Krishna says in Bhagavad-gita, "I am adventure." If we go out and preach -you read in Caitanya-caritamrta Haridas Thakura, Lord Nityananda, Advaita Acarya - all the adventures they would have. We will be a few minutes over time. We used to go out in Detroit. We had a map of the city of Detroit and the idea was to knock on every door in the city of Detroit. They have been working on it for six to seven years. We had a map and we were working our way through. Has anyone been to Detroit? The joke is that it was a good place to be from. It is a rough city. It has pervasive poverty and crime. It has areas that the police don't even go to at night. After eight o'clock pm they won't even go in. If you call they will come at seven o'clock the next morning to see if the house is still standing.
We were going door to door. We found out that a certain group of people did not like sweets. We used to have peanut butter burfi but they did not like it so we made simple popcorn and put it in bags. We had been going for years through this part of town with popcorn prasadam in bags. One day we were there chanting. I think it was in '72 or '73. The Detroit riots were just about to break. This is when they burnt down the whole city. Turns out that the riots broke out right where we were that afternoon. We looked this way and there was Detroit's police coming this way with tear gas masks, tear gas guns, and shield and riot protection. And they were moving like a Roman legion coming down the street right to us. Okay we can't go that way. We looked the other way and coming down the other end of the street were the locals - broken beer bottles, baseball bats, Molotov cocktails, and they were coming our way. We were sandwiched right in the middle of a situation was that just about to explode. We took a quick analysis of the situation - these guys have guns and these other guys don't have guns so we will go that way. Now the crowd of locals was very angry. They were not friendly or accommodating. They were out for blood. Angry! But when we got up close so that they could see us, all of a sudden someone yelled out , "Hey, it is the popcorn people." [Laughter] They parted the crowd, welcomed us, and we chanted our way right through.
- An excerpt from a lecture By H G BadriNarayan Prabhu (ACBSP)
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