By Ritudvipa Gaurachandra dasa, Uttar Pradesh Padayatra leader
We padayatris celebrated the Gaura-purnima festival 2023 at a park in Raebareli, an agricultural trade centre on the banks of the Sai River about 80km southeast of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.
Raebareli is an attractive city surrounded by extensive forests, mango groves and rice paddy fields. We stayed for one month making contacts and getting to know the public. Initially, people did not pay attention to us. Then as we started our daily programmes of nagar sankirtan and prasadam distribution, different items each day, slowly by the magic of prasadam their hearts melted. People began helping us by donating fodder for the oxen. We would perform daily sankirtan and distribute prasadam at Shantinagar Park where up to eighty people would gather, chant the holy name and honour prasadam. We distributed 350 Bhagavad-gitas, eleven sets of Srimad-Bhagavatam, Srila Prabhupada-lilamrta and Sri Caitanya-caritamrta, and many of Srila Prabhupada’s books. I was delighted by people’s response and the book distribution. In the four years of the Uttar Pradesh Padayatra, this was our best Gaura-purnima celebration. Raebareli residents had become very happy with padayatra.
Once I was talking with our spiritual master, Lokanath Maharaja, our inspiration behind padayatra. I said, “Maharaja, when we go to different places people don’t take much interest, they don’t come for the aratis.” Maharaja’s merciful reply took away all my doubts. He said, “Then you should go to places where people welcome padayatra and join padayatra.” This I realized in Raebareli by Maharaji’s mercy. He has all knowledge of padayatras, knows how to tackle all problems and where it is padayatris will be happy. In Raebareli people assisted with expenses and took great care of us. Whoever we distributed books to helped us in every way they could.
We invited all our well-wishers to the festival and about 500 people attended, more than seventy of whom performed abhisheka of Their Lordships. Everyone honoured prasadam. By the end of the programme people were so surcharged with kirtan that they insisted we return to Raebareli for Gaura-purnima next year. I replied, “We will come after six years, but we will never forget the hospitality and love you showered on us.”
