Devotee Spotlight - Pratapana Prabhu.
It was 1974 and Pratapana was 28 and practicing law in Melbourne when he saw a poster advertising Rathayatra with Srila Prabhupada. Under his photo it read ‘at whose feet all other masters sit’. He was captivated and the next day joined the throng of enthusiastic devotees at the parade up Swanston Street. With Srila Prabhupada and Lord Jagannath centre stage, the love and bliss of the devotees as they danced and chanted in ecstasy was palpable. Somewhat disillusioned with law, Pratapana decided he wanted to taste what they experienced and determined he would visit the temple the next day. Well, it snowballed from there! Within 5 days he had left his legal practice behind and moved into the Melbourne temple to take up brahmacarya life. Not long after he found himself travelling around Australia in a van with Caru das. They spent 9 months on the road distributing Srila Prabhupada’s transcendental books which created a spiritual revolution in the lives of the many people who read them. From that time onwards he had no fixed address but travelled to where the most ecstatic service was, including 2 years distributing books with the world’s most expert devotees in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, 3 years in Japan collecting funds to build the Vrindavana, Mayapur and Mumbai temples and travelling around India with Srila Prabhupada, 2 years doing sankirtan around Europe, 4 months reclusion in the Himalayas and finally back to Australia. In 1981 he married and became temple president of Sydney’s Radha Gopinath temple for ten mostly blissful years.
When the temple moved to North Sydney in the early nineties he and his wife Jayasri remained in Darlinghurst, rented the building from the temple and kept the doors of Govindas restaurant and theatre open. In 2001 they converted the downstairs temple space into a dedicated Kirtan yoga space which continues today along with contemporary ashrams for people wanting to dive deeper into a spiritual way of living.
For the last three years Pratapana has been assisting in helping guide New Gokula into the future. He now spends most of his time between both these services.Thank you for your service Pratapana Prabhu.
This is part of the New Gokula Farm Newsletter (August 2021)
To read the rest: https://bit.ly/385iMj1