This book is a page-turner to the highest degree; once you begin, you just can’t put it down. . .Through Maharaja’s carefully chosen words, you will see the exquisite sights and feel like you are living the experiences that were part of establishing the Hare Krishna Movement in India. You will meet incredible devotees, who became pillars of this movement through their own storied spiritual growth and advancement, and be introduced to seemingly ordinary persons whose lives became transformed by contact with Prabhupada and his “dancing white elephants,” just as he envisioned.
—Malati Dasi
Foreword, Dancing White Elephants
In 1971 Srila Prabhupada directed young Giriraj Brahmachari, “You should write. This is your first business”—an instruction he repeated over the years.
Now—forty-two years after Srila Prabhupada’s order and following both His Divine Grace’s instruction that “one may temporarily suspend the order of the spiritual master, but one should never neglect it” and his example that “just like my guru maharaja gave me the order to write, [though] I have no time . . . I am always thinking of his order, and when the opportunity arises, I will take it up again”—Giriraj Swami has written his fifth book, Dancing White Elephants: Traveling with Srila Prabhupada in India, August 1970–March 1972, covering visits to Amritsar, Indore, Surat, Bombay, Calcutta, Allahabad, Gorakhpur, Delhi, Madras, and Mayapur.
In some four hundred pages of text and seventeen images, Dancing White Elephants, with a foreword by Malati Dasi, who was present for most of the adventures, will captivate the minds and hearts of readers and increase their attachment to and love for Srila Prabhupada and his “white elephants,” his disciples who helped him in his mission.
