Gaura Prasad das Adhikari, Oct 28, USA: I’ve very much appreciated Rocana Prabhu’s analytical examination of Satsvarupa’s Lilamrta and more recently, his exposé of Radhanatha’s autobiography. However, I would like to draw Rocana Prabhu’s attention (and the attention of the Sun’s good readers) to another misrepresentation of our Srila Prabhupada by an ISKCON guru.
Back in the mid-90’s Bhakti Charu Swami embarked on the Abhay Charan project. Apparently he spent over $1,000,000 to produce 108 episodes and spent a good deal of his time (as well as the valuable time and money of many ISKCON devotees) to achieve his goal. And what was the result?
The result was the cheap ‘hinduization’ of Srila Prabhupada.
From the very first episode, his depiction of Srila Prabhupada, Srila Bhaktivinod and other acaryas in our line is third-rate and erroneous. In fact, all the characters in the series are so two-dimensional and their depictions are so misleading that it would have been appropriate if a disclaimer appeared at the end of each episode – “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead portrayed in this series is purely coincidental.”
For example, under Bhakti Charu Swami, Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s famous struggle against the yogi Bisakisen became a poorly directed, poorly scripted and poorly acted parody – something like Ghost Busters meets the Telly Tubbies. It bore no resemblance to the original story. I could go through every episode to demonstrate to the readers other instances like this, but I don’t think I could bear to watch the whole series. I will leave that up to the bold viewer who has a stronger stomach than I.
The scripts are never according to what we have heard from Srila Prabhupada nor according to the authorised biographies of our acaryas. Why is that? I was told by one of the devotees working on the project that when one of Bhakti Charu Swami’s disciples remarked, “But that is not the way it really happened,” Bhakti Charu’s response was, “I know – but I saw it like this in my heart!”
If the incidents portrayed in Abhay Charan are indicative of the revelations from Bhakti Charu’s heart, perhaps he is in need of a heart transplant…
However, the worst was in the later episodes, when Srila Prabhupada goes to the west. The actor Bhakti Charu chose to play the older Srila Prabhupada (NOT a devotee, I hasten to add, but a chain-smoking thespian from South India) resembled Prabhupada only in as much that he was old! He was so tall that sometimes he towered over the other actors. But physical deficiencies aside, how did Bhakti Charu Swami use this actor to present Srila Prabhupada’s pastimes to the world?
In one of the episodes, Srila Prabhupada meets Kali personified in New York one night. Suddenly a beam of light shoots from Prabhupada’s forehead and destroys Kali.
Er…sorry, correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t seem to remember that incident in Srila Prabhupada’s life. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention – or was this yet another of those poignant revelations that manifested from Bhakti Charu Swami’s heart?
When he first embarked on this project, Bhakti Charu said that the thing that inspired him was that he saw that the world was in need of real heroes, and that Srila Prabhupada was certainly a real hero.
We can’t argue with that.
But what Bhakti Charu has done with Abhay Charan is turn Prabhupada into a Marvel Comic superhero, or to be more specific, a cheap Bollywood imitation of a Hindu superhero. What will Bhakti Charu do as a sequel – ‘Prabhupada joins the X-Men’? ‘Prabhupada and Spidey Vs. The Green Goblin’? Naturally, I mean no disrespect to His Divine Grace. I am not referring to OUR Srila Prabhupada. I am referring to Bhakti Charu Swami’s Srila Prabhupada.
Yes, this is Bhakti Charu’s very own Srila Prabhupada. His personal representation of his spiritual master – immortalised on celluloid for generations of people to watch in awe.
“Wow! Did Prabhupada really do that?”
Srila Prabhupada was sooooo tall!!!”
“Did Srila Prabhupada say that? Cool!”
Of course, I’m sure that his followers and the Hindus that support (and manage) various ISKCON temples think that Abhay Charan is a wonderful TV series. They are probably even wondering why Bhakti Charu didn’t receive an Oscar or an Academy Award for it. The reality is that Abhay Charan was so bad that even the Indian TV networks wouldn’t take it – now that’s REALLY bad!
I’m not wondering why Bhakti Charu never received an Oscar or a Golden Globe – what I’m wondering is that after Bhakti Charu finally completed this project, why didn’t we hear any more about Abhay Charan? It was neither glorified or endorsed by the GBC, it wasn’t propagated by individual temples –it doesn’t even have its own website. Strange for something that Bhakti Charu Swami spent $1,000,000 and almost a decade of his life on.
Was this suspicious silence because the GBC felt that his depiction of Srila Prabhupada was an embarrassment to ISKCON? If anyone can fill in the blanks, please let us know.
Whatever it was, I certainly feel that this sad caricature of our beloved Srila Prabhupada and the bogus pastimes that have been fabricated by Bhakti Charu Swami do more damage to the image of His Divine Grace than Satsvarupa’s Lilamrta ever could. After all, it’s much more likely that ISKCON congregational members will watch Abhay Charan than read Satsvarupa’s biography.
In fact, I am surprised that nobody on the Sampradaya Sun (including Rocana Prabhu) has mentioned anything about Bhakti Charu’s project before – or perhaps the Abhay Charan series is so appalling that nobody has even bothered to watch it in order to review it.
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