With the blog's changing to free-style expression from the earlier reportage model, I find my writings have been more on the philosophical side. Our friends are asking, "How are you guys? How are you settling down, is everything moving on as planned?" Let me touch on all that.

I could hardly speak of being at Radha-kunda without mentioning the Kutir project. The one thing we are looking forward to is the day when our bhajan kutir is built, giving us a place of peace of our own where we can retire to for a life of bhajan. There is no peace among people, bhajana – and smarana in particular – calls for a peaceful environment.

With the kind help of some Vaisnavas and some work I managed to pull together, we've collected the funds for paying off the land, though the registration will have to wait until we have our six-month residence quota together – we'll go by the book. I hear some advocates can juggle their way around the restriction, but I don't think that's worth it – it sounds too shady.

The house won't be that large – some 55 m2 with one room for me, one for Malati, one kitchen, one for Thakur and a jaga-mohana at the entrance before Thakur's room. There'll also be an underground level the size of my and Malati's room for the hot season – half underground, half above the ground. We'll set up a dome from iron net above the entire area to keep monkeys away from all the trees, flowers and bushes we'll be planting. Yes, and latrine and bathroom will not be inside the house! Having a latrine in the house is so yucky and impure – here in particular, where things tend to start smelling in due course... And two hand-pumps, one for Thakur and kitchen needs near the house, the other near the latrine / bathroom area.


After a rather rough Niyama-seva, our health has been getting towards the better, though our bodies, we find, are still going through a good deal of adjustment to the environment and are quite fragile and easily bent out of shape with the smallest mistakes in eating or otherwise. The weather is getting quite chilly. People think we are accustomed to that, coming from a cold country, but they couldn't be farther from the truth! Yes, we ve been through -20 degrees in the midwinter, but inside houses we have triple windows and a steady +21 degrees day and night, warm water as much as you wish.

Yes, and the house won't have a water tank! A tank on the roof is a good way of ensuring that in the cold season the water you get is really very freezing cold, and the gange ca yamune caiva invocation at the bath's start literally brings you to Gangotri in so many ways. We do have an iron rod heater to warm up a bucketful of water, and it works fine whenever electricity is on – which is a couple of times a day nowadays, fortunately often in the morning. And in the summer season, it's hot as straight from hell – and no, we don't have a cooling device to handle that! Whereas water coming straight from underground varies very little in its temperature – warm in the winter, cool in the summer.


With some coding work from the "outside", I've felt a need to balance it out with something meaningful in the realm of devotional works – and as some of you may have noticed, Bhasa.Net has come to life within the last month. A good deal of my spare time has gone into developing the bibliography section, a few more features to go before it's done. Hop onboard and contribute.

I need to get a new hard drive for the laptop – a bit bigger and a bit faster. The built-in drive is, yesterday I discovered, a 4200 rpm walla – which means that work is sluggish indeed, especially with anything video. The drive is the bottleneck slowing things down, and if I ever intend to get Lake of Flowers and the DVDs going, this is something I need to get – even if we aren't filthy rich at the moment. Sure, I could use a laptop with something more than a C1.3 GHz processor, but... Fortunately I don't need to go to Delhi to get any of that done – Mathura and Vrindavan are developed enough to have several PC stores that can even deliver to Radha-kunda.

And with that, today's entry has drifted around enough to merit concluding.