Remembering Drutakarmā Prabhu
I am not qualified to glorify Drutakarmā Prabhu in a comprehensive way. Others have done that, and I was happy learn about more of his achievements from them. I just want to say a few things concerning my own relationship with him, and hopefully that will be interesting to readers, and they may learn additional things about him.
I met Drutakarmā Prabhu when I moved from Pennsylvania to San Diego to work with the branch of the Bhaktivedanta Institute that Sadāpūta Prabhu had there. I loved science in school and after burning out on writing accounting software for a devotee computer business, I decided I should work with Bhaktivedanta Institute. Sadāpūta Prabhu’s operation in San Diego seemed more interesting to me than what Rasarāja Prabhu had going on in Bombay, so I decided to join him. At that time, Sadāpūta Prabhu and Drutakarmā Prabhu were working on the book Forbidden Archeology. I was the typesetter, and many of the illustrations took up part of the page. When the text flowed around them, producing shorter lines, the lines often looked too loose. I would work with Drutakarmā, the principal author of the book, editing the text, so the meaning was unchanged but text was not too loose on the page.
Drutakarmā in his former āśrama, was married to a woman who was a pūjārī, and he was engaged in making ghee wicks and in dressing Rādhā-Giridhārī once a week. His ghee wicks were precision, each the identical size and shape as the others. He had artistic talent and devotion that you could see by how he dressed the Deities.
For many years he wrote an article each month for Back to Godhead magazine. He told me that he did that by working on it just fifteen minutes a day. By the end of the month, he would have a completed article.
Even as a new devotee in 1979, I loved the evening program, and when I was in San Diego, I tried to schedule a speaker for the Bhagavad-gītā class every night. Drutakarmā Prabhu was almost always willing to give class. I was happy to have a reliable speaker, especially on the nights I dressed the Deities while listening to the class.
Drutakarmā Prabhu would schedule the morning class in San Diego. He and Sadāpūta Prabhu would alternate speaking on Wednesdays. Drutakarmā was liberal about allowing any devotee in good standing to give the class. He always felt that to be following nicely they must have some realizations that would benefit others.
He had a saying that stuck in my mind regarding the numerous fasting days we observe. He said, “Fast days are slow days.”
One verse he would quote in his classes, which I feel is important, but which many devotees do not often quote is:
yaḥ śāstra-vidhim utsṛjya
na sa siddhim avāpnoti
na sukhaṁ na parāṁ gatim
“He who discards scriptural injunctions and acts according to his own whims attains neither perfection, nor happiness, nor the supreme destination.” (Bhagavad-gītā 16.23)
That verse seems like the key to success in life!
In the early to mid 1990s the Bhaktivedanta Institute, along with three other ISKCON projects, decided to move to Alachua because the cost of living was cheaper than in San Diego. Thus Drutakarmā Prabhu and I drove from San Diego to Alachua the last week of May in 1994. We stopped at ISKCON temples in Tucson, Dallas, and New Orleans. Just one night we stayed in a motel near El Paso. Drutakarmā Prabhu was such a sādhaka that we chanted all the morning program songs in the hotel room before driving to Dallas. I appreciate his tolerance during that journey. I am almost never ready to go on time. Also I would chant Hare Krishna kīrtana when I drive, so Drutakarmā had to put up with me chanting four or five hours of kīrtana for five days.
Because I was a proofreader for Forbidden Archeology, I was later asked to proofread Drutakarmā Prabhu’s Forbidden Archeology’s Impact and a collection of his articles on archeological anomalies. I also was given the chance to proofread the second edition of Forbidden Archeology, some sixteen years after the original, for which he kindly gave me $500.
In around 1995 Drutakarmā and Sadāpūta Prabhu split up. Drutakarmā wanted to promote Forbidden Archeology, and Sadāpūta Prabhu wanted to write books on other topics like Vedic cosmology and consciousness. Sadāpūta Prabhu was upset to see that most of the Bhaktivedanta Institute budget was spent on the promotion of Forbidden Archeology. It was difficult to see these two devotees I admired involved in a conflict. Badrinārāyaṇ Prabhu, later Badrinārāyaṇ Swami, said I was like a child amidst a nasty divorce. I had to choose whether to work with Drutakarmā Prabhu or Sadāpūta Prabhu. Drutakarmā, then a vānaprastha who regularly attended temple programs, had a lifestyle much more like mine than Sadāpūta Prabhu, who had gotten married and lived outside, so I had some inclination to join him. I decided I should consult an authority. I knew Ravīndra Svarūpa Prabhu from when I previously lived in the Philadelphia temple, so I decided to ask him. He said he thought that Sadāpūta Prabhu could use someone to assist him, and thus I continued assisting Sadāpūta Prabhu in book and video production for the next ten years. When I saw Ravīndra Svarūpa Prabhu in Mayapur on September 16, 2026, I thanked him for his advice in this, and for the other ways he benefited my spiritual life.
Although both Drutakarmā Prabhu and I would travel, somehow our paths did not cross for twenty-four years. In 2019, followers of Sadāpūta Prabhu, who created a Gainesville Bhaktivedanta Institute for Higher Studies, organized a conference in that city on consciousness, which Drutakarmā Prabhu attended. It was great to see him again after so many years. We would see each other at other Bhaktivedanta Institute events in the following years.
I passed on a note for Bhṛgupati Prabhu, who was assisting him in his last days, to read to Drutakarmā Prabhu:
Dear Drutakarma Prabhu,
Please accept my humble obeisances again and again. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
It was an honor and a pleasure to serve with you at Bhaktivedanta Institute. Thank you for your contributions to my spiritual life. And please forgive me for any offenses I committed to you.
I hope that you get the full mercy that Lord Caitanya appeared to bestow and which Srila Prabhupada made so widely available.
Your unqualified servant,
Krishna Kripa Das
I do not think it made it to him, as Bhṛgupati wrote, “He’s alive but not responding.”
I was impressed by Drutakarmā Prabhu’s dedication to the practice of sādhana and his dedication to Śrīla Prabhupāda’s mission. He was a real team player. He did not need to be the leader of a project. He just played his role in it perfectly and assisted in that way. All glories to Drutakarmā Prabhu, an exemplary Vaiṣṇava.
