Prabhupada had planned the takeover of Russia long before he ever went to Russia.
Govinda dasi: He used to sit and turn the globe, and he would meditate on the different countries.
And he would say, “Brahmananda, you shall go to Russia. Goursundar, you shall go to Japan. Somebody else, you shall go to South America.”
You have to understand, we had no money, we had no manpower, we had nothing.
We were a handful of teenagers, 10 people in their early 20’s who were rather eccentric, all of us, because we had rejected our cultural values and we were following him like a Pied Piper, and he was telling us about these different countries we were going to go to and open temples.
He had his plan. It was not haphazardly done.
I have a beautiful picture of Prabhupada sitting and turning his globe.
He did it a lot. He meditated on the globe.
He looked at the different countries. You would see him doing it a lot, and he was planning.
He had planned the takeover of Russia long before he ever went to Russia.
This is a part of what he knew he had to come to this world and do.
We just didn’t know what all he was doing, although sometimes…in Montreal when we had a lot of time and he would talk, he used to talk to me about his different plans.
We had no money. We lived in a little flat. We had rats too.
There was nothing and yet he was telling me how he was going to have a world sankirtan party, and he also told me how he wanted to have a big auditorium where people could come and watch bhajans and hear bhajans and see plays and Krishna conscious things rather than going to the cinemas.
He felt the cinemas were drawing people into another world.
He had plans of doing this.
And when I go to Bombay and I see that great big auditorium, I say, “He said he was going to do this.”
It’s just like if I’m a pauper and I tell you I’m going to build Disneyland, and that’s what it was like.
But I never disbelieved anything he said, I just listened.
I was just always listening to him, and he liked to talk about what he was going to do.
And he talked about many things.
—Govinda dasi