). As we were walking from Tulasi house to our new kitchen I asked the Prince in a quest to find out how much he knows about ISKCON, in a response he said by pointing out to rose flower bush ‘who doesn’t know ISKCON, just like everyone knows rose flower similarly ISKCON is well known to all’. I also gave him the tour our new kitchen along with Darpan, Nitin from Victorian Parliament who were accompanying the Prince. Darpan and Nitin who were highly instrumental to organise the grant of $500k from Victorian Government for our new kitchen. They were all extremely impressed with our new kitchen. Prince (owns 5 star hotel in India) commented ‘this is far better than any of our hotel kitchens, temple of Lord Krishna deserve such a nice kitchen to distribute Krishna Prasad to everyone’. They all had darshan of our Deities, took them to Srila Prabhupada house, naively I asked him to sit on the floor of Srila Prabhupada house he happily sat and listen to the glories of Srila Prabhupada for about 15 min, during our discussion he commented generally ‘Brahmanas are by birth’, at the end of our discussion he agreed that Brahmana is by action (characteristics and qualities) not just by birth. Finally they all honoured fruits and juice from 4pm offering and left happily.