Bhaktivedanta Archives: Disorganized, Inefficient and 10 Years behind the Technology
BY: MADHUDVISA DASA
Feb 14, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA (SUN) — As followers of Srila Prabhupada we associate with him through his vani, or his recorded instructions. That is because his vapu, or physical form is no longer present before us. However, any sincere follower of Srila Prabhupada can detect that Srila Prabhupada is still with us. He is living with us in his books and other recorded vani, like the audio and video recordings.
I have always been horrified by the lack of realization of this and therefore the lack of respect for and interest in Srila Prabhupada's recorded vani shown by the leaders and general devotees in ISKCON. I think this almost complete disinterest in Prabhupada's vani in ISKCON is a remnant of ISKCON's Zonal Acarya days. In those days, the Zonal Acaryas would preach that it was a big offence to directly approach Srila Prabhupada. They said that you had to surrender to, hear from, and serve them instead. So as I can practically testify, because I was there, living in at least 80 different ISKCON temples in these years, they would give absolute hell to anyone who was seriously interested in Srila Prabhupada.
This mood continues in today's ISKCON. Some devotees even preach it still. They say that it is useless to hear from Prabhupada because he is not a "living guru". I personally sat in a class given by Prahladananda Swami at Ratha-yatra festival time in the Brooklyn temple in maybe 1991(?), and he quite openly said in the class that it was useless to hear from Srila Prabhupada tapes because for any spiritual benefit, you have to hear from a "living guru..." And no one questioned him on this. I was stunned and couldn't say anything... Even today, his disciples still have the same idea. I met one of them last year in Vrindavan and he confirmed that his guru maharaja taught him that it was useless to hear from Srila Prabhupada because he is not a living guru.
So this poison is very strong in ISKCON and it has destroyed practically everything. Can you imagine what happens to a distributor of Srila Prabhupada's books after he hears this philosophy? He understands from his guru maharaj that he cannot understand these books written by Prabhupada, but that he has to understand them through his guru maharaja. Jayadvaita Swami is even changing the books so they say this!!
So obviously the confused disciple comes to some crisis when he realizes "guru maharaja says I can't understand Prabhupada's books, I have to hear from him instead of reading Prabhupada's books, so why am I distributing them?" "If I can't understand Prabhupada's books, then these people on the street surely can't understand them..." So obviously, as the result of the preaching of his guru maharaj that he needs to hear form a 'living guru', he gives up distributing Srila Prabhupada's books and goes back to maya...
You may think I am exaggerating, but I am not. Things are so bad in ISKCON that no one can believe it if you explain it. Who could believe that any spiritual organization could run a school system where, in most of the schools, practically every boy was sexually abused by the gurus and their followers? But it happened in ISKCON. And they get away with it for so long because no one could believe such "saints" could be doing such terrible things.
Bhaktivedanta Archives was actually formed to save the Prabhupada vani from being destroyed by these demoniac gurus and the demoniac BBT. And they have actually saved so much Prabhupada vani which would have otherwise been destroyed, either purposefully or simply by neglect, by demons in ISKCON.
So personally I am very, very, very grateful to Parama-Rupa Prabhu, Ekanatha Prabhu and Ranjit Prabhu, who have made it their life's work to preserve and distribute the vani of Srila Prabhupada. They have many great achievements. They produced and released the Prabhupada Folio in the early 90s, against the orders of the GBC, and that has created a revolution in the ability of devotees to access the teachings of Srila Prabhupada. Then they printed all of Srila Prabhupada's teachings including letters, lectures and conversations in book form.
And Parama-Rupa Prabhu created the Bhaktivedanta Tape Ministry and systematically presented about 1,300 recordings of Srila Prabhupada.
So without the service of these devotees, where would we be? We are all eternally grateful to them and beg for their mercy and beg for the dust of their lotus feet. They had the intelligence to actually do something to save the Prabhupada vani at a point in time when in ISKCON, practically no one was interested in Prabhupada vani. They were only interested in the vani of their "guru maharajas", who almost all later on turned out to be big demons in the dress of gurus.
But all this said, the treatment that the Prabhupada vani gets in the Bhaktivedanta Archives is far from satisfactory. The Archives devotees are also in ISKCON and are also contaminated by the ISKCON poison that minimizes the importance of Srila Prabhupada's vani. I am sure they are wondering why we are so anxious to hear the 700+ more recordings of Prabhupada that they have not released, because we already have about 1,300 recordings to listen to.
Actually the plan of the Archives was not to preserve the Bhaktivedanta Tape Ministry at all. They were simply going to let that disappear and replace it with their CD ministry, which would have been when it was completed a few hundred CDs only. Only a small percentage of what we already had on the cassette tapes. And they purchased some new [in the late 80's, early 90's] digital editing equipment and for the first time they could easily change the Prabhupada audio without anyone noticing. So they went crazy with this.
The idea was to produce CDs that were clear and easy for the listener to understand. So they were heavily editing Srila Prabhupada's classes. They removed anything that they considered a distraction. So if Prabhupada ever said anything that did not seem to be on the topic, they were editing it out. Like if there was a baby crying and Prabhupada asked for the baby to be taken out, they would edit out the baby crying and Prabhupada asking for the baby to be taken out. If Prabhupada repeated something often they would take out the repeated words that Prabhupada spoke. If Prabhupada paused for emphasis, they would edit out the pause. If Prabhupada spoke to anyone on the side they would edit it out. Even if they considered Prabhupada was digressing from the main point they would edit him out.
Often Srila Prabhupada is speaking on one point then he "digresses," he comes to a point and mentions something and then starts to explain that thing, and when that explanation is finished, he goes back and continues speaking on the original point. So in some cases the Archives were editing out what they considered to be Prabhupada's digressions. Sometime they would take words or whole sentences from other recordings and insert them into places where they thought Prabhupada should have said them.
It is quite common on these tapes to be reading through the transcript and being 3/4 of the way through, and on the CD Prabhupada finishes the class and says "Thank you very much, chant Hare Krishna!" But in the transcript of the original tape Prabhupada continues powerfully preaching. And it is amazing what nectar they deleted....
When I complained to them about this they said, "Prabhu, these CDs are not for archival purposes, they are for preaching..."
Anyhow, I have digressed. the plan of Bhaktivedanta Archives was to just let the Prabhupada cassette ministry recordings disappear and replace them with a few hundred heavily edited CDs. That is when we realized there was a need to save the Prabhupada cassette ministry and since then, the early 90's, we have produced three Prabhupada MP3 sets. Both the current archives MP3 set and the previous archives MP3 set are produced by us. The second set was based on work by some devotees who I do not know, who for the first time released actual programs. In the first set we released, we had for each tape "Side A" and "Side B." But this devotee put each class in a separate file as it is in the current Prabhupada MP3 set. Unfortunately the original tapes he was working from were not good, so many were cut off. There were so many other problems with this set also.
I am explaining this because the Archives seem to have been thinking that 1,300 recordings of Srila Prabhupada was already more than enough to release and they were planning to reduce the available Prabhupada recordings down to a few hundred "high quality" CDs.
This illustrates how the ISKCON poison works. They so much de-emphasize the importance of hearing from a pure devotee that devotees are thinking: "What's the point of having all these Prabhupada recordings? After all you have to hear from a 'living guru...'"
In every aspect of the Bhaktivedanta Archives operations, this neglect and lack of care and respect is painfully present. They have something like 17,000 or more images of Srila Prabhupada. But they have only made about 80 of them available to the devotees! I had a very practical experience of this when we were typesetting the Krishna Books Inc. "Chant and Be Happy" booklet. This is exactly the same booklet that Prabhupada's disciples printed for distributing at the peace rallies in the 60's, but they printed it in black and white, we wanted to print it in color. So I went to the archives at Prabhupada Village to get the images for that booklet. I asked Ranjit if I could have an image of Prabhupada smiling and he promptly said that Prabhupada did not smile much, we hardly have any images of Prabhupada smiling! Of course, I had seen the thumbnail scans and knew that there are so many photos in the archives collection of Srila Prabhupada smiling brilliantly. But the archives representative was adamant. "Prabhupada didn't smile much..." He said the only good photos of Prabhupada are the 80 we have already released. Why don't you pick from one of those photos? I told him that the devotees have seen those 80 photos of Prabhupada millions of times. I want some photos that have not been released. His reply. "They're all bad Prabhu. We have already released the [80] good ones..."
So I asked if I could have a look through the Prabhupada image galleries he had on the computer in front of him. "No. Prabhu. We can't let anyone see them!" As if I had made a great offense even daring to ask to see an unpublished photo of Srila Prabhupada!
In the end, out of frustration, I started going through some old Back to Godhead magazines he had there and started picking photos out of the BTG's and telling him, "I want this one..." And he got them all for me. Mind you, out of all the pictures we used in that "On Chanting Hare Krishna" booklet, only two of them had been scanned by the Bhaktivedanta Archives. For the other images Ranjit had to go downstairs and get the original films out of their files and scan them for me. From this we can understand that the archives have so many images they have never scanned, which simply exist in the basement of their house at Prabhupada Village. So if something happens there, these images of Srila Prabhupada will be gone forever.
And what has happened to a lot of these transparencies and negatives while they have been in the care of Bhaktivedanta Archives is horrendous. You cannot believe it. If devotees want, I can post some typical examples. So many of the negatives are so badly scratched that to get anything presentable, you have to work on it for days in Photoshop and still it leaves a lot to be desired. And throughout the whole collection the films and transparencies have developed these horrible black dots and marks all over them. It looks like mold to me, but I have not seen the actual transparencies affected by this, I have only seen the scans.
While re-editing the ITV Acharya Series programs, we requested all the still images used in the introduction sequences from these shows so we could remake them at better quality. Obviously when these shows were originally produced in the 80's, the images were perfectly clear. They must have been, there was no Photoshop then. But the scans of the same images we received from the Archives were terrible, covered in heavy scratches and this horrible black spotted mold or whatever it is. We could fix it up enough for the DVDs in Photoshop, but for high resolution prints these Prabhupada photos are ruined. And the archives have no copies of the transparencies or negatives. Even though it is easy to duplicate these without any significant loss of quality, they never did. Instead they used the original negatives every time they wanted to reproduce a print. In the olden days ,every time you make a print you have to put the negative into the enlarger. So I guess with all this moving the negatives in and out of the enlarger, the only original negatives for most of the "classic" Prabhupada photos are almost destroyed. And there is no copy.
What has happened with the Prabhupada images at the Archives is repeated for whatever other recorded vani they have.
An example of how little they value the original recordings of Srila Prabhupada is back in the 90s, when they were distributing their Prabhupada Library, which was a complete set of the Prabhupada Tape Ministry tapes plus all the Archives books, plus a copy of the then new MS-DOS Vedabase, as a promotion they were giving every customer "A free original reel of tape containing a Prabhupada class." They were actually giving away the original reel-to-reel tapes that Prabhupada had personally recorded... As a sales gimmick... This was one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in ISKCON. They have absolutely no idea of the importance and value of the Prabhupada recordings they have.
And now Ekanatha Prabhu is telling us that they are busy trying to capture the original analog tapes digitally. Which means they have not done it yet... They made a big noise and collected a lot of money in the early 90s for transferring the Prabhupada tapes to DAT digital tape. But obviously they did not transfer them all. Why would they? At that time their plan was to let the cassette tape ministry with its 1,300 recordings fade away and replace it with a few hundred CDs. So in their minds there was obviously no need to transfer all these tapes to digital.
Quite honestly, this same poison effected me also. I produced the first Prabhupada MP3 set in the early 90s at the fervent request of Mahesh Raja who practically locked me in his house in Manchester until I had finished transferring his complete Prabhupada tape collection to the Real Audio format [at that time MP3 was just new and not established as the standard format for compressed audio].
I clearly remember a conversation that I had with Mahesh Prabhu. We were saying this is nectar, but who will want the full set of Prabhupada recordings when we finish it? Basically we were counting the people up who we thought would be interested to get the "Complete Prabhupada MP3 Library" for their computer. We came up with five or six people and that was it. But I was very surprised and happy when we started advertising and selling it on the internet in the mid-90s. I couldn't make enough of them. The demand from the devotees was amazing. Then I gave it to Madhavananda Prabhu in New York and he was producing as fast as he could, and could not supply the demand, and he gave it to Brahmananda and Gargamuni in Vrindavan and they started manufacturing it as fast as they could. We distributed thousands of sets in six or eight months...
And all this time, the Archives were criticizing us. They did not want Srila Prabhupada distributed like this because they wanted to sell cassette tapes! But having their heads down and doing their archival work, I guess they did not notice that by the mid-90s, people did not have cassette tape players anymore... But they were adamant. "No MP3s. Cassette tapes..." This is but one of many, many examples showing how the Archives are generally at least ten years behind when it comes to technology, and generally they have no idea how to use the current technology. The exception to this was the DOS-Vedabase. That was really cutting edge technology at the time they released it.
Eventually the Archives surrendered to the reality that people don't have cassette tape players anymore and they started advertising their own "Prabhupada MP3 Library." I was so happy. I thought, "Wonderful, they have done something at last!" I knew they had the original tapes and I knew they could get a much better result then me. I had to work off the cassette tapes they were distributing which were often very bad quality. There were so many problems in their production of cassette tapes, but that is another story. So I was thinking that this is wonderful, now we will have a really nice quality MP3 set produced by the Bhaktivedanta Archives from their master tapes... So I ordered one of their sets. And it turned out to be simply a pirate copy of our set. They had done absolutely nothing at all except copy our set...
But I was unhappy with the quality of this set and eventually convinced Ekanatha to let us have access to the Cassette Tape Ministry master tapes, and with the help of Nara Narayana Prabhu and his family and friends in Los Angeles, we produce what is the current Bhaktivedanta Archives Prabhupada MP3 Library.
At that time I tried very, very hard to get access to all the original recordings, the Prabhupada recordings we are still trying to get access to now, but Ekanatha flatly refused. At that time I really had to force him by writing many letters and making a big fuss, otherwise he would have never given me even access to the Cassette Tape Ministry master tapes... So from my experience, it seems that the only way the Archives will release any unreleased Prabhupada vani is you have to make such a big fuss. So everyone needs to push Ekanatha very hard on this point of releasing the unreleased Prabhupada audio, and he may then realize the importance of it and it may actually dawn on him that Srila Prabhupada's followers have the right to hear the recordings that Prabhupada made, clearly with the intention that his followers would listen to them.
Why did Srila Prabhupada record these tapes? So Ekanatha could lock them up in the Archives and deny all of the followers of Prabhupada access to them, while the tapes rot? Do you think Prabhupada would be pleased with you for this, Ekanatha Prabhu??? And you are upsetting the devotees. And we are not supposed to upset the devotees. You know, Krishna is pleased when you please His devotees. So you can please so many devotees by releasing the unreleased Prabhupada vani. And by their blessings you will surely go back home, back to Godhead. So why not do it, release all the Prabhupada vani you have locked up there and please Srila Prabhupada, please the devotees, and go back home back to Godhead. It is a great opportunity...
Anyhow I could write a big book about the Archives and how they are not properly archiving the vani of Srila Prabhupada, but I think you get the idea. Whatever they do, it is with the same apparent ignorance of the importance and value of the recorded Prabhupada vani they have in their possession.
There are so many examples. In the early 90s, the BBT spent a lot of money to get all the Prabhupada 16 mm and 8 mm films transferred to broadcast quality digital video tape [digibeta tapes]. There was only ever one NTSC copy of the digital tapes made and that was put in the care of Bhaktivedanta Archives. Another non-digital copy was made and put in the care of Nrsimhananda Prabhu at ITV. There was also one PAL copy that went to Europe. About ten years later, Yadubara Prabhu approached Bhaktivedanta Archives to get the digital video tapes so he could use them for producing his chronological collection of Prabhupada videos, which has now become "Following Srila Prabhupada." Of the approximately 40 video tapes, Bhaktivedanta Archives had lost two of them. Fortunately Nrsimhananda Prabhu had not lost his copies, so we were able to supply Yadubara Prabhu with copies of these tapes. Yet another example of the Archives not taking care of the Prabhupada vani in their possession, and certainly not realizing the value of it.
Anyhow, what needs to be done now is for the Archives to make very good digital transfers of all the Prabhupada audio tapes they have in their possession that they have not yet digitized and convert all these files to the flac format, and publish the files and the digital signatures for these recordings with some naming system that only really needs to identify the original tape. That will establish the standard originals, and then we need to work together cooperatively from these original tapes and produce the new complete Prabhupada MP3 library. And this can be done using today's technology, not the ten-year old technology the Archives are using. Today these things are done online using a collaborative model and a website to coordinate everything. To make this possible, all the Prabhupada vani needs to be released on this website and devotees can work on it by downloading files, fixing them and then uploading them, then the transcribers can download the fixed files and transcribe them and upload their transcriptions... This is the current technology...
This project is very dear to my heart. I gave five years of my life to ITV to work on a similar project to save and distribute all the video and film recordings of Srila Prabhupada, and that resulted in the very successful Prabhupada DVD set, which does contain all the known film and video recordings of Srila Prabhupada. So as far as the film and video, everything is presented and preserved in a nice way by the Prabhupada DVD set and now also Yadubara Prabhu's "Following Srila Prabhupada." So the visual record of Srila Prabhupada has been saved and preserved. But we have not saved the audio or the still images... A large percentage of the images of Srila Prabhupada and the audio recordings of Srila Prabhupada are in grave danger of being lost forever if we cannot somehow encourage Ekanatha Prabhu to do something about this.
I am prepared to give as much time as needed to Bhaktivedanta Archives to help with this project to preserve and publish all the audio recordings of Srila Prabhupada. I can help with the website to coordinate the project and I can help with the computer work to restore the poor quality files, and when this is done I am happy to help Ekanatha Prabhu with the transcription work also. In this way, when it is about preserving and distributing the vani of Srila Prabhupada, I am happy to be the humble servant of anyone who is actually interested in doing this...
If any of these invaluable recordings of Srila Prabhupada are lost, the loss is incalculable. There is so much value in even one word from Srila Prabhupada. The disaster of loosing even one tape is unimaginable. Bhaktivedanta Archives need to discover the value of the Prabhuapda vani they are holding onto and comprehend the great disaster they will be responsible for if any of this material is not preserved and distributed to the devotees.
Anyhow forgive me writing so much. I could write much more, but who would read it?
I am simply humbly praying that Ekanatha will accept the help we are offering and together we can save and distribute this great treasure of unreleased audio from His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada!
All glories to Srila Prabhupada, who continues to live in his recorded vani.
Chant Hare Krishna and be happy!
Your servant,
Madhudvisa dasa
