Who Is Your Favorite Celebrity Sankirtana Devotee? - Stars strut their stuff for Mahaprabu

Mine is Boy George. I really love the song "Bow Down Mister"

From bombay to bangalore
All the hindus know the score
If you wanna live some more
Hare, hare, hare

If you do not take the vow
You can eat the sacred cow
You’ll get karma anyhow
Hare, hare, hare

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

Do the right thing with your hands
Lay down on the pleasing sands
Whatever else your faith demands
Hare, hare, hare

From bombay to rajastan
Nitai guara, radha syam
Hare krishna hare ram
Hare, hare, hare

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

In the desert jahshamire
They put kun in their hair
At the westemers they stare
Hare, hare, hare

Paint a tilak on your brow
Open like a lotus flower
It’s time to check your karma now
Hare, hare, hare

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

Bow down mister
Hare rama, hare krishna
Bow down mister
We say radha syam

Bow down mister
We say radha syam
Bow down mister
We say radha syam
Bow down mister

Raise your head and lift your ands to the lord x4

Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare
Hare ram hare ram rama rama hare hare
Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare
Hare ram hare ram rama rama hare hare

Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord
Raise your head and lift your hands to the lord

Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare
Hare ram hare ram rama rama hare hare
Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare
Hare ram hare ram rama rama hare hare

Hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare
Hare ram hare ram rama rama hare hare

I've got to go go with my man George. I think he's overall the coolest celebrity chanter to date. Once I carried a Ganesh statue for him from Vrindavan to New York. I didn't get to meet him unfortunately, some guys came from and took the statue from me at the airport. But at least I did a little seva for George.



We were talking, about the space between us all, and people who hide themselves

behind a wall of illusion, never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late, when they pass away

We were talking, about the love we all could share

When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love, with our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realize it's all within yourself, no one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small, and life flows on within you and without you

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold, and the people who gain the world and lose their soul They don't know, they can't see, are you one of them?

When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there

And the time will come, when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you


It's a Maharishi-era song (Sgt. Pepper, 1967) but it was very influential in my teenage marijuana and psylocibin assisted spiritual ecstasies and the resultant quest for God. Thank you George, wherever you are...



I didn't know Neil Diamond was a chanter. I would guess him to be a Scientology kind of guy. Maybe because of the polyester suits.

Neil Diamond: 'Songs are Life in 80 Words or Less'
Family Weekly, February 29, 1976
by Noel Coppage

...

FW: After those Broadway concerts, you temproarily retired from live performing to write a symphony. Did the job of writing the Jonathan Livingston Seagull score postpone that?
ND: I guess I satisfied the urge I had by writing that score, at least temporarily. It took a whole year of my life and was very involving. After doing it, I felt I'd now like to do something simpler.

FW: I understand you did considerable delving into religious tracts while you were working on the 'Seagull' score.
ND: That's right. By chance a Hare Krishna kid came knocking on my door about then, wanting to give me literature and such. I invited him in. We talked for a while, and I asked him to read the script and tell me what he thought of it, had him make notes on it. I wound up working with him about six weeks-put him up in an apartment, rented him a car-until I reached the point where I had to work alone on it. He wanted me to go off with him to India and sit in a cave. I said that sounded great and I'd love to, but now I had to write this thing. I gave him a plane ticket, and he went while I settled down to pull it all together.

Who's this "Other" that folks are voting for?

Oh, man, you shoulda said, "I can't give Lord Ganesh to anyone but George himself. It's a sacred trust!"

That is a cool story. What size was the statue?

I came to KC through George's music as a teenager, and I went to see him perform in St. Louis in 1974. I stayed at the temple for the first time then as well. I was 15. I can't even tell you how blissed out I was.

The other day I was browsing in Barnes and Noble and found a big hardbound book entitled, "HIPPIES". It is a photographic account of the counter-culture hippy movement, from the end of the beaknik era to the end of the hippy era.

I looked for Hare Krishna in the index and found 'Hare Krishna Mantra'. It was interesting that the sections devoted to chanting Hare Krishna were attributed to Allen Ginsburg. There was no mention of ACBVS, nor the Hare Krishna devotees. There was a picture of George with Maharaja Mahesh Yogi, but none of ACBVS.

We should honor Allenji for breaking the ground in the west by introducing the maha mantra. It was John Lennon who wrote in the Beatle song The Walrus about Allen and who spread the name of Hare Krishna in the radio waves:

Semoline pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man you should have seen the kick in Edgar Allen Poe.
I am the eggman oh, they are they eggmen -
Oh I am the walrus GOO GOO GOO JOOB
GOO GOO GOO JOOB GOO GOO
GOOOOOOOOOOOJOOOOOB.

The statue was wrapped up nice, but it was about 2.5 feet tall, and not too heavy, nor too thick, so it may have been a wood or plaster bas relief. It was sent by Prthu who hosted George at his (former)ashram in Vrindavan a few years before.

I lived for a couple of years in the St. Louis temple, the one on Lindell Blvd. I think in '74 it was probably the older building a couple of streets back.

My one is Peter Sellers. Although...i must say, he was better really whenever he was chanting......

George Harrison was the one who brought me to KC as well thru 'All Things Must Pass' and 'Living in the Material World'.

George was also very much into Paramahansa Yogananda whom he 'Turned Me On' to as well...

Yes, let's not forget Peter Sellers whom through the character of Hrundi V. Bakshi introduced many of us to Vedic culture.



The Party
Starring: Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Al Checco, Jean Carson, Herbert Ellis

Review Summary
Hrundi V. Bakshi (Sellers) is a seemingly nameless and faceless Hindu movie extra in Hollywood who manages to get noticed during the filming of a movie, but for the wrong reasons. He blows up the desert set of the film he is working on, ruining the entire days filming. The director (Ellis) is fit to be tied and wants him canned immediately. He is somehow sent a party invitation rather than a letter of termination. Bakshi is too dense to know anything is amiss when he shows up at the studio executives modern home and stands out like a fish out of water.

As he offers to engage in banter guests and host look on in puzzled confusion. The only one at the party to pay him much notice is the parakeet whom Bakshi talks gibberish to and over feeds “birdy num nums”. He loses his shoe in the pond/stream that flows through the house and wades into the water at one point. Other obstacles for Bakshi include being baffled by intercoms, artwork, toilet paper on a roll, etc. He leaves damaged appliances and havoc wherever he wanders. He chats with a lovely guest named Michele (Longet). The action of the party moves to the pool where a baby elephant covered in 60's protest jargon is washed off. The hippie kids make a nuisance of themselves. The Party is mindless fun from the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers combination.
--David Fletcher, Resident The Party Scholar

A little known George tidbit: Summer seven or eight years ago George sponsored a feast at the Krishna-Balaram Mandir in Vrindavan, after evidently having a dream in which John Lennon came to him and said he was a suffering as a ghost, and needed maha-prasad. George must have been shaken up, having taken the dream seriously, and a short time later asked Prthu to arrange a feast in John's honor. Unfortunately I doubt many, if any, of the Indian brahmacaris knew who George or John were though. I was happy to able to participate.

I love that movie

Allen would of been my second choice. Well, actually I love them all. Recently I attended an Allen Ginsburg film festival that showed film clips of his many public readings. Among the many works shown there of him reading was his "Sunflower Sutra".

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, sur-
rounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just our-
selves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sun-
rays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuber-
ance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the rail-
road and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomo-
tive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomo-
tive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're bles-
sed by our own seed golden hairy naked ac-
complishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sit-
down vision.

It was the one on Lindell. I had been told that they'd recently moved from the other one when I went there. I came back in the summer of '75 for a couple of months (my mother let me go thinking I'd get sick of it, then dragged me back) and then returned when I was 17 and allowed legally to leave home. But they sent me on to Chicago because all the women had gone to India or were staying at the Evanston temple.

When were you there? Have you kept in touch with any of the devotees? I lost track of them and don't know where any of them ended up.

I would have chosen George Harrison....But apon recently learning that Chrissy Hynde is a devotee...out of sentiment I chose her. Even if she is an NM disciple.....Just Kidding

Back when I was dirty, oily, & all around at odds with myself hitting puberty, I saw the "Message of Love" video on Ca. Music Ch. and I was hooked. Through Her tuff lyrics & melodic sighs I found salvation and a new rockin direction. My first idols; I even cried when James Honeyman Scott and Pete Farandon left the world's stage. I just think it's just peechy to find out she's into Krsna too. So she gets my vote anyday

Annie Lenox and Boy George.

Although I voted for Boy George, I still think that Crispian Mills (previously of Kula Shaker) should be in there.

On an aside, could anybody here explain the ISKCON use of the word Sankirtan or Sankirtan Devotee. It appears to mean something other than getting together and singing kirtan together.

Annie Lennox? As far as I know, she severed all ties to ISKCON in 1986, and didn't go to some other Vaishnava group. She was married to a Harikesha disciple for about a year, and it was a miserable marriage. In 1986. interviewed by Britain's Sun newspaper, she described her ISKCON involvement as "a period of my life that I very much regret.... apart from the fact that I am still a vegetarian, Hare Krishna plays no part in my life anymore."

Admittedly, her song "Conditioned Soul" bespeaks her ISKCON involvement. But "Missionary Man" and "Thorn in My Side" speak even more eloquently of her exit from ISKCON.

If Crispian Mills is in your heart, he is there.



While the original meaning was congregational chanting, when Sankirtan came to the west, "san" became interpreted as "sans" which means "without" and so Sankirtan has come to mean an assorted number of activities "without" kirtan and so the confusion or multiple meanings of the term. Indeed, one might ask in looking at the usage of the term, what isn't Sankirtan?

I was thinking of her and Boy George mainly as musicians who have some history in ISKCON and selected them for their art and not for their bhakti. I didn't know that Annie Lennox is still a vegetarian. This is definitely something. She is doing better than some former ISKCONers.

And thanks for Ananga for mentioning Crispian Mills! To think about it, his song Govinda was the last major KC hit I know of. Or was there another in the meantime that I missed?

Otherwise, devotionally speaking George Harrison deserves the first prize, but his artistic appeal is too 60-ish and 70-ish for me.

If I have to choose a Celebrity Sankirtan Devotee of nowadays that would be Nando Reis; A Pop singer who is really giving a tune up to the devotees’ image in Brazil. With his new song over 70. million people are daily listening to Hare Krishna Mahamantra on TV programs!

http://www.dipika.org/2004/10/31/31a_nando...tees/index.html

3. Começar de Novo (a TV Soap Opera) captured 38 points in audience rating in Brazil and 63 percent of all the televisions sets, thus consolidating leadership in its category and show time. This means that six days a week during evening prime time, for every ten television sets in Brazil, six are tuned in to Começar de Novo. This audience of more than 70 million has listened to the Mahamantra at least 49 times since the soap opera started seven weeks ago.

5. MTV Brazil, the hottest Brazilian Music television network among ages 10 to 50, has recorded Nando Reis and the Hare Krishnas chanting "Mantra" live and is broadcasting it every day.

8, Public Concerts: Nando Reis, Chandra Mukha Swami, and eleven other devotees performed live this past weekend at the Canecao in Rio de Janeiro, Rio's equivalent to New York's Madison Square Garden, and there are many other concerts scheduled throughout Brazil.

And there is much more. Television stations are visiting the Sunday feast at several of the more than 25 ISKCON temples in Brazil to learn more about the Hare Krishnas. People are stopping devotees at malls, on the streets, and in public places. "I have seen you on TV," they say. "Where are you located? I want to learn more."

It is simply, without exaggeration, the biggest Hare Krishna revolution we have ever seen.

http://www.dipika.org/2004/10/31/27_preach...azil/index.html

Sankirtan came to be used to mean any form of preaching activity, such as book distribution, done on the streets. In the beginning, the emphasis was on how many books one distributed, and there was still some purity in intent. Later on, the competition shifted to how much money one collected, and the increasingly ambitious projects of temples and increasing number of mouths to feed in them exerted pressure to collect funds also. Finally, they found it cheaper to sell junk than distribute books. It was a downward spiral at the moment it became about money and people started rationalizing that the money belongs to Krishna anyway, so why not liberate it by lying, shortchanging the customer, etc. When it was about books, often a book would almost be given away to a sincere but poor soul.

My theory from my anthropological perspective is that it was an example of two cultures mixing poorly. The American drive to compete mixing with the notion of preaching and/or begging on the street were a toxic combination.

A sankirtan devotee was originally a book distributor, of course, by this definition of sankirtan.

I don't know how much chanting is done on streets anymore. We used to go out regularly but I don't see ISKCON devotees doing so anymore. The local Sridhar followers to regularly. I got held up by them crossing the street one night and I had to smile and say, "karma" for all the times I must have slowed traffic down in my ISKCON years.

I was just in Europe, where I saw devotees dancing in the streets in both Prague and Copenhagen. I am attaching a photograph of devotees in downtown Prague.

Elpis,

Is that you in the Yellow dhoti..?

I am not cool enough to pull off a yellow dhoti

How did Neil Diamond get in there?

The Song named “Mantra” is the one in which Nando Reis chant the Mahamantra on the daily opening of a Soap Opera, in the evening time for more the six month. It is estimated by the Media that 70. million people daily watch the Soap Opera named “Comecar de Novo”. The clip alive is a MTV production.

To hear the Song "Mantra" click Musica; Discografia and select the fifth album on the top right and click # 5 on the panel.

http://www.nandoreis.com.br/site/swf/flash.htm


Radhe-Radhe!

Brihat-Mridanga Ki Jay!

i voted for him, he rules
plus his name is DIAMOND, he should win a poll at least for that
come on vote for him!

I'm feelin' fine, I'll explain to you now.

Some worry all day 'bout who they can trust

Life is a card

Just make it real
just don't think twice.
and don't think, feel
It don't take plans to clap your hands

-neil diamond

ps. i had no idea he was a devotee. who put him on the list, what is his story.

I vote Hector Villa Lobos!

On the same panel click # 18 (Bonus track Mantra)

Hare Krishna
Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna
Hare Hare
Hare Rama
Hare Rama
Rama Rama
Hare Hare