I had a bit of driving to do today. Acintya Rupa and I went out to Mulgrave to check the venue for Mrinal Mahajan's wedding with Pragati Bhatia. The venue was impressive and can seat 450 in style. We measured the stage and worked out a way to perform the wedding amidst all the tables and stages.

After that I had to go out again to Heidelberg for my final check-up with Dr Gya. It is a longer drive on busier roads. The trip to Mulgrave is mostly freeway and so therefore quick and easy. Travel to Heidelberg is partly along Bell St and back down Waiora Rd and then Punt Rd.

As a result I rediscovered the tedium of vehicular travel. You spend most of the time looking at other cars and the people in them and the usual advertising ugliness. Not a pretty sight.

Fortunately I had planned the trip so before I left I downloaded a couple of podcasts onto my iRiver from the recent ICELT conference. (ICELT stands for ISKCON Communication Europe Leadership Team).

That way I had some real entertainment during my journey. I got a really good chuckle from Saunaka Rsi's presentation, "Europe, ISKCON and Modernity". He poses a lot of valid questions on the identity of ISKCON culture and its traditional roots and how ISKCON will engage with "modern" society. I started the second discussion which was just as interesting, "The Gaudiya Math in Europe in the 1930's" by Bhrgupada Prabhu.

I'm looking forward to the next session.

# Posted by Aniruddha at 20/4/06; 7:07:03 PM to the Education & Training dept.
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The long running struggle of Kazakhstan's Hare Krishna community to retain a farm they own -- their only commune in the former Soviet Union - has intensified, Forum 18 News Service has learnt, as Almaty regional court has ordered the farm to be confiscated without compensation. "We will contest this decision in the Kazakhstan Supreme Court of Supervision. The situation is critical. Under the law the court bailiffs can come to us at any moment and begin to take the land from us," Rati Mandzhari (Yekaterina Levitskaya), of the Society for Krishna Consciousness, told Forum 18. The commune has long been the target of state attempts to close it down, which the community and an OSCE official think may be motivated by state intolerance of Hare Krishna devotees and greed for material gain.

# Posted by Aniruddha at 20/4/06; 10:20:08 AM to the News dept.
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Whew! There is hope for God...

Out here on the edge of the 400-billion-star Milky Way -- just one of an estimated 100-billion-plus galaxies in our 14-billion-year-old universe -- a God's special concern for the individual can seem preposterous.

Yet the idea of God remains imperative to many people seeking meaning in their lives.

Despite a fractious history, science and theology now have a closer alignment: some highly respected physicists and cosmologists, such as Australia's Paul Davies, have proposed in recent years that the universe is rigorously lawful, to the degree that it seems purpose-built to produce life.

# Posted by Aniruddha at 20/4/06; 10:02:49 AM to the News dept.
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