My experience of the Hare Krishna, the vision of ISKCON

During my BSc days at DU, for about 14-15 months, I was part of something called Vedic Club, later Shreshtha Club, a Delhi-based group of the Bhagwad Gita scholars and boys interested in the same. The motive, roughly, was to revive the practical wisdom of ancient Indian scriptures among the youth. Later, I learned this was just a small branch of a larger vision called the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Positives :

The Hare Krishna chanting and dance

I danced many times on Sounds, such as Baarat, farewell, etc. Although I, for practical purposes, wasn't a devotee, these chants brought out the most insane dances in me — the free-flowing dance - dancing with almost strangers with no calculations in my head. Our trip to Harsil Valley and Gangotri was deeply fulfilling and psychologically enriching. Needless to say, it was relatively cheap, too.

Negatives:

“Sri Krishna is the supreme personality of Godhead." This is where everything theoretical about ISKCON starts. This is where the lectures at our Shreshtha Club either always started or had it as an implicit fact. And to this day, I don't know what it means… for it to be true. How does the observable universe have to be for it to be false? This doesn't hit me much unless I come to know that this Krishna or probably one of its units is the same as the son of Devaki and Vasudeva, the king of Mathura, a city in Gangetic plain, lived (physically) about 5000 years ago.

There's no apparent reason for today's world to be qualitatively different from the world 5000 years ago (I am not talking about the differences in the state of evolution, lifestyle, economy, technology, and superstitions). And I never received a good answer to this asymmetry in the earth's temporal ‘sacred ’ness.

The problem was that I couldn't divorce the practical value of the experience of Hare Krishna chant-dance from the ‘closed' Iskconian theoretical framework of “Who am I? And how do I reach the answer to — what should I be doing?”

I couldn't be a ‘devotee.’ And I gave up trying to be one.

VKJ)