Barsana Dham

Today I had been to Barsana Dham. It is a spiritual centre and US centre of Jagadguru Kripalu Parishat. It is located a few miles outside Austin among a lot of greenery and calm atmosphere. It houses a Radha-Krishna temple and meditation halls among beautiful landscaping and ponds. Their way of worshipping resembles the ISKCON way, involving singing Bhajans and dancing. Today they were celebrating Janmashtami, so it was grand.

I am not really very religious, so the place did not make a significant impact on me. But I am amazed at the following it gets from both Indians and natives here. The dedication shown by a few people there really surprised to me no end. Another interesting thing I have observed is the effect of music on devotees. Most of these worshipping methods involve a Bhajan that starts slowly and picks up pace and volume with time. By the time it ends, many of the devotees reach a state of mind that cannot be explained very easily.

My thoughts about religion and God are not in line with their practices, hence I must restrain myself from judging their practices. However, another thing there today was totally in line with all my beliefs - free food. At any point of time, the food court was drawing two times as many people as the main hall where today's festivities were on. I could see that a number of people were there to enjoy a good evening socializing with others, enjoying free food and having a walk in the serene surroundings of Barsana Dham. I call it a valid purpose in itself, because I am part of that gang ;-)

BTW, their websites are IE only :-( They strictly prevent you from getting in if you are using any other browser. Also, while their website is loaded, (really! I am not making this up) it disables copy-paste functionality on the entire OS. Very surprising to see the lengths they go to safeguard their copyrighted stuff, especially considering it is a spiritual/religious organization. However, I tried to load their website on Firefox in Linux, and bingo, it went through :-)