Comments on: Tulsi Gabbard: Living The Gita, Beyond The Photo Op

by: sdmuni108

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 17:43:17 +0000

In a healthy, ideal social situation undoubtedly it will be comparatively easy to experience a natural balance in gender relations. But even in so-called ideal situations described in sastric literature, you still find examples of phenomenally powerful women.

Besides that point, is not clear what T Gabbard’s election to the US Congress has to do with dysfunctional marriage relations, whether past or present.

I would also question if SP’s priority was obsessing on transitory gender roles with which our current identification is only nominally “real,” as compared to facilitating the conditional souls with an opportunity to take up devotional life.

by: Paramananda das

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:52:54 +0000

ISKCON is a Patriarchy where men are supposed to take the leading roles, and modern society is more and more Matriarchy ,because so many nonsense men are not responsible in family life, and due to men not controlling their senses they are becoming womanizers and controlled by women ,and thus divorce is huge .Of course many women also divorce their husbands neither is very good. Srila Prabhupada said if there is divorce there should be no remarriage. Women can certainly be siksa Gurus, and behind every great man there is a great woman ,vedic culture is not woman hating ,but a question of protecting women

by: Paramananda das

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:33:48 +0000

Akruranath Prabhu you have failed to carefully study Srila Prabhupadas teachings, Srila Prabhupada had a different role for women though that may seem old fashioned, and that is for temples and ISKCON, I humbly advise you to study for example Sb 7 canto that describes the role of women

by: Akruranatha

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:28:24 +0000

I am trying to grasp the significance of the fact that while many of us on Dandavats are preoccupied with endless, sterile debates about whether women can serve as initiating gurus in ISKCON, the first of Srila Prabhupada’s followers to serve in the U.S. Congress will be a woman.

We seem to be divorced from the world around us somehow.

There seem to be these different approaches or tendencies. One approach is to try to create a separate Hare Krishna world which has very little to do with the rest of the people around us (except as a sounce of money and potential new recruits).

Another approach is to “mainstream” and show the world how the family next door can be Hare Krishnas and be happy, successful, peaceful and wise.

I am not saying one approach is valid and the other isn’t. I would have to admit that the Hare Krishna movement I grew up with in the 1970s was more like the former. We were a self-contained world, inviting people to leave the mainstream world and join ours. We were determined to show that we had a better way of doing everything, and we had all the answers.

I sense, though, that there was something limiting and short-sighted, even arrogant and fanatical, in that approach. We didn’t have all the answers (though perhaps we had the answers that mattered, answers to the bigger and more important questions). We could not even retain most of our people. The lifestyle was too demanding, economically unsustainable, and socially unnatural.

I do not know how everything will play out, but I have to say I am very happy to see that there are devotees like Tulsi Gabbard out there who can be respectable, successful people in the larger, American society and still identify themselves as Vaisnavas and followers of Srila Prabhupada.

If there weren’t, it would make me feel insecure, as if our reality did not live up to our ideology.