Welcome to Episode 5 of Successful Vaisnavas.

Update on Successful Vaisnavas

Before we get into the interview, I just thought I would update you on Successful Vaisnavas.

 As of today 31^st March 2013 we have

291 Email subscribers, 301 podcast Downloads, 251 Facebook followers, and on Youtube 59 Subscribers and 6,986 views.

 Our aim is to build a community of devotees who can support each other in the sort of ideas we discuss on the podcast. I hope by sharing the following stats it can encourage other devotees to do the same kind of thing I am doing.

 You can help by letting others know about Successful Vaisnavas. Share it on facebook, or just tell your friends.

 Personal Update

Today we went to the Holi Colors Festival and the Auckland ISKCON temple. It was a successful event with a good turn out and people having fun. It was good to see many local people attending. Most of them first time at the temple. The event was well advertised with signs all around the streets and an article in the local newspaper with really attractive color photos.

 Every thing was going well until about an hour from the end the sky’s opened, breaking the drought we have been having in Auckland. It bucketed down, but everyone still seemed to have a great time even in the rain.

 I had some personal experiences that had quite a big impact on me that I think you might find instructional. I am releasing a youtube video where I discuss that in more detail. You can find it at youtube.com/SuccessfulVaisnavas or if you are on the email list, I will email when I release new videos.

 The personal significance of this interview.

Urmila Devi Dasi is special because it is the first interview I recorded for Successful Vaisnavas and I recorded it almost exactly a year ago. It was exactly one year ago yesterday. 30^Th March 2012.

This is both ironic and embarrassing, because as you will hear in part two of the interview. One of the key lessons to learn from her interview is to just go ahead and do something rather than waiting around until it is perfect. I even mentioned on the interview that I would go ahead and post the interview as soon as possible.

It took me one year to actually do it! But at least I’ve done it. (Or at least half done it now:-)

 So what is the lesson to learn from this?

1. Often things take longer than we expect. I’d underestimated the amount of work it would take to set up a podcast…First setting up the website, then hosting the audios, then submiting it to podcast directories like iTunes with the correct logo etc.
2. Indecision and perfectionism can stop us from taking action. The audio quality in the interview with Urmila is not so good and it is long. It goes for 2 hours altogether. So I spend quite a lot of time trying (unsuccessfully) to improve the sound quality. I was also unsure whether to post the interview in full all at once, or to break it up into two sections, or… I had all kinds of different ways of doing it. I also didn’t want to post it as the first interview because of the length and audio quality.
3. Better late than never. There is a saying that I have included in my song Do What You Love for Lord Caitanya“What you can achieve within a year may not be much but do not fear. Within 5 years or maybe ten what you can achieve will have no end. It will have to limit. You just have to decide to get in it.”Even though things may not be as quick as we like in the beginning (for whatever reason) we should celebrate whatever success we have and keep. Because when we just keep going Krishna reciprocates helping us to get better and build up momentum.

 You will find these ideas come up in the interview as well as other very profound ideas about working for Krishna. I am sure you will enjoy it. Here is Urmila Devi Dasi

Krsnendu: I’ve got a little bit of a bio here, that you joined the Hare Krishna movement in it’s early days in the west. I’m not sure, exactly what year did you join ISKCON?

Urmila: ’73

Krsnendu: ’73. Okay, cool. And you got initiated by Srila Prabhupada around about that time? Was it quite soon after that?

Urmila: Yes.

Krsnendu: I think your hand might be over your microphone. I’m not sure, it sounds like–

Urmila: No it’s not. My microphone is right here.

Krsnendu: Okay. It just sounded a little bit muffled. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening.

Urmila: Oh, no. We can try and turn off the video, we might get better quality.

Krsnendu: Okay, maybe. Let’s just try that and see if it helps. It might make it easier. I’ll turn mine off, and see if it– Wonder how that sounds.

Urmila: Did that help? Is that any better?

Krsnendu: Maybe slightly. So, your background in the Hare Krishna movement is especially in education. You’ve been a principal for many years, and you’ve been a Back to Godhead author, particularly writing about education as well as many other topics. Quite recently you did a PhD in education.

Urmila: Not quite so recently anymore, now, it was 6 years ago now I finished it.

Krsnendu: Wow, time flies, doesn’t it? Could you just explain a little bit, yourself, what your PhD was? Because I know it’s to do with educational management. Could you explain briefly what your PhD involved?

Urmila: It’s an education in the area of educational leadership and my dissertation was on job satisfaction of all the teachers in the Hare Krishna schools in the world. So, what we did a lot of– In America, a PhD has a lot of coursework to it. So we did a lot of study on the different aspects of education itself, learning and teaching, and also on general leadership and management, but particularly of educational institutions, non-profits, charity organizations, like that. And in America, my Master’s gives me the qualifications to run one school and my PhD gives me the qualifications to run a district of schools, in other words to run like forty schools.

Krsnendu: Wow. That’s impressive. So, that’s the studies into leadership and education, that’s like very relevant for ISKCON in many ways, isn’t it?

Urmila: Yeah, I think so.

Krsnendu: That’s great. And then, recently you’ve become– As far as– You were my neighbor in Auckland for– Wow, what was it? Was it just–

Urmila: A total of about a year. Not all in one go, but it totaled about a year.

Krsnendu: Yeah. And you were my neighbor, and I remember that you were very focused and there was not much happening apart from this one project, which is these books that you’ve written. Which I’m not sure if you’ve– What you’ve been up to since then, but that was just an amazing thing. These books, which I’ll give my explanation of what they are, and then you can probably elaborate a little bit. It’s basically a learning-to-read series of books, just like when children go to school, there’s a series of books that they start reading at different levels. There’s different philosophies of how to teach reading, and what you’ve done is integrated the different ideas of how to teach reading, so that whichever philosophy you like to follow, these books can be used in that way.

Urmila: Correct.

Krsnendu: And on top of that, you’ve added the context of Krishna conscious philosophy and values into it. So practically anyone can use the books to learn to read, and at the same time, they’re developing their Krishna consciousness as well.

Urmila: Yes.

Krsnendu: And on top of that, that’s amazing in itself, but then you’ve also added the technology aspect of it, which is using a magic pen and other technological advancements that are about to be announced, I think, that allow children to hear the story in all different languages, and also to read along with the book that this magic pen actually reads the book so the children can follow along as well. Which is really cool. My son’s got all of those books, well both of my sons, and they will– I don’t want to say they fight over the magic pen, but they really love those books, and they definitely compete to enjoy reading those books.

Urmila: Are you using them to teach reading?

Krsnendu: Yeah, my– One of my sons is just about to start primary school, so we have been kind of using it to learn reading, but we’re not in a hurry. We’ve basically just been allowing the children to read the books and just get a taste for reading, and enjoy the experience of getting into books. At this stage, that’s what we’ve been doing with the books, but as he’s starting school, we’re going to use them more, and particularly the activity books that go along with it and things. Be really helpful. So that’s my summary of your books. Perhaps you could add a little bit more about–

Urmila: Oh, I think you’ve summarized them just wonderfully. You could also just talk about the illustrations. There’s about 400 original color illustrations, and thousands of original black-and-white illustrations.

Krsnendu: How many artists were involved in those? They’re beautiful artworks.

Urmila: You know, I’m not sure off-hand. I’d have to sit down and count. Probably at least ten or fifteen, something like that.

Krsnendu: Did you say ten to fifteen?

Urmila: Yeah, something like that.

Krsnendu: The sound quality is still not perfect. Just thought I’d let you know. But we’ll do our best.

Urmila: Well, I’ve got a really good connection here in London, so it might be a problem on your end.

Krsnendu: Oh, okay. Yeah, going from one side of the world to the other, down here in New Zealand, maybe something is getting in the way.

Urmila: Well, this is one side of the world to the other in both directions. London and Auckland are on the other side of the world from each other in two ways. Norther to southern and eastern to western.

Krsnendu: Right, right.

Urmila: We’re basically as far away from each other as you can be on the planet, pretty much.

Krsnendu: Right. The amazing thing about technology, huh?

Urmila: Yeah, technology is definitely very interesting.

Krsnendu: Yes. Something like Sanjaya on the battlefield of Kuruksetra, but they didn’t have to use technology, they had more subtle ways of doing these things.

Urmila: Yeah, something like that.

Krsnendu: We’ll talk a little bit later on, a bit more about your books and what your plans are, what you’ve been up to with them lately, and what your next plans are. But I thought now could be a good time just to ask you… Particularly about the books, but you might want to also talk about other experiences that you’ve had in Krishna consciousness. It’s an amazing achievement that you’ve created these books. How many are actually in the series? How many books?

Urmila: There’s forty-two color books, and forty-one black-and-white books.

Krsnendu: Wow, so it’s about seventy-something books. And you did it all within about one year?

Urmila: Three years. From the beginning it was almost exactly three years, from the time we started working until it was published.

Krsnendu: Okay. Now that’s an amazing amount of productivity, so I’m sure there’s tips that you can give us about how to be productive. But before we get into that, what led you to this project? What was your planning process? Did suddenly you wake up one morning and just think, I’m going to write seventy-three books in the next three years, or is it something you kind of go the idea over time?

Urmila: Eighty-three.

Krsnendu: Eighty-three. Wow.

Urmila: Yeah, eighty-three. Oh goodness. Well, I’d say as soon as I became a gurukula teacher, particularly. I mean, maybe it even started when our oldest son started gurukula, so that would be like ’79. So perhaps it even started in 1979 or maybe even started before that, when our first child was very young, and just seeing how few Krishna conscious books there were. But especially, I think once I started becoming a gurukula teacher, which would have been ’82, ’83. I remember just that there weren’t practically any materials that were Krishna conscious safe. It just didn’t exist. I went to the gurukula headmaster’s meeting and I said okay, where’s the curriculum? And they said, “We don’t have any curriculum.” It was really amazing. They had a few things here and there, but nothing that was comprehensive. So I think it was from that time that I thought we really should have Krishna conscious materials in all areas.

Krsnendu: That’s right. You created a whole guide for teachers at that point as well. It’s one thing I didn’t mention that’s another significant thing you did.

Urmila: That was after the first gurukula headmaster’s meeting I went to, and I can’t remember what year that was, I’m guessing it was 1984. I went there and– It was either ’83 or ’84. I went there and I asked where’s the curriculum, and they said we don’t have any. So I put together a ver short guide just for seventh and eighth grade, what we call junior high school in America. Very brief, just what subjects they should study and how they can study it and what resources to use. The Minister of Education at that time, Toshan Krishna Prabhu I think it was, or maybe it was Sri Rama, or maybe it was Jagadish. I can’t remember, but somebody – I think it was Toshan Krishna – said why don’t you really expand this? Why don’t you make it into a whole book for all levels?

So then, for the next five years I was working on the book Vaikuntha children, which Sri Rama helped me with, and later I heard that Sri Rama was implicated with some child physical abuse, but I never dealt with him, on that. I never worked with Sri Rama in a school, so I never saw him dealing with children at all. Anyway, he encouraged me to write the book, and he gave me some guidelines and various articles to include in the book. So that ended up to bein just over five years, about a 500 page book. We’re working on a second edition of it now, on how to run a school and how to teach just about anything. But still I was very aware that the children didn’t have good materials. So we produced a few things on our own, we produced some books of stories with Krishna Dharana from Los Angeles, illustrated by Ananta Shanti Prabhu from London. I don’t know where that is anymore. We just produced that on a photocopy machine, it was a lovely little book.

And then we produced a book for teaching Bhagavad-gita, illustrations by Madhava Priya and Durga and work by a devotee named Krishna Rupa mostly, although I kind of coordinated it. So still a lot of people are using that book. But it was really all that I could do while I was a full-time mother, housewife, gurukula teacher and school principal. That was the limit as to what I could do.

And so I started really desiring to retire from active teaching and administrative work so that I could work on curriculum. That was my focus. It took quite a while before Krishna changed that. And of course Krishna is interesting in the way he facilitates our desires, that’s a whole other story. But anyway, Krishna facilitated that, and I was about to just start on doing curriculum, but I kept thinking I had to be my, like, sponsors. I didn’t think I could just work on it on my own. I knew we had to have some sort of a team. So, I was sort of looking to do that, and not really knowing where to go and what to do.

I had a period where I was a little lost as far as, okay, well how do I do this? In the meantime, I was considering going to graduate school, and most of the people I consulted with said do it. I was able to get accepted into one of the top schools for education in America, which happened to be right in my neighborhood. So this was very easy for me. I took three years then, to get both and a Master’s and a PhD. I worked really hard I must say.

Krsnendu: It sounds like it.

Urmila: To do a Master’s and a PhD in three years together was definitely the most tapasya I’d ever done in the Hare Krishna movement.

Krsnendu: Yeah, that’s pretty intense. Fast track.

Urmila: It was very intense. The last year, I was doing both an internship and my dissertation. So when I finished that, I thought– I was still in the same mindset that I thought I had to work with some project, and because I was no longer running a school, I no longer had any service or rules of maintenance in my community. My husband and I were already in vanaprastha ashrama at that point for about ten years. So, I wasn’t again- I was working something that I had to be sponsored in some way, that I had to have some program with maintenance and work with a team. I was thinking big. I thought there has to be-

Krsnendu: Right. You felt like you couldn’t do it on your own, that you had to be kind of part of some organization or something.

Urmila: Right. I thought I have to be part of some project, some organization, it has to be a team, there has to be a tremendous amount of money, we have to bring everybody to one physical location, we have to have at least five to twenty people working on it, and so forth and so on. That’s what I was thinking. And I thought, there has to be some means for me to live, I have to have a home, and I have to have an income. I was thinking along those ways, what we in the Hare Krishna movement call practical. Hold on for one second okay, please? Hold on.

Krsnendu: Sure.

Urmila: Yes, I was just thinking in terms of practicality. And, well of course, it has to be done this way and that way, or- Hold on again, one second. I’m sorry. And I was very- Without realizing it at all, I had no realization of this at all, but my so-called practicality was blinding me. It was restricting me and blinding me and it was making me unaware of what was right in front of my face. Again, I didn’t see it like this at all at the time. To me it was trying, it was just self-evidently obvious that I had to think practically and things had to be done in that way. I didn’t realize that I was operating within a paradigm.

Krsnendu: So was it like you were thinking that, I can’t do it now unless all these other things are there first sort of thing?

Urmila: Yes. That’s right. Exactly. It didn’t occur to me at all that my thinking was the result of all sorts of false assumptions. You know, when you make assumptions, by definition, you think they’re true. That’s what an assumption is, it’s something you believe to be true without even realizing that you believe it to be true. And it’s something that very much limits your thinking. All of us conditioned souls are bound by a lot of these sort of things. I’m sure I’m bound by some of them right now without any awareness of them at all. You just don’t even know that they exist. One example for me is, I just met a devotee who I know very well who’s here in London to see Radhanatha Swami, and she just arrived here without knowing where she was going to stay. She told me that she always travels like that.

Not only that, she told me that when she left Belgium, she had inquired at both the temples here in London, the Manor and Soho, if she could stay there. So she’d made some effort. And they both told her they had no room, and she came anyway. So I asked her, what are you doing? She rode all night on a bus with no sleep, I saw her this morning, and she said “Well, I’ve arranged a ride to the program today at four o’clock.” I said, well what after that? She said “I don’t know.” I asked her, do things always work out for you? And she said, “Yes.” She told me she even travels to India like that, with another devotee who travels to India like that, and here also. Just goes there, without a plan, shows up, and somehow or other the Krishna takes care. That kind of thing shakes my paradigm. I might say, well I don’t want to do that, or I wouldn’t be comfortable with doing that, or something like that.

But the fact is that there are people who do that, and it works. They’re still living and they’re happy and they haven’t had to sleep on the street yet. But it’s such a strange paradigm to me, that you would call a place and they say we have no room, and you go anyway. And you just trust that somebody will take care of you, and somebody always does. So it was something like that, that I had this paradigm that in order to do curriculum, I had to make such and such and this and this practical arrangements. And again, I wasn’t even aware that it was a paradigm. I wasn’t aware that I was making some sort of a conscious choice. It just appeared to me as a self-evident truth. So I went to London, and I started working with the people who were developing the Krishna [20:08]. Basically, that was close to a year of frustration. So I was working for a project, and somebody was taking care of me, and giving me a place to stay, and we had a team, etc etc etc.

But there were many problems. One problem is that the team was not composed of people who shared the same philosophy of education, or the same vision of education. As a consequence, we couldn’t agree on practically anything. Our basic assumptions were so radically different about what was the purpose and the system of education that we just couldn’t make progress on even the most basic, basic, basic things. And we were meeting maybe once or twice a week, so between meetings that meant I couldn’t do practically anything because I had to get the go-ahead from the team in order to move forward, and the team couldn’t agree on anything.

Krsnendu: That wouldn’t go very far.

Urmila: No, it really didn’t go very far, and very quickly the convener of the team realized that he had convened the wrong team. That he should have checked for some congruency of vision before he brought people in. But once you bring people in, it’s kind of hard to bring them out.

Krsnendu: Yeah, that would have been tricky.

Urmila: Yeah. So, there we were. And then on top of that, we had a situation where the person who was providing the funding actually didn’t have the funding yet. He was telling us he already had the funding, but actually that wasn’t true. He had made some investments and he was hoping to have the funding. That was a very awkward situation, because we thought that we had money to play with, and actually we didn’t. So that was actually quite a problem, because he wasn’t telling us that there wasn’t actually- He was telling us that there was money. What he was doing was saying, “There’s money, just give me a plan.” And then whenever we’d give a plan, he would reject it, and the reason he would reject it was because he didn’t actually have any money. Not because it was a bad plan. So again it was a question of waiting and waiting and waiting, because you write a plan, you present a plan, and then after you present the plan then you have to wait a month for them to think about it, then they’d finally get back to you and say, “Well, you know, we don’t like this plan. Can you present another plan?” Then it takes a month to do that kind of thing. So we were spending, really, all of our time and energy just making plans that got rejected.

Krsnendu: Frustrating.

Urmila: It was very frustrating. We just couldn’t get anywhere, and finally I went to India for Karttik and just chanted the whole time, because there was nothing else for me to do anyway. I ended up staying in India for three months, basically just chanting, which was a nice thing to do. But finally, finally we got approval to do one very simple thing, and Taraka from Australia and I ended up doing that, which I don’t even know if anybody used it, so I don’t think anybody used it and they didn’t really give us permission to share it, either.

Krsnendu: What was that? That was textbook or something?

Urmila: Yeah, it was a textbook for what’s called the UK Collective Worship, where for ten minutes every day, the children- Originally it was some sort of a Christian thing where there was prayer every morning. So it’s still mandated by the government, but it’s become more like a school assembly for most schools. Anyway, we put together something that was Krishna conscious, but as I said I don’t think it got used. In that experience, I was so frustrated. I think it was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve ever been in, because I’m a very action-oriented person. So to be in a situation where I couldn’t take a step forward- And I didn’t feel like I could just do something on my own, because they were paying me. They were providing me with all of my facilities, and they were paying me, and I didn’t think it was ethical for me to work on their time to do something else.

Krsnendu: So you were in a compromised kind of a position.

Urmila: Yes. I was in a situation where I couldn’t do anything on my own. I didn’t feel that ethically I could do something on my own, and they wouldn’t let me do anything for them. It was really just driving me crazy. So what I started doing at first was then looking for another sponsor and another project and that kind of thing. And then, at a certain point, actually due to something one of my youngest sons sent to me. I just said, I’m going to try doing this without working for anybody. I’m just going to do it on my own. Now at that time, I had no– I had nothing. I had about twenty-five boxes full of stuff, mostly books, that were…

Krsnendu: Sounds like a familiar story that we’ve heard about one Bengali swami, that was in a similar situation.

Urmila: Who’s that?

Krsnendu: There was one Bengali swami and he was trying to work with other people, and they didn’t seem to work out with him, and he just had a box of books and a little bit of money, and he just–

Urmila: Oh yeah, yeah. That’s exactly what happened Prabhu.

Krsnendu: And he went across the ocean to another place.

Urmila: That was exactly, exactly what happened. By the time I got to Auckland, I realized that I, for the first time in my life I was really following Srila Prabhupada. I mean, it’s just an incredible experience. And some of it was choices I make, and some of it was just circumstances. Anyway, I had had my stuff in boxes since 2005. My stuff in India, and then it got shipped to London. So I had all these boxes of books, mostly. I had maybe two boxes of clothes, and one box of [27:09] paraphernalia, and the rest of it was all- It was over twenty boxes of books. I had originally had a 4,000 book library. So I had several questions. What do I do with my stuff? And I had no home, no base, and I had no money. I had no money, I had no income, I had no base, and I had all this stuff and no place to put it. So I made a decision, and it was a very strange decision. I made a decision, I said I’m not going to worry about any of that. I’m just going to forget about it, because I was really worried about it. Where am I going to live? Where am I going to put my stuff? And how am I going to buy toothpaste?

Krsnendu: All that practical stuff.

Urmila: Yeah, all that practical stuff. And then I just said, I’m going to stop. I’m just going to stop, I’m not going to worry about it anymore. I’m just going to decide what service I want to do, and focus on what is the minimum facility that I need to get that done. I had gotten some very good advice from Anuttama Prabhu in the communications industry. He said, “Why don’t you do something for curriculum that can stand on it’s own? You know, that’s complete by itself, but that also can act as a seed to be built upon either by you or by somebody else in the future. Something that can be completed in a relatively short time.” So I decided that I was going to take the idea of the Collective Worship book from the UK, from that work we had done, and take work that was done in the ’90′s on thematic learning, and create festival books.

I knew that was something I could do completely on my own, I wouldn’t need anybody’s help with it, although I did end up getting help with it. I thought, the only thing I need to do that is a desk, a chair, a good internet connection, and to be left alone. To not have other demands on me. But that’s all I need. And I decided to put the other question, the practical questions of home, boxes and income aside. I started looking around for where I could get a desk, a chair, an internet connection and to be left alone, and I found- There were hardly any places where I could get that. I mean, now I actually know of some more places, but at the time I could only find like three places that were willing to do that. The main thing I wasn’t going to be given was to be left alone. So pretty much every place that anyone who stays here has to do X amount of local service.

Like, Bhaktivedanta Manor said I could stay for three months at a time, but not more than that. The only place that was really going to facilitate me was Auckland. So now instead of looking for some place where I could bring in twenty to two-hundred people and where there was $10,000,000 involved and so forth and so on, I was just looking for a desk, a chair, an internet connection and to be left alone. Prana Prabhu really was the one who facilitated that in Auckland. He used his donation money from yajnas to fix up that place and get me a nice desk, and you were the one who gave me the internet connection, and Kalasamvara agreed to leave me alone. So Prana Prabhu provided me the desk and the chair and the bed and all that stuff, you provided the internet, and Kalasamvara provided the “leave me alone”. That was a big thing that Kalasamvara did by the way, because there were only one or two other temples in the world willing to do that.

So that wasn’t a small thing. I mean, I did some Deity service there soon after I came and everyone went to a festival. Other than that, I was giving classes just once a week, and that’s the only service I did for the temple. Even in the winter when it was cold, I was just having mangalarati in my house because the temple room was so cold. And nobody there, nobody got on my case about anything. I was just left alone, which had a downside to it, which I’ll get to in a minute. So anyway, then I decided that I was just going to put my boxes in storage, that I didn’t need to figure out where they were going to go. That was also an out-of-paradigm thinking, that I just wasn’t going to have a base, I wasn’t going to have a home, I wasn’t going to have a place to put my things, I was just going to keep them in the devotee attic, and I wasn’t going to have an income. I just was going to live without those things.

It was interesting, after I made that decision, for four days in England people handed me donations, which was a very new thing for me. I had really not been given donations before. It was four days in a row that people gave me money, and I thought this is Krishna tell me don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. So, I probably jumped ahead. I think that’s about what was happening. Oh yeah, first I was just working on the festival books. I was going to go to New Zealand to work on the festival books there. Then Sitarama in London contacted me and said– Actually I have all this written down somewhere. I can actually send you the article that I wrote down.

Krsnendu: Oh, okay. Cool.

Urmila: I don’t have all of the details written down, but Sitarama from London, who I’d worked with for many, many years on various educational projects, little bits here and there, he contacted me, said “Urmila, I’d like to produce children’s reading books. Are you interested?”

And I said “Sure.”

So I met with him in London, and his idea was stand-alone kind of moral fables. I said I don’t want to produce stand-alone books, I wanted to do something that’s comprehensive reading program. We kind of went back and forth on it for a while, and he decided to do what I wanted to do basically because I was the one who was going to do it. I won the argument because I was the one who was going to do the work. I told him that I wanted it to fit with international systems, and that I needed some training, that because I had not- I had taught children how to read, but I had never written a program to teach children how to read.

I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. I knew I wanted to– The main thing I didn’t know, was I wanted the books to work with what’s called leveled reading. I had never taught with leveled readers. I had taught with analytic phonics and synthetic phonics and not with guided reading using leveled books. I knew something about the system from getting my PhD and doing my internship, but I didn’t really know how to do it. So Sitarama Prabhu paid for me to get some training from the Institute of Education in London, which is one of the top places in the world. They actually created one of the leveled reading systems. I got to work with the two women who created that system, so I got to work with two of the top, top, top, top, top experts in the world in reading. One of them in particular, who doesn’t want her name mentioned because she doesn’t want to be associated with anything religious.

But anyway, she really helped. She gave me a lot of guidance to get started. And then Sitarama said “Why don’t you produce one book first, that we can show people?”

So, with barely knowing what I was doing, and not having any- Again, this is so much out of the paradigm of being practical. Without having established the foundation and the basis and the structure and the template and the skeleton and the scaffolding and any of that stuff that you have to do first, before you create a learn to read program, I sat down and wrote one book. I wrote the book Colors.

Krsnendu: Colors. The one about Holi.

Urmila: Yes. And Sitarama Prabhu paid for a British artist, Madhusudhna, to illustrate it. It was good he did that. Remember, I had no money and no income. So we got this one book written and illustrated, and then Sitarama Prabhu also paid to go to a copy shop and print off ten copies. Which is a very expensive way to print, by the way. I’m sure it cost at least a hundred pounds to do that. But then we had ten copies of this book that really looked like a book. It really looked like something. It was beautiful. It was a nice little story, and it was beautiful. So then we had something to show people. Now, that was a brilliant move on Sitarama’s part. Then I went to New Zealand, and in New Zealand, Prana Prabhu had told me that I was going to have an office and a team, but when I got there it turned out I had neither office nor team. I was really just there on my own. I was really on my own.

And the downside of being on your own when you’ve spent your whole life thinking you need to have an office, you need to have a team, you need to have this and you need to have that and you need to have the other thing, it was very hard to get started. I didn’t quite know where to start, and I was actually kind of scared to start. What do I do? Where do I begin? How do I do this, exactly? I don’t really know what I’m doing, and that kind of thing. Which led me to praying a lot. So what I did was I kept working on the festival books. I produced, all together, four sets, or kinda four and a half festival books. At the same time I started working on the readers, and Prana Prabhu introduced me to a devotee named Dvaraka Puri, who is a literacy expert in New Zealand, works for the government.

And she knew another of the top literacy experts in the world, the woman who has engineered the whole literacy program for one of the main publishers internationally, Nelson Thornes PM, and who herself had written eight hundred learning to read books. So, Dvaraka Puri introduced me to this lady, and I showed this lady some of my rough ideas, and she basically said, “This is all terrible. You’re doing it all wrong. This is what you have to do.” She gave me a ton of free materials, and she gave me a ton of free instruction. Now it turned out that she figured I would never produce anything worthwhile, but she ended up giving me an incredible amount of guidance and help. Then Dvaraka Puri started giving me a lot of guidance and help, and she lent me- I’d also borrowed some books from the Manor school in London, and Dvaraka Puri provided me with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of samples.

Also Sita Rama Prabhu in London had gone to the library and photocopied some pages of books, also with samples. So I had a ton of samples and then I had the whole framework and template from Nelson Thornes PM that this woman gave me. So I actually had something to start with, but I was still putting a lot of my energy into the festival books.

As I said, it was a very– It was a real challenge to do this, because everybody leaving me alone meant everybody left me alone. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing or how I was doing or how it was going. Nobody. I had zero external anything. There was not one single human being on the planet outside of myself who was giving me any kind of encouragement or impetus, or anything. Nothing. To get done what I wanted to get done. I didn’t have any team to help me. I had Dvaraka Puri to help me, but she was only there occasionally. I was really on my own. Just really on my own.

And then I was trying to do something that I had never done before, that was extremely difficult, and I didn’t even quite know how to set up the framework. Anyway, I finally set up the framework, and I started filling it in. It was extremely difficult. People look at a little children’s book and think it’s easy to write. It isn’t. The simpler the book is, the harder it is to write. A very simple book, if you could only use like fifteen words in the English language to make a story.

Krsnendu: Very restricted.

Urmila: It’s very restricted. Here’s ten, fifteen, twenty words, and write a story, and it should be a story that is interesting to children. It should be a real story. It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And it’s got to be about Krishna. And it’s got to follow the twenty rules for each level. So, you have- It can have one line per page. You have to write a story using fifteen or twenty words, the story has to be a total of eight to ten sentences maximum, it has to be a real story with a beginning, middle and end, and it has to be about Krishna. Try doing that. It is extremely hard. It was interesting also, because sometime in the process I remembered that I always told people that I like solving intellectual and mental puzzles. I realized that Krishna had given me a service that was just suitable for my nature, although I didn’t appreciate that at first at all.

Anyway, very soon after I got started, one devotee contacted me, having seen the festival books, and told me that he was so impressed with them that he wanted to fund it, and he wanted me to do it really professionally, and that he was prepared to give me up to $100,000 to do a professional job. So, this ended up to be exactly like what happened in England, where somebody promised me money and then didn’t actually give me anything. It ended up being just the same. He said make a plan, and it was just a- It was like a repeat, it was like a rewind repeat. So I made some plans, and then by the time- and it took him a month to look at the plan, and another month to think about it, and then to ask me to do a revised plan, and months and months went by.

Meanwhile I didn’t want to work on the festival books anymore, because I thought, if this guy’s going to give $100,000 to work on the festival books, I don’t want to keep doing them the way I’m doing them. I would rather do them with high-quality artwork and so forth and so on. Why produce another one on the cheap? So I just stopped what I was doing, which is what Krishna wanted me to do. So finally this rich person just said, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to give you anything. I’ve lost my money.” It was the same thing. Just , he said sorry, I don’t actually have any money. Of course this guy actually had money to begin with, he lost it, whereas the other guy never had any to begin with.

He said “I’m sorry, I lost all my money in investments, and I’m not going to be able to give you anything.” By that time I’d gotten out of the festival book mentality, and I’d gotten fully 100% into the reading books, which is exactly what Krishna wanted me to do.

The way he did it was sort of interesting. And I would just have to pray– Basically, in order to write the books, I would work for a couple hours, and then I would take a walk. I’d work for a couple hours, and I’d chant extra rounds. I’d work for a couple hours, and I would read. I couldn’t work- Because it was so difficult. I couldn’t just sit and work eight or ten hours on the reading books. Which was also very odd for me, I’m the kind of person when I get into something, I just throw myself into it and work twelve-fourteen hours a day. I couldn’t do it.

Krsnendu: That’s interesting.

Urmila: I had also never- I has also always had the idea that I was incapable of doing original creative work. I just thought it was impossible. I thought I can take things other people have done and put them together in new ways, but I can’t create something original myself. But that’s what I was doing. I mean, some of the books I was taking, I’d say the majority of the books, I was taking existing stories and rewriting them for children. But there were some of the books that I was writing myself as original stories. And I didn’t think I could do that. I had believed until that point that that was something that was impossible for me to do. Every book was very, very challenging, it was very difficult, although as I moved up through the progression it got a little easier. But every one was extremely, extremely hard. I did a lot of praying. I also really meditated on–

The main thing I was meditating on was the pastime where Bhima kills Jarasandha, where Krishna told Bhima to kill Jarasandha, and went with him to kill Jarasandha. But Bhima was fighting for twenty-eight days with no result. And then finally Bhima says, Krishna, I don’t have the potency to kill Jarasandha. And then Krishna says- Krishna basically didn’t say anything. Krishna invested him with His own potency, and gave him a hint by splitting a blade of grass. And so that’s what it was like. If I asked Krishna in the beginning to help me with each book, I would get nothing. But if I tried and tried and tried and tried until I have exhausted myself, and then I would go and say I don’t have the energy to do this, I don’t have the potency to do this, I can’t do this, then I would get invested with Krishna’s potency and be able to do it. And that happened over and over and over and over.

That was the repeating pattern. I’d start a book, I wouldn’t be able to do it, I would try, I would go through many, many drafts, I’d write many, many different stories, I would try many, many different things. Some I would do halfway, some a third, some complete. I’d have to keep taking breaks, I would get frustrated, and then finally I would go to Krishna and say, I can’t do it. I don’t have the [45:38] to do it. it’s impossible. And then he would give me the inspiration. There were two books that really were so directly written by Krishna, they were extraordinary. One of those is A Chicken is Food for a Cat, and the other is Seven Things For Krishna. So, A Chicken is Food for a Cat, I had written many, many books at that level and I didn’t like any of them. I was in the middle of japa time, I was in the temple, and I was just focused on my japa, I was not thinking about the books at all.

It was six o’clock in the morning, the whole book came to me in finished form in my mind. It was a completed book and I just went back to my room and I typed it up. Seven Things For Krishna, I was typing it without any idea of what I was doing. It was just kind of flowing through me. I didn’t know where the story was going, I didn’t know what it was going to be about, I didn’t know how it was going to end, I didn’t know anything. It was just coming as it was coming, and came out as something complete, which both of those books were particularly incredible experience. Now, all this time I had no idea how I was going to publish them. None. You have to remember, I had no money.

Krsnendu: Right. So you’re just creating this whole series, but you’ve got no idea how it’s going to be printed or distributed or anything, right?

Urmila: I hadn’t illustrated anything. I had nothing. I had nothing. That was also very peculiar for me. It was every chance that the books were never going to be more than doc files on my computer. In fact, from a practical point of view, that was the most likely scenario. From a practical point of view, 99% chance, nothing was going to happen, other than be doc files on my computer. Even though I was just pouring myself into into this thing.

Krsnendu: So did you sort of have faith that it would all work out, or you just sort of felt driven that you just had to do it, even though you didn’t know if it was going to happen?

Urmila: Neither. I went to a very different place, I went to a place I’d never been before. I went to a place of relishing the activity and letting go of the results completely. I actually went to a place of yoga that I had never been to before, where I was offering every moment to Krishna and Prabhupada. And I let go of the results. I just let it go. Obviously I wanted the results, but that wasn’t- It was no longer the source of my happiness. My happiness was no longer dependent on the result. My happiness was dependent on the process, and the moment to moment relationship I was having with Prabhupada and Krishna in the process.

Krsnendu: Wow. It’s like the Krishna conscious flow.

Urmila: It was a Krishna conscious flow. And I couldn’t have done it otherwise. I think it would have been impossible. If I had been focused on how it was actually going to become books, the chances of that were so remote from a material point of view, that I would have lost my enthusiasm. There’s no way I could have endured it. I mean, you just couldn’t. You could be driven maybe for a day or two, but you just couldn’t- You wouldn’t have been able to keep up that kind of enthusiasm, because there was no hope. There was just no hope. So, I started having quite a lot of problems with my health, which is quite common for me. But it started being really bad, and I found out that a doctor in Australia that might be able to help me. Actually he was in America, but he was going to be visiting Australia, and if I saw him in Australia I could get the treatments at less than half price. So I said to Krishna, Krishna if you want me to do this, you make the arrangements. The next day, I got an email from Prana saying we’d like to give you a donation. He offered to give me a donation that was exactly the cost of the medical treatment in Australia.

Krsnendu: Wow. Is that right?

Urmila: That is correct. Then I was contacted by these devotees in Australia saying they wanted me to come here and preach, and I kept saying no, because I wanted to focus on the books. But now I said yes, I’d like to go, I’ll go for this medical treatment and I can also do some preaching. Will you pay my airfare? So they said yes. I then spent a month in Australia. Now, the medical treatment didn’t help me, by the way. But while I was in Australia, I ended up meeting Radha Caran Prabhu.

Krsnendu: Ah, the publisher.

Urmila: The one who does the murtis in China and he published a book about Tamal Krishna Maharaja. So he met me, and I showed him again that one book, remember I had that one book done. And he said– Yeah, I’ve got one book done at the time. He said “I know artists in China, who are professional animators, and I’ll arrange everything for you.” He said “You get me all of your drafts by,” I think we were like May first, this was I think in February. He said “You get me all your drafts by May first, and then I’ll arrange to get them illustrated.” I thought he was going to pay for them to get illustrated also, but that ended up not to be the case. So later he clarified that. I thought wow, you know, and someone else is going to do the work for me. So then a little later on in Australia I was invited for lunch prasadam in a devotee’s house. I showed him– I showed everybody the one book that I- You know, people say what are you doing, so I showed them the book. And he said “I’ll give you $10,000, will that help you?” So there I was, all of a sudden now, I was almost finished with the main reading books at this, it was about 70% done. So now all of a sudden I had artists and I had the money to pay them.

Krsnendu: Far out.

Urmila: Far out is not the word for it. It was amazing. I was floored. Okay, but now I had a deadline. If I wanted to work with these Chinese artists I had a deadline. Thank God I had a deadline. Actually it wasn’t a real deadline, because when Radha Charan Prabhu got to China, he discovered that he couldn’t do it himself, so I had to go to China. So if I feel like that I had to go to China, I wouldn’t have been working towards the deadline. But because I thought he was going to do it for me, I started working towards the deadline. So I took all those stories I wrote and we had about six of the teachers in New Zealand who went through them. Also some teachers in other parts of the world who went through them electronically. They gave me really detailed feedback on all of them. I should also say that while I was working through the books, I realized that my framework wasn’t complete.

So I started building my- I stepped back from the books and started building the framework better. Altogether it was about six months on building the framework. Anyway, so I would keep making revisions in the books, because the framework kept getting better and better, and tighter and tighter, and more and more complete. We were consulting with a lot of different publishers of reading books. So then I had the teachers’ reviews. But then I sent the books to this woman in London, this world expert in London, and she agreed to review them also and Sitarama paid her for it, like ten pounds a book. At that point there were forty-four books, now there’s forty-two, so that was 440 pounds that he paid, that was very nice of him. It couldn’t have been another way. It was interesting, she told me that she could review them in a week. I said how long will it take, and she said a week.

So I thought that meant a week after she gets them. But what she really meant was it’ll take me a week, but I can’t start until such and such date. But she hadn’t told me that. So anyway, we had this deadline for China, so I really pushed to get everything to London. We sent them electronically, and then Sitarama printed them out there instead of shipping them. And she sent us back her reviews. Now she sent them back later than we anticipated. And then it turned out that the first third of the books she thought were just terrible. She loved the second two-thirds, and she really didn’t like the first third. What I realized going through her comments was that my framework had a serious fault in it. I had made a serious, serious mistake in my essential framework and foundation.

Krsnendu: And this means like how you integrated the different philosophies of teaching reading and that sort of thing?

Urmila: That’s correct. I had integrated them wrong. Now, understandable, because as far as I knew I’m the first person in the world ever to integrate them. So it’s understandable that I didn’t do it right. But because I didn’t do it right, I had messed up about a third of my books severely, and the other two-thirds all had problems. Everything had a problem with it. But I knew what the problem was. The problem was the framework. In other words, the problem wasn’t essentially the book itself, but it was how things were working together. Meanwhile, I have this deadline, and- I’m not boring you with all these details?

Krsnendu: Oh no, this is really interesting for me. I’ve got a whole list of questions I was going to ask you, but you answered all the questions in the process of explaining everything.

Urmila: Okay. So, then I have this deadline for China, right? I have this deadline for these artists, and my belief was that the only way to get these artists was to get the materials to Radha Charan Prabhu on time. That was what I believed to be the truth. I should also say I was in the process of applying for a long-term New Zealand visa, so my passport was in the New Zealand visa office. That’s where my passport was. The process had been delayed, my fingerprints weren’t right, they had to retake my fingerprints. Anyway, everything had been delayed and my passport was stuck in the visa office, probably for another month or two. I looked at her comment and thought, my God, it’s going to take me months, it might take me another year, to fix this. It’s a really major thing. And if I fix this, I’m going to miss the deadline. It’s just, how am I going to do it? Maybe I should just leave them the way they are.

I spent one day doing nothing. Completely, absolutely nothing. I took care of my deities and chanted my rounds and ate something, but I didn’t do anything all day. Maybe I took a walk. And I was just like- And I didn’t have a day to waste like that with this deadline looming. But I just thought, what do I do? What do I do? Do I fix this, or not? At the end of the day, I just said, “Okay Krishna. This had got to be first class, got to be professional, there can’t be anything wrong with it, I’m going to fix it. And if that means I miss this deadline for these Chinese artists, if it means it takes another year, if it means that… You remember how hard it was to write those books? It might mean going back and rewriting all of the books. I didn’t know what it meant. I wasn’t sure what would be involved with fixing this problem, but I was determined that I was going to fix it.

That night Dvarakapuri was with me, she happened to be in town with her daughter, and she stopped by to see how I was doing. And super-soul told me what question to ask her. Had I asked that question at the beginning of the program, I wouldn’t have made the mistake. And it was a very simple question…