Our Youthful Guest.

Small temples like ours are always delighted when the occasional senior devotee visits. Refreshed by their classes, their kirtans and the opportunity to discuss questions about our spiritual lives, we return to our work with greater enthusiasm.

For Gaura-purnima this year, our guest may have lacked the dignity of grey hair and wrinkles, but his youthful buoyancy and Vaishnava behaviour were attractive features at our festival.

Gopal Hari is twenty-two, and was born and brought up in a Vaishnava family and the temple atmosphere of the Boise temple, in North America, started and run by his parents. He is the younger brother of Dr. Ravi Gupta, well-known in ISKCON for his regular column in Back to Godhead magazine which he wrote in his teens.

Gopal is following in his brother's footsteps, currently studying for a PhD in Science and Religion at Oxford University. His thesis will be about Divine Action as revealed in Shrimad Bhagavatam.

Gopal gave two very nice classes about Lord Chaitanya over Gaura-Purnima, which you can listen to here. Unfortunately we don't have adequate recording equipment to have recorded his wonderful kirtans, but I'll post one of his Oxford kirtans in the next post.