{"id":28712,"date":"2021-05-19T23:37:08","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T04:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/?p=28712"},"modified":"2021-12-19T23:38:21","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T04:38:21","slug":"dancing-white-elephants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/dancing-white-elephants\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing White Elephants"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In India in the early 1970’s, when we held Pandal Programs, Srila Prabhupada referred to us as ”Dancing White Elephants”. Brahmananda Prabhu describes the story…….<\/div>\n
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Brahmananda: I\u2019m thinking what Srila Prabhupada, when we came here, [India] what he called us. You may know. What did Prabhupada call us? ”Dancing White Elephants.” Now, I did some research about white elephants, what that means, and I found out the term comes actually from Thailand where they have many elephants there and every once in a while there is an albino is born, a white elephant. So when a white elephant is born, it\u2019s considered very special and the white elephant is treated very special, not like the other elephants. He\u2019s pampered, he\u2019s kept very nicely. The thing is, of course, elephants are used to work. In the logging industry, the elephants pull the logs and push them and they work very hard. But the white elephant, they don\u2019t work, they don\u2019t put him to work. They just keep him. So the thing is that it\u2019s very expensive to maintain the white elephant. He has to be given special treatment and all kinds of facilities and so on, whereas the other elephants don\u2019t have this. The other elephants, all they do is work. But the thing is, the white elephant doesn\u2019t produce anything. The white elephant is actually useless, he cannot work, he\u2019s just maintained. So what they do with the white elephant, they teach him some tricks, to perform something, they make some show and they\u2019re entertained. They find it very entertaining to see the white elephant dancing. The black elephant, nobody cares to see the black elephant dance; but the white elephant, oh, that\u2019s very good. But the problem is that the white elephant can\u2019t do anything else. So it\u2019s a very apt description, I think, when we came to India. We could not do anything. Sometimes we thought we were maybe doing something, then Prabhupada had to remind us actually he was doing everything. Actually Prabhupada had to manage everything, every last detail, to how to distribute prasadam, how to teach us to eat the proper way and wash and so many things. So Prabhupada had to micro-manage the whole India preaching, because we were not very expert. And why? Just so the ‘white elephants’ could attract the brown elephants to dance. But this was Prabhupada\u2019s mission. When Prabhupada came to India in 1970, He made India his headquarters, he stayed in India. From India, then he would go out and visit the West for preaching. But he stayed from 1970 all the way through 1977 in India as His base. So the mission was to have the Indian people become devotees.<\/div>\n
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In India in the early 1970’s, when we held Pandal Programs, Srila Prabhupada referred to us as ”Dancing White Elephants”. Brahmananda Prabhu describes the story……. \u00a0 Brahmananda: I\u2019m thinking what Srila Prabhupada, when we came here, … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-26 16:37:11","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.isvara.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}