When I recently moved to Mumbai, being born and brought up in South India I faced a common question whenever I spoke with new people. After the common question what is your name? , many of them asked me what your Last Name or family name is? I was really surprised why it is so important to mention our Last name or what is the significance of the last name(since in south India its not considered much). From my childhood I had used only Initial which is the first letter in our father’s name. Then even I went ahead to one of friends and asked what the significance of the Last name is? He told me that we can find out the caste or the family lineage of a person with his last name. Suddenly some thought splashed my mind which made me write this as an article. As an ISKCON devotee, I knew that every devotee when he receives initiation he also receives a spiritual name from his Spiritual Master and all the names ends with “dasa” to signify that we are eternally the servants of the servants of the Supreme Lord, Krishna. So, in this material world everybody thinks that he is the body and attaches oneself to family, caste, country and so on. Every moment the material energy of the Lord puts us into an illusion that I am product of this material nature born from so and so and coming from such and such family. So we strive hard to keep up our so called prestige and position before others. In this way out of False Ego we do so many things which keeps us bound with this material world endlessly. But being so merciful the Supreme Lord and His Devotees comes to this material world to relieve us from the suffering of material existence which is no better than a mirage. In this Age of Kali, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu along with his associates mercifully descended to this Material world to distribute the Holy Name of Lord Krishna, so that by chanting these names we can revive our original position, our real Ego that is “jivera svarupa haya krishnera nitya dasa”.By gaining our original Ego, we can understand that our real and eternal last name is always dasa, to be a servant of the Supreme Lord.
Comments
What a wonderful observation and analysis.
Your eternal servant,
eternal muser