The Odyssey of Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The most beautiful collection of rejection letters!
“Looking back, I don’t know what it was—youthful folly, divine inspiration, some chromosomal glitch in the DNA sequence—I don’t know what it was that prompted us to take this on…. We just felt compelled….We had faith in Yamuna.
We had faith in the fact that prasadam was so central to Prabhupada’s mission—that if we could do this, then we could die peacefully. I am not saying that in any kind of metaphorical way. I truly think that it was a service that we could look back on and say, ‘You know what? If nothing else happened, I helped to get that done.’
So we got somebody to pay for copies of the manuscript and sent them out [to publishers]. To this day I have at home the most beautiful collection of rejection letters from every publisher in America. They are the most heartfelt, ‘This is incredible research’; ‘It’s extraordinary’; ‘Good luck to you’; ‘I have no idea what to do with it’; ‘I don’t have any ideas for you’; ‘It’s fantastic.’
But who wanted to publish it? Who wanted to read 1,000 pages on Indian vegetarian food with all of these descriptions of Lord Krishna and this guru [Srila Prabhupada]?”
– Yogesvara das, from “Yamuna Devi: A Life of Unalloyed Devotion”