Rocana's False Gurukuli's Beer Bust

PADA UPDATE: Thanks prabhu, yes our Prabhupadanuga program in Vancouver has a wonderful kirtana, and Rocana boycotts us. He says he is not in favor of the ISKCON kirtana styles, but then he does not promote anything except the ISKCON guru program. ys pd]  

PADA: Rocana das recently claimed that the Bhakti fest "Gaura Vani band" ex-gurukulis were partying and drinking beer -- and he had proof, look at the labels on the bottles. OK these bottles turned out to be ginger ale. And so now Rocana has once again alienated a group of people by attacking them without warrant. At the same time there have been stories, however some years ago, of wild ex-gurukuli's "parties." Yet that was some time ago, many of them are now grown up adults and most of them are actually married, and many now have their own children nowadays and so on.

So all Rocana did was upset these people for no good reason, and make it appear that the senior devotees sector are enemies of these ex-children. At the same time, there is another group of critics of this group, who say that these kulis are bogus for "not singing the right tunes," "not dressing appropriately," and so on and so forth. PADA's view is -- that its a miracle any of these ex-kids are even chanting in public at all, considering all their generation went through. We are glad they even believe in Krishna, and want to sing the name of Krishna in public, at all, at this stage.

Gaura Vani band means of course the speaking of Lord Gauranga. Are their parents out there with a band singing anything, anywhere? Where is Rocana's public band? Where is the public band of the "they are singing bad tunes" crew? Lets face they have nothing going on, at least these ex-kids have something. This is another problem, if someone is doing something, then the people who are doing nothing, ok like Bhakta das, will criticize us. Actually he is doing a little bit of something, he is promoting the GBC's guru program and he has found a fresh group of disciples to promote him and that agenda.

So we try to be nice to the ex-kulis in general, considering them as childhood victims of a child negligent, if not dysfunctional, if not violent cult. Its simply not helpful to blame the victims. This was the same problem that critics have had with the child molesting lawsuit. "Well these children are saying horrible things about Krishna, ISKCON and Srila Prabhupada." OK agreed, that's true, but if your own children are saying horrible things about your own religion, how are they to blame?
How come many of these children ended up hating the Krishna religion, whereas our own children ended up being favorable to Krishna? That means something went wrong in the victim's upbringing which caused them to reject the religion.

That means the people in charge of these children, aka the adults, created conditions where these children ended up having these attitudes. And worse, when the lawsuit came up, the Sanat / Prahlad folks publicly suggested that these children simply needed to be chopped up for being so offensive. OK, that's really going to help fix things? No, they simply alienated the victims even more and more, and convinced them there is an anti-child policy. At the same time we are glad they wrote that, it proved our point in spades, there is an anti-child policy going on here. Now we had written proof.

Then again we have ex-kulis like Aniruddha who was arrested recently, he has really had a messed up life, there is no question about it. So when the children as a group have a number of homeless and dysfunctional victims, have been having excessive parties, are having suicidal thoughts, have been going to psychologists and ordered to take psychotropic medications, have been getting arrested, and so on, who is to blame for that, if not collectively, the leaders of ISKCON and the acquiescing adults?

What is interesting is that 1,000 ex-children signed up for the molesting case, and we have never seen 1,000 of them unite on anything else ever since. That means they all agreed on one thing at least, the leaders, the adults, the acquiescing parents, all of them had let down their entire generation and had put them into a very abusive condition that was even causing suicides. So they all agreed on one point, all of the adults in ISKCON collectively failed them. There is a group of people who say that PADA should not have interfered in the suicides problem, of course those same people later on would have criticized that we allowed the suicides and did nothing?

Why does Srila Prabhupada say -- you cannot please the demoniac?

To his credit Rocana helped the case because he did recognize that suicides was not at all a good development for these ex-children, and that these suicides would eventually give the society an un-favorable image as a Jim Jones suicide cult in the public media.

Oddly, the Prahlad group said at the time that is exactly what they wanted, they said they wanted the newspapers in America to advertise "a blood bath in Dallas." So there is a section of former ISKCON / GBC / Satsvarupa groupies who really wanted these children to die more and more, and for that story to be in the media, and they still do, they still defend their idea of having dead children and for that story to be a media story. The ex-children of course know about all this child hating sector within their society, and no wonder they are alienated.

So there is a section of people who resisted the lawsuit, saying its better for them to die, and this has happened also in the Catholic church where leaders, and elders, advise the victims to be silent, and this results in dysfunction and suicides. Then again all we have to do is look at Satsvarupa's art to figure out why some of his ex-followers are so haywire and anti-humanity.

In any case, we think all of the ex-children of ISKCON should be given a special break, especially if they are even interested in the religion, at all. We also got many thanks from a number of them for helping them with the lawsuit, they said, "Apart from PADA, no one wrote about our plight or even cares about us -- at all. Most people wish us ill."

So this is the first problem, if we want to attract them back to Krishna, we have to show some signs of concern for them, and appreciation for all they went through in the GBC's guru wars, of which they are the worst case examples of victims of this war. If someone in the family was abused and feels alienated, actually the other family members have to work all the harder to show concern for them. Or they may never come back, ever. Who would blame them? ys pd