Today's log-in at MySpace had another 18 friend requests queued up. Clearing out the junk and approving the rest, the total count settled at a round figure of 1008.

Now, the value of having 1008 friends?


The numbers mean little in the end. While in theory we all know much of the nature of friendship in this world, its superficial reality becomes painfully obvious for a Western individual living in India. You won't have a shortage of people keen on making friends with you. You'll have a grand shortage of people who wish to be friends for a reason I would consider spiritually worth-while. Money, assets, services, contacts abroad – they are the honey. As it turns out the desired goods aren't going to become available, friendships come to a rapid closure. People become sordid, or better even, stop talking to you altogether. A cruel and morbid world it is.

In truth, the last option is desirable indeed. Gramya-katha na sunibe, gramya-varta na kahibe. "Hear not the village talks, speak not of the world's ongoings, Raghunatha!" For a sadhaka who is wholeheartedly aiming at sheltering the mind in the services of Radha and Krishna throughout their ever-unfolding nitya-lila, idle talks are little more than arrows piercing the heart and boiling tar poured into the ears. A torture, and a detrimental torture at that, for even slight immersion in the mundane with a sense of affection or attachment can do untold damage to smarana. With the purification of the heart, the awareness becomes more and more subtle and one begins to perceive even the slightest adverse effects; effects that in the past went unnoticed amidst immersion in the mundane.

We are practically hermits. As a matter of daily routine, we crawl out of our house into the last hour of daylight, circumambulating the two kundas, purchasing goods for Thakur's seva for the coming day, meeting saints of choice for blessed company. Walking while chanting the names, keeping the eyes off the world, towards the ground; for the visible environment of even the sacred'est of lands is filled with things unbefitting for the sadhaka's eyes, sights one will never wish to remember again. Few are the real friends, the friends who have forsaken the mundane pursuit and assemble with the sole aim of nourishing each others' spirit identities. In such company, days run into nights and nights into days with a prayer it would never end, the passing of the clock's hands a torturous journey speaking of the inevitability of departure.

If only one of the 1008 becomes more than a friend in name, spending days and nights with us in the rapture of wholehearted bhajana in the sacred land of Vraja, if only one's heart weeps with passion for the services of Radha and Krishna, then I regard him or her as 1008 times more in worth than the assembly of 1008 noble names seen today.

Where are you? That is the question.