(4) Intense Service Life

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Nrisingha Palli, 2 November 2020, part 4
Translated from Bengali

We must always practise Krishna consciousness. As long as you have service, you must always do service. Do more and more service. Day and night, always do more and more service.

Guru Maharaj often told about Ajita Krishna Brahmachari who stayed at Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math. It was festival time at the temple. Busy with various services (it was necessary to cook a lot, wash a lot of dishes and so on), he stayed up till late, and when it was time to go to bed, he said, 'I will not go to the room. I will anyway have to again get up in a few hours, take a shower and go to the mangal-arati. I would rather stay here in the storeroom and sleep here.' He would put some sack on the floor and sleep like that.

There was no such thing as 'my room' in those days. Now, you all get a room with a bathroom, a bed and everything else. When I first came to the temple, there were no bathrooms in the rooms. When we woke up, we had to queue to take a shower in the common bathroom downstairs. Those who woke up early got to the bathroom first, and if you wake up a little late, you will have to stand last in the queue and wait for a long time. And Param Guru Maharaj had a rule that if somebody did not come to the mangal-arati, they were not given prasad that day. And Guru Maharaj went a little easier from there; he said if somebody did not come to the mangal-arati, I am not saying that they will not be given prasad, but I am requesting them not to come for prasad themselves. I did not have any problem.

When I woke up at four in the morning, I would manage to do many things between four and six in the morning. That was my duty. I would wake up at four, go to the mangal-arati, sit at the kirtans and listen to Hari-katha, and after that go to the bus stand, take a bus to Nimtala(?), and from there I would walk to the field. If there was some leftover rice in the morning, I would take it with some fried/fire-burnt chillis.

When I started construction, I would leave right after arati and have some bread (pauroti, পাউরুটি) with banana on the way. It cost one rupee. Then, I would allocate work among the workers, see what materials they needed and come back to the temple. I would also often go back and forth by rickshaw. There were no shops in Nabadwip, near our temples, so I had to go to different shops by rickshaw. There were also no mobile phones, they had not been discovered yet. When first mobile phones appeared, Gurudev gave me a phone (it was a huge phone). Even when I went to the bathroom, I would take it with me and kept it on top where soap is kept. I always thought, 'When will Gurudev call me? What if Gurudev calls me when I am in the bathroom?'

One time Gurudev did call me when I was in the bathroom. At that time we were building the temple at Govinda Kunda. That morning, I had just passed stool and was filling a bucket to take a shower when Gurudev called me and told me to come to him at once. I wore a gumcha and went to him. Gurudev asked me, 'Why are you wearing a gumcha?' I said that I was in the bathroom. 'What? In the bathroom! Ew! Could you not take a shower first? Anyway, stand over there and listen carefully. Today is your last day. If you manage to build the foundation today, then the temple will be built; otherwise, it will not happen.' I said, 'What should I do?' And Gurudev told me, 'Offer bhoga to Giridhari and offer very nice sweet rice to Kurmadev. And call workers to come and start building today.' That day, I brought three hundred people. They started working early in the morning and finished early in the morning the next day. They filled the bottom with twelve hundred sacks of sand and three–four lorries of boulders, then the foundation base became firm. Gurudev told to offer bhoga to Kurmadev, and then it was possible to do it. Before that, we had been trying for one month to make the foundation, but nothing worked.

So, just as the chatak bird is always waiting for a drop of water, always looking up at the sky, in the same way, 'When will Gurudev give me sevice?' – we must always look in this direction. We must not make any excuses...

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Language: Bengali

READ OTHER PARTS:

1) Search Out the Source
2) Unique Gift to the World
3) March On
4) Intense Service Life
5) Patience, Faith and Affection