Some Were Curious, Some Were Crazy!
As the symptoms of Srila Prabhupada’s physical body began to impede on his ability to translate, all his disciples worldwide became more concerned about his longevity. We had become so dependent on his guidance, inspiration, and Krishna Conscious nurturing that the thought of His Divine Grace leaving us was of great concern to every devotee in the Hare Krishna movement. Many of us were requested to keep doing our daily duties. Book distribution had to still go on, guests had to be greeted, feasts had to be cooked, deities had to be worshiped and the temples had to stay open.
Those who met Srila Prabhupada in the very early days of the late 1960’s had already established a very intimate relationship with him on a deep level many of us who came later never had the good fortune to experience. We are all unique individuals and as the world learned about Srila Prabhupada, all sorts of characters showed up to see what he was doing. Some were curious, some were serious, some left, some stayed, some got initiated, some fell down, some soared to the top and some were crazy. Tamal Krishna was one of those who seemed to understand very quickly the concept of going after Krishna with the intense greed Ramananda Roy spoke about:
“‘Pure devotional service in Krsna consciousness cannot be had even by pious activity in hundreds and thousands of lives. It can be attained only by paying one price — that is, intense greed to obtain it. If it is available somewhere, one must purchase it without delay.'”- Madhya 8.70
Just as the extreme behaviors of extraordinary devotees like Vamsidas Babaji Maharaja are hard for most people to appreciate, Tamal Krishna Goswami’s attitude about devotional service was also misunderstood by neophyte devotees. Srila Prabhupada, however, could see his capacity and engaged it. For approximately ten years Tamal demonstrated his perseverance to serve Srila Prabhupada under a wide spectrum of circumstances. It was not all the extraordinary service that he did for His Divine Grace that made him stand out. It was how he handled it when Srila Prabhupada chastised him on the occasions when his zealous gusto for Krishna blinded him to sometimes engage in insensitive-like dealings with others. Srila Prabhupada was well aware of the Chanakya Pandit concept of testing loyalty at moments of adversity and Tamal passed that test on numerous occasions. The fact that he encounters all sorts of difficulties with others was proof of just how dynamic his personality was.
“So as soon as you become successful, there will be many enemies. That is natural. That is the sign of success.” – Room Conversation, Nov 3, 1973, Delhi
In 1999 the people who were responsible for foisting the puerile idea that Tamal Krishna Goswami masterminded a conspiracy to poison Srila Prabhupada demanded that he be “Interviewed.” (SHPM. P.289) In an attempt to put this issue to rest Tamal Krishna did exactly that and gave his testimony, but it made no difference to those who have repeatedly demonstrated by their behavior that their personal ambitions prevail over any evidence contrary to their agenda. LINK: Tamal Krishna Goswami Testimony
As Srila Prabhupada’s health deteriorated it was a natural fit that Tamal Krishna would be there to do what he could to nurse his beloved spiritual master back to health in an attempt to pay him back for rescuing him from a meaningless life of confused bewilderment. All of this is very straightforward, clear, and reasonable. What is revealing, however, is how much effort has been made to reinterpret Tamal Krishna Goswami’s service history and portray it all as very dark, ugly and sinister.
The majority of Srila Prabhupada’s disciples are still under the age of 80 and most of us have not yet experienced a heart attack or serious life-threatening illness. Unless one works as a hospice provider, or has helped nurture a loved one’s transition to death the rest of us can only imagine what life will FEEL like in a body that is worn, weak, and malfunctioning. The rest of us must, therefore, be careful to recognize that we are naive about what it will be like when we start gasping for breath and …
…become extremely ill, lie flat and hardly mov(e) for six hours, experience vomiting, weakness, much mucus, … lack of energy (and can) barely…walk…” –KGBG p 484
Coping With Death, Failure, Guilt & Loss
Being the bold type of individual Tamal Krishna Goswami was, he offers us a very raw, genuine and vulnerable account of the type of psychological stress he felt serving Srila Prabhupada as his body deteriorated. These are not easy subjects for anybody to speak about no matter how one looks at it. The Mental Health American organization founded in 1906 confirms this point and reminds us that:
“When a death takes place, you may experience a wide range of emotions, even when the death is expected. Many people report feeling an initial stage of numbness after first learning of a death, but there is no real order to the grieving process. Some emotions you may experience include: Denial, Disbelief, Confusion, Shock, Sadness, Yearning, Anger, Humiliation, Despair, Guilt These feelings are normal and common reactions to loss. You may not be prepared for the intensity and duration of your emotions or how swiftly your moods may change. You may even begin to doubt the stability of your mental health. But be assured that these feelings are healthy and appropriate and will help you come to terms with your loss.” LINK: Coping with Loss: Bereavement and Grief
This is advice given to the average person who is faced with the grief of losing a family member. When we speak about His Divine Grace everyone knows we are referring to someone who was far greater than just a family member. His disciples respect him as the savior of the entire galaxy – Jagat Guru, and we were all mourning his loss when he was no longer with us physically! We knew that Srila Prabhupada was the empowered ambassador Krishna sent to restore the highest form of religion, at the dawn of kali yuga, to the most fallen, undeserving, meat-eating, mlecchas, sudras, intoxicated with pride, lust, anger, and greed!
So we were all affected, but those who were his guardians for the last few months no doubt had to process more shock, confusion, and guilt than all of the rest of us put together because they were on the front line of trying to preserve the life of our beloved spiritual master. So it is very understandable why Tamal Krishna Goswami would get choked and emotional when he talks about the days he was tasked to keep Srila Prabhupada alive. But these Truth Guys interpret this behavior as proof that he was a surreptitious killer, but that is Zebra thinking. Clearer thinking would be consistent with what the Mental Health industry told us above, these feelings are healthy and appropriate and will help you come to terms with your loss.”
It is sad, scary, and ominous for all of us to even hear about what these senior devotees faced for several months because we are all heading towards that exact same difficult moment. Someday each of us will experience tremendous difficulties eating, digesting, eliminating and breathing!
In his last days, he told one of his sannyasis, “Don’t think this isn’t going to happen to you.” Prabhupada came into this world, on Krsna’s request, to teach us how to live a pure life of Krsna consciousness, and that includes how to finally pass away from this world to attain eternal life. Prabhupada underwent death in a way that was perfect and glorious, and at the same time in a way which we can all follow. – SPL 55: The Final Lesson
Yes! There Was Confusion!
The fact that Tamal Krishna was clearly confused and had moments of mixed emotions is to his credit and does more to vindicate him then convict him. He had to cope with the loss of not only a profound friend, mentor, and extraordinary spiritual master, but he was also probably struggling with a strange version of survivor’s guilt. It is very easy to understand how he may have been tortured by the question of what he might have been able to do differently to preserve Srila Prabhupada’s life even just a little longer. Yet these delicate Truth Guys are shameless in the way they rush into clobber a man when he is at his weakest moment grieving. They flip all these emotions that are openly shared upside down in a pitiless attempt to convict him of a crime he did not commit. Yea… it’s becoming very clear why the people doing this have such affinity with the KKK sympathizer Harry Elmer Barnes.
I, therefore, find it pompous, cruel, idealistic, insensitive, and heartless the way Chicken Little and all the other bird-brains in the barn rush in to interpret for the rest of us everything Tamal Krishna says with such obvious vindictive condemnation and contempt. When he shares with us the very real difficulties he faced as Srila Prabhupada continued to get iller, it all gets pounded into some form of subliminal confessions about the “Crime of the Millennia” that they hallucinated and are hell-bent on forcing into the history books.
For example, after a whole lot of sensationalism over the use of the word poison we are asked:
Did Tamal, as the primary caretaker and personal secretary of His Divine Grace, do anything about a poisoning that Srila Prabhupada was in great “mental distress” about? … No,… And that is very incriminating for Tamal and his associates, now that poisoning has been absolutely, irrefutably confirmed. – KGBG p.159
After understanding these points it should be evident to anyone with clear thinking that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to poison Srila Prabhupada with cadmium. In the past, those who had believed otherwise must have been unaware of these facts. But now that we have shown just how little we know even today how cadmium behaves, it is recklessly irresponsible for anyone to leap to the conclusion that Srila Prabhupada was maliciously poisoned by it. Only those with a poor fund of knowledge and selfish agenda will continue to believe and perpetuate this travesty of reasoning.
Shortly later these acharyas of truth rhetorically ask:
Think about it… If you were Srila Prabhupada’s secretary, you’d call the police and have a blood test done, right? Or else you could end up being blamed, right? Was Tamal just that irresponsible, or is there another explanation?– KGBG p.159
Well, it’s really not that difficult to understand if you don’t have Zebras 
prancing between your two ears. The fact that NOBODY called the police or felt it was necessary to have a blood test done was because none of the people who were there had any reason to believe that Srila Prabhupada was being poisoned. He never came out and said that to anyone, there was no poison conspiracy and Tamal clearly explained that what he said on the tape was “the swelling’s going down.”(KGBG p. 186)Not: “The poison’s going down.”
De Mortuis nil nisi bene [dicendum]
“Of the dead, [say] nothing but good”
It’s astonishing how many people don’t stop to realize how all of this is such ass-backward thinking. Tamal Krishna is portrayed as a horrible, monstrous, egocentric, but brilliant, sociopath that masterminded this assassination without anyone knowing about it. But if that was the case he certainly wouldn’t pour his heart out about it later sharing the terrible dilemma he faced trying to determine the best course of action. It’s also interesting to notice how there is a whole subsection to describe how Tamal Krishna was: Ruthless, Heavy-Handed, Angry, and Dominant. – KGBG p.510 These are symptoms of someone who speaks his mind out boldly, maybe even somewhat recklessly, without hesitation. He never was one to quiver in the corner wondering what others may think about him because he was perhaps overly confident and spoke out plainly. According to Chanakya Pandit, “One who speaks out plainly cannot be a deceiver.” That makes a lot more sense than believing the man ( Tamal Krishna Maharaj) who we are told everyone hated, masterminded a complex conspiracy with the help of all his friends, so nobody ever noticed it, suspected it, or squealed about it for over 12 months!
What is thrust in our face is way more than just the 159 pages that are exclusively dedicated to dredging up every negative thing that can be found about Tamal Krishna Goswami. The Truth Committee isn’t seeking to objectively understand what actually happened in a balanced, fair or reputable way. They have no hesitation to tromp all over anything associated with Tamal who has now passed on for over 15 years. Instead, they are foaming at the mouth to hang someone, have his Samadhi torn down and get their own names in the history books one way or another! Does this sound like appropriate Vaishnava behavior?
What is ridiculous about all this is how it is presented in the mood of a formal FBI investigation. In an ongoing attempt to get as many big impressive concepts into this deluge of petty gossip, the poison authors offer to hold the hand of the reader and escort us thru the field of forensic psychology. A big part of that is how they justify dissecting every word and gesture made by Tamal Krishna Goswami. They documented every petty complaint they could find about him, studied and published his horoscope and even conduct their own voice stress analysis in a futile attempt to prove what never happened!
His diary is disassembled as “Another one of the whitewash cover-ups by ISKCON leaders“ –KGBG p.470 because there are portions that… the Truth Sleuths do not like, consider inaccurate, fail to support their mordant agenda or do not match verbatim what was captured on a tape recorder. They can’t stand the fact that there are not a whole lot more tapes from mid-1977 for them to psycho-analyze, perform voice stress analysis on, seek out clandestine whispers or play backward.
Forensics 101
What is evident by all this thrashing about is how deficient these amateur forensic Boy Scouts are in recognizing that most tapes record for about an hour and only capture sound within a very limited range. The historic value of a personal diaries is that it records the non-verbal messaging, innuendos, smells, distant sounds, ambiance and what may have been occurring during the other 23 hours of the day. But because the few audio tapes that are available don’t include confessions about a big conspiracy to poison Srila Prabhupada they are also thrashed. The folks who stirred up this mega-nightmare-from-no-where make another one of their reliably astute and equipoise conclusions, this time about Tamal Krishna Goswami’s Diary:
“…is full of omissions and apparent additions. TKG’s Diary cannot be trusted as an accurate history, but rather, should be seen as the attempts of a guilty poisoner trying to deflect attention from himself as the prime suspect in Srila Prabhupada’s poisoning.” – KGBG p.470
Well, that sounds really fair, objective and what a professional forensic profiler would say right? Apparently, it is because later on we find the section entitled “CRIMINAL PROFILING IS STANDARD INVESTIGATION METHODOLOGY.” –KGBG p.521 Oh my! We must be working with some really sharp cookies here because they studied everything so well and… BINGO! They discovered that Tamal Krishna Goswami fits the Criminal Profile of someone who could mastermind this plot! Whoooaa! Except for the fact that all of this is very one-sided and not at all conclusive.
One of the most well-documented forensic traits of assassination by poison is the fact that it is almost always done by a single individual alone. Other traits that people who turn to poison for murder tend to have is that they tend to be immature, spoiled by their parents, feel inadequate, scorn authority, and are non-confrontational. Do any of those attributes sound like Tamal Krishna Goswami?
In the world beyond the make-believe poison conspiracy, Criminal Profiling is done very carefully by career detectives with at least 20 years in the field of criminology, not a bunch of people who are so insecure they resort to presenting their nocturnal dreams as valid evidence. Forensic detectives build a network of experts in specific fields of behavior and rely on computers that hold extensive details about hundreds of thousands of crimes for the purpose of finding repeating patterns. Even then Criminal Profiling is still considered to be a very delicate combination of both science and intuition that is handled very carefully so no innocent people will get prematurely arrested.
Compare all this to the hundreds of pages of Deputy Dog pontification that gives the untrained eye some impression of authenticity, but none of it comes close to how highly skilled psychologists would identify the associated behaviors and thoughts in a criminal mind. To drive this point home I ask the reader if they feel convinced that the people making all these reckless allegations followed ANY of the standard procedures they would have to do in order to use the Neural Network for Psychological Criminal Profiling (NNPCP) system.
“ The primary inputs include the crime scene analysis, victimology, forensic and autopsy reports, and preliminary police reports. The secondary inputs include a structured criminological interview and a battery of psychological diagnostic tests of offenders apprehended for a crime as well as an interview with the crime scene investigators. A relationship between psychopathology or psychology and profiling is explored in each case. The outputs of the system (the investigative information) consist of 24 investigative areas and 200 specific types of information on the offender’s psychological, psychopathological, and motivational profile. The model for profiling an offender based on one crime thus relies on the fact that human behavior in the commission of a certain type of crime falls within parameters evidenced in data obtained from previous similar crimes committed by known offenders whose psychological characteristics and behaviors have been studied. LINK: NEURAL NETWORK FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL CRIMINAL PROFILING
Big words are tossed around and a plethora of ideas are poured out for everyone to oooh & ahhh over but nearly all of it is speculative, conjecture, and projection making the majority of the conspiracy evidence completely irrelevant. The Goof Teams idea of forensic work and criminal profiling is so one-sided that even the simplest reader can perceive how vindictive their agenda is in the nothing-held-back full-blown character assassination of Tamal Krishna Goswami which concludes with a whole subsection titled:
MORE HARM THAN GOOD WAS DONE BY TAMAL –KGBG p. 535
There is not even a charade of respect for the ‘dead’. What we read is pure animosity. Nor is there any consideration given to what the Mental Health people, who actually deal with death and loss every day, tell us individuals go thru when they experience the loss of a loved one.
“You may not be prepared for the intensity and duration of your emotions or how swiftly your moods may change. You may even begin to doubt the stability of your mental health.”
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