When we planned our little civil wedding, which was just supposed to be a tiny celebration to declare our relationship to the Vaisnava community and seek their blessings, we never expected what was to come.  At the end of the short, 20 minutes of celebrations and another 20 minutes of friendly photo shoots, Damodara Pandit Prabhu introduced us to a photographer from the Daily News.  He politely asked if he could take some snaps of Mandakini and I.  Perhaps at the time Mandakini didn’t know exactly how significant it would become but I had a little bit of a hunch of where this was going.  

A week later we’re already hearing people talking about our wedding in the newspaper.  The Tweed Boarder Mail had a half page article with a photo caption on their cover, more than enough publicity to be pleased with, especially since we were not expecting any coverage of our wedding more than the devotee’s local newsletter.  In fact, the photographer wasn’t even meaning to bump into a wedding, he had simply come too late in the morning to get his shots of the swing festival.

The next week we had even more people talking about a newspaper article of our wedding.  We had already received our own copy of the Tweed Border Mail but Tayla, a Govindas‘ staff member, decided to bring her newspaper copy to give to us.  We were surprised yet again to find a front page picture of us in the Daily News’ Weekend issue, yet another newspaper.

The Tweed Border Mail and the Weekend are two newspapers for the Tweed Shire and the southern end of the Gold Coast. These newspapers scale over the boarder of two Australian states. The Tweed Shire itself has a population of almost 100,000 people and the Gold Coast has a population of over 500,000 people. The wedding photographer stumbled upon our wedding by accident but it seemed to be Krsna’s arrangement to put His name out to thousands upon thousands of people.

We planned our wedding on Balarama’s appearance day because Prahlada Nrsimha Prabhu, our astrologer friend, advised us to place the event on a holy day so we could receive an abundance of Vaisnava blessings.  The event went on before any of the festival arrangements as not to take the focus off our Local Lordships, Krsna-Balarama.  It seemed not only did we receive the blessings of the local Vaisnavas but by the blessings of Balarama we also received high scale community blessings.  I think the key is that Krsna is pleased if you please His devotees, especially such exalted expansions as His very own Brother.  It was great to be accidentally an instrument in spreading the holy name, showing just how merciful Krsna is to His devotees to allow them a service, even if they’re too busy planning their wedding to lock in the time for it.