GBC member and ISKCON guru Bhakti Charu Swami suffered a mild heart attack recently, but is now in a stable condition at Apollo Hospital in Indore, India. Dr. Sujata Bhargav, who cared for him at the hospital, allowed devotees to visit his room when appropriate. Despite his condition, the Swami spoke to various disciples and students, saying that he was “tired of taking rest,” and that talking to devotees enlivened him.

Ditching your gas guzzler is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, but if you really want to do something about global warming, get a used car. You'll be putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As Matt Power notes in this month's issue of Wired, hybrids get great gas mileage but it takes 113 million BTUs of energy to make a Toyota Prius.

On June 20th 2008 Gokulananda, a second generation ISKCON member—or gurukuli—died by suicide in Marina Del Rey, California. His death was reported to his family and Gurukuli peers by his girlfriend of five years, Michelle Lemay.

On June 29th, about ten of Gokulananda’s gurukuli peers gathered with other friends to honor his bright spirit and to pray for peace and happiness on his journey.

One of the oldest and most important Indian celebrations was held in the Liverpool CBD [Sydney, Australia] last Saturday when about 4000 people attended Rathayatra, the Festival of Chariots.

It was the second year the festival had been held in Liverpool and organisers said it could become an annual event.

The holy ceremony of Bhumi Puja (ground-breaking) ceremony of the first ever state-funded Vaishnava-Hindu School in Britain will take place on Saturday 7th June 2008 and marks start of building works to be completed in August 2009. The Krishna Avanti Primary School is situated in the London Borough of Harrow.

The highlight of my visit to Mayapur this year was Anuttama Prabhu's seminar on leadership and management—an extremely valuable course, which teaches so many important skills and principles of effective leadership and management.

If you ever watch TV, read a newspaper, or listen to the radio, chances are you'll have heard of the term 'carbon footprint' by now. In our increasingly green conscious society, it's the buzzword of the minute, and refers to the impact human activities have on the environment.

MOUNDSVILLE, W.Va. -- Sujoy Bhowmik lives in two worlds.

On most days, he is a pharmacist at a CVS in Columbus. Other days, he is Narottama Das, a devotee of Hare Krishna, who finds peace in West Virginia at the Palace of Gold.

Once a religion whose members gave their life to the movement, the Hare Krishnas today welcome the most devoted people and the casual follower. In the 1970s, many of the members lived in communes. Now many, like Bhowmik, have careers and live outside the movement but are still devoted to their religion.

Mayapur ISKCON devotees took their seventy-strong devotional chanting party, complete with sacred food to distribute, to Krishnanagar this April 26. The town is the administrative head quarters of Nadia District in West Bengal, and is famous as the place where Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura worked as a magistrate while re-discovering Navadvipa’s holy places.

This June, devotees at ISKCON Mayapur’s satellite temple of Lord Jagannath in Rajapur, Simantadvipa joyfully celebrated their annual Snana-Yatra festival.

The ancient Snana-Yatra, or “bathing festival” is considered to be the birthday of Lord Jagannath and has been practiced at Jagannath Puri for hundreds of years.

Here's a fabulous recipe if you ever have a lot of cucumbers and don't know what to do with them.

The Brazilian BBT harks back as far as 1975, when Srila Prabhupada held the first Portuguese Bhagavad-gita in his hands. Director Ishvara Swami ran the organization impressively, translating all of Prabhupada’s books and turning out huge print runs of between 100,000 and 400,000, with an unprecedented one million copies of Perfect Questions, Perfect Answers flying off the presses.

Russian ISKCON devotees celebrated Ratha Yatra in Moscow this June eighth for the first time in nine years. Held in conjunction with The Beatles And India festival in Gorky Park, the program featured a parade of the chariots along with a concert of popular Moscow groups covering Beatles’ songs.

An impressive chariot was built for the deity of Jagannatha, the Lord of the Universe.

Iskcon is enlisting its ex-IIT devotees to conduct stress management sessions at its Rathyatra fair on the Park Circus Maidan this year.

Responding to the increasing number of suicides and stress-related diseases among the youth, the Krishna devotees have decided to highlight the malaise in society and offer stress management solutions through its Iskcon Youth Forum.

A couple from Chennai decided to live simply - by a stream in a one-room hut. The man, Magari, would forego his occupation of hunting while his wife Madhavi would cultivate Tulasi instead of selling baskets. Magari would also give up non-vegetarian food.

As sacred tour guide Dina Bandhu Dasa approached Varsana, the legendary home of Lord Krishna’s consort Radharani, dusk was falling; but the festivities were only beginning.

Dina Bandhu is one of the privileged few westerners who know about the annual Phul Bangalas – flower palaces – and Kavi Sanmelans – poetry recitals – demonstrated at Varsana and Nandagram, the village of Krishna’s adoptive father Nanda Maharaja.

Laboratory tests reveal that many brands of ghee manufactured in India are adulterated with the body fat of animals. The lab report says the only way to guarantee the purity of your ghee is to make it yourself.

HONG KONG: By day, Kenneth Valpey dons his academic robes to elevate his students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to a higher orbit of understanding about Indian religions and cultures.

But come evening, he assumes another avatar. He slips into something a little more comfortable — like a pristine white dhoti-kurta and a wrap-around angavastram — and sermonizes on the Bhagavad Gita to the devotees of Krishna in Hong Kong.

Spirituality is the new black. Not my words. Those of Richard Egan, PhD student at Dunedin School of Medicine. Richard is studying the effects of spirituality on end-of-life cancer care and had the misfortune to be midway through a radio interview with me yesterday when the news broke of Sir Edmund Hillary's passing. Not an interview either of us will be forgetting in a hurry I'm sure.