Hi Hello Haribol to all my friends both new and old and to all my family members both material and spiritual and after all, it's all spiritual when relationships are involved. Welcome to the very first sevamrta e-news. Issue 1, Jan 2006.
The end of our studies for 2005, which included a short online JavaScript course that took us right up to near the end of December 2005, plus two of our wonderful teenage "monsters" moving on to greener pastures, and the local temple migrating out beyond the next little town, all combine to herald a period of time being available so that the poor old www.sevamrta.com no longer need play second fiddle, well at least for a while, more on that later.
Thus it brings me great pleasure to announce the first major update to the sevamrta site since July 2005. We have lectures, thanks to inspiration and assistance from Pankaja prabhu and from my dear brother Jaya Krsna prabhu. There was also one time when Srila Gour Govinda Swami visited Cairns and we have images of that unique visit.
With 2006 being the temporal locus of formal study in web design for me, specifically in web programming languages (wish me luck, I gunna need it) we hope that this will lend itself to more and more activity in both form and content for sevamrta.
Back to Menu at the top of Page
LECTURES:
Ten new mp3 lectures of His Divine Grace Srila Gour Govinda Swami were recently uploaded to the Srila Gour Govinda Swami lectures page.
Now, I know only too well that there are plenty of mp3 lectures available from a whole host of speakers, some even totally top confidential content lectures, but Srila Gour Govinda Swami lectures are a bit like land, in that we won't be getting any new lectures from SGGS, just as we won't be increasing the size of the earth, in the forseeable future.
This locked supply means that although we all may have many SGGS lectures on tape, the only ones we actually hear these days are in digital format as most players are in this format, so only those lectures that get reformatted are actually available to share, especially since many old tapes have become mouldy and stuck together due to not being used or broken and otherwise worn out.
The lectures of SGGS are of a classic nature dealing much with how to traverse our journey to our spiritual home (as well as many describing the activities of our home), a content pertinent to us here and now in our current status as practising sadakas.
Click the link to view the new lectures
If you use a version of squirrel mail (unsuitable for using links in emails) you will need to copy and paste this link into another browser page.
http://www.sevamrta.com/sggs.com/lex.html
SGGS Lectures
Back to Menu at the top of Page
IMAGES:
Most of the devotee community missed out on the brief sojourn of three or four days that we spent with His Divine Grace Srila Gour Govinda Swami in Cairns Australia during 1993. Gokula das das and Paramanda Puri and his wife, Vrajakishori, plus Raga Manjari didi (whom I last heard was practicing natural medicine at ISKCON Sri Mayapur) and her sister, who both hailed from nearby Port Douglas, Bhadra didi, Rakshana and Saksi, and a handful of other extremely fortunate devotees, all had Srila Gour Govinda Swami to ourselves during this time. Sooooooo nice. It was here whilst basking (nay, not basking, drowning) in the alpha proxima ecstatic radiance of Srila Gour Govinda Swami that I got my first real understanding of spiritual life and of the sweet nature of vaisnavas, a lesson that was to be ever so gently hammered home in coming times during my stay at his lotus feet in Bhubaneswar.
As Gokula and Param had to leave early to get to the next venue (presumably Brisbane) it was up to my wife and I to see Gurudeva off at Cairns airport, an event which, due to the mercy of the merciful, took much longer than it usually would have taken because of a bomb scare which held up all flights. Since we didn't have to rush, there were a few pictures taken of us sitting out the bomb scare (which didn't scare us since HDG was there with us). These photos, due to the plethora of rather professional shots circulating the traps at the time, I have never shown to more than a few people till now. A few shots of SGGS giving lectures at Cairns Tradewinds Regency and Cairns Library Hall are also available.
Click the link to view the new images
If you use a version of squirrel mail (unsuitable for using links in emails) you will need to copy and paste this link into another browser page.
http://www.sevamrta.com/sggs.com/pix.html
SGGS Images
Back to Menu at the top of Page
UPDATES:
A few cosmetic changes to the sevamrta home page incorporating hidden DHTML divisions which hide the topic content till the topic heading is clicked, provide us with a neater page. The content is in the form of editorials, or spititual blogs if you prefer, by yours truly, covering various topics but always to do with spiritual life.
Hopefully lots more SGGS mp3 lectures and bhajans will become available soon as more and more devotees realise the unique contribution that HDG Srila Gour Govinda Swami has made to the evolution of the human race. We are all in his debt whether we knew him or not, for he has given mercy to those below the lowest of the low and thus lowered the threshold for entry onto the path of spiritual life; speaking from experience, this is a fact. Who else could have instructed us this way giving such clear, insightful directions.
Click the link if you like to think.
If you use a version of squirrel mail (unsuitable for using links in emails) you will need to copy and paste this link into another browser page.
http://www.sevamrta.com/
Sevamrta Home Page
Back to Menu at the top of Page
WTF : WHERE'S THE FUTURE?
With 42% of the population of the USA online with broadband accounts, and we can extrapolate on that figure to give some idea of the rest of the first world and even some of the second world, regarding the future of both online spiritual instruction and internet business, indeed internet activity of all sorts, is assured, since I know of no authoritative statement that the doomsday bug is due to bite. Plenty of paranoia but never any authority.
Hopefully Krsna will be merciful and permit me to finish the Eternally Infinite pages which are a set of web pages that were actually the brainchild of Mathuranatha prabhu, who suggested a website wherein anybody could type a topic such as God or death or spiritual life into a search engine and come across our pages of spiritual information.
Heavy involvement (at least for my tiny brain) in JavaScript, Flash Actionscripting, plus PHP and XML soon, time willing, and always the good old (X)HTML coupled with CSS, keep the poor old tarunkrsnadas active to the point of distraction; so much needs doing immediately to even just get started. I must be willing to admit that getting these html emails to display adequetly is a real challenge. Please contact tarunkrsnadas (mrterrible) if you experience any difficulty with it, describing your mail client. This will assist greatly thank you.
The sevamrta site is earmarked to become an interface for a commercial web design / development business should I ever be able to amass the required skillset and mindset, plus a team of cooperative coders and designers willing to work together to achieve an holistic result.
Sevamrta will still have the same pages as now and possibly even more, depending upon the direction krsna takes us, but the index page will be replaced with an online business interface, possibly in about 12 months after next year's study. No problem, just bookmark the lectures page or whatever page is your fave and nothing has changed, effectively.
Sevamrta will remain online as both a functioning online bhakti experience for the devotees, especially fans of Srila Gour Govinda Swami, (devotees from all over the world love and download the SGGS lectures, and with terrabytes of bandwidth available, more lectures will follow), and for the uninitiated to find out about spiritual life, but it's mostly my intoxication with Srila Gour Govinda Swami that keeps me involved in www.sevamrta.com as time permits.
I had been building a site called Dezign Devil but it's earmarked to become a cooperative of artists and developers if enough talented amateur people are interested. I've had some expressions of interest from artists and a couple of web designers that I know who are inclined to come on board. "Dezigns" for the home page get built and uploaded and then scrapped, clearly outlining the need for a design / development team. And even if one person could do it all, it's much quicker and more fun to run with a team.
Dezign Devil will need to become a community venture, as I cannot afford to keep two websites running, neither in terms of time, energy, nor funds.
NB: For anyone interested in what web design entails, here is a brief idea of it's scope.
"Web design": an excedingly generic term that could mean anything along a spectrum from Mum and Dad style dreamweaver homesites on one end to (perhaps more aptly described as web development) "aggressively commercially oriented Macromedia Flash interface rich internet database driven application content management systems incorporating AJAX and other emerging technologies" programmed in Java, JavaScript, and or PHP, ASP, JSP, XML, (or possibly any combination of 3+ letter acronyms), at the other end of an ever broadening expansive, to the point of explosive, ... spectrum.
Anywhere in amongst the above could be a niche for "web designers".
The future of web design: As the first postal service was a milestone in human information transferrence, the internet, including e-commerce and e-instruction, is a natural evolvement of the need of the human race to interact in information sharing whether commercially or for recreation.
If you're good with computers and are looking for a direction ... you could possibly do a lot worse than choose an interest in online activity of any description, but due to personal bias, hopefully spiritual.
Have a look at what other devotees have accomplished,
An online temple: Institute for Vedic Studies, Jagannatha Mishra prabhu's amazing contribution.
Shyamarini didi's Book Site: The Art of Spiritual Life. Fascinating reading ... absolutely love it.
A bit less mainstream but nonetheless important is: Choti
Pankaja's site is great for fans of Srila Bhaktivaibhava Puri Maharaja: Soul Definition
And Devaprasta prabhu's site: Giridhari
And I'm sure you all know giriraja.org.au and gopalajiu.com. This is by no means anywhere near an exhaustive list and in no way politically motivated. Just some of MY faves.
Haribol from your servant and well wisher
tarunkrsnadas.
Back to Menu at the top of Page
COMMENTS and CONTACT:
User research is probably the one most valuable "resource" available to any endeavour. Feedback regarding the user experience can precipitate changes that might otherwise hinder performance for long periods, unnecessarily.
I am personally not happy with the java navigation menu on the Srila Gour Govinda Swami pages, which looks great, is easy to use, and takes FOREVER to download, so a rethink of the navigation for the SGGS pages is in the pipeline. I'd love to hear if anyone has similar, or other, priorities for change on the sevamrta website. Or maybe it doesn't even matter to most users. Feedback time, c'mon, c'mon. The Java navigation was an early experiment in "picturesque" navigation that I could only do using Java at that time. Progress presents us with other options nowdays.
If you have any comments to make or would like to contribute material, whether, written, or lectures / pictures for upload or perhaps you would rather not recieve these newsletters in the future (I'd be very lucky if I can get one together every 3 months, probably be less frequent), please click the contact link to let us know about it, or simply reply to this email.
A new, very secure email reply php contact system is in the pipeline, but I still can't understand the flamin' thing as yet, assuming that it is actually more secure than the php system curently in place.
If you use a version of squirrel mail (unsuitable for using links in emails) you will need to copy and paste this link into another browser page.
http://www.sevamrta.com/formmail/formmail.html
Contact Sevamrta