By Sri Giridhari das
Maraimalai Nagar is a small town located at the outskirts of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, South India.
Our Janmastami was a grand success event. For the first time, we had a long program starting from 5 pm extended up to the mid-night. Prior to the program, we had erected a huge pandal for easy distribution of prasadam. The program was well advertised throughout the area through banners, pamplets, and announcements. The entrance as well as the program hall (the school auditorium) was nicely decorated with flowers, banana trees, coconut leaves etc. We had depicted Krsna lila in chronological order through our attractive paintings. Also, we had displays showing ISKCON activities and the main preaching points.
People started to come in big groups from the evening. Four varieties of Prasadam (all cooked by our own devotees) was served to all the visitors from the very beginning of the program. We had a minimum of 2,500 visitors for the festival (last year we had about 1,500). A drama titled “Mrgari” was staged by our own devotees which had a lot of applause. We had two lectures, one in the evening during the peak hour and the other in late evening. We had nearly 150 devotees for the abhisekam done at mid-night for Sri Sri Gaura-nitai (deities of one of our congregational members). Later everyone took anukalpa prasadam.
Books were nicely organized and the distribution was also quite good.
The next day Srila Prabhupada’s Vyasa puja festival was also done in the same auditorium with nearly 200 people in attendance.
Over all, the festivals were enlivening.
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