The Pursuit of Happiness

In Gokarna, a man relives the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s

- Anjuly Mathai

In 1965, Abhay Charan De, later known by the honorific A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, boarded a cargo ship, the Jaladhuta, to New York to spread the teachings of Lord Krishna to the English speaking world. He began his mission by chanting kirtans at the Tompkins Square Park in New York. New Yorkers had never seen anything like it before. They were fascinated and many of them joined in, chanting and dancing on the streets, heralding the onset of the Hare Krishna movement. They would later constitute the section of humanity we now call hippies.

Soon came what is now known as the summer of love, an enthralling period in history when hundreds of hippies congregated at the Haight- Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, turning the city into a haven of politics, music and drugs. Perhaps it was divine arrangement that Swami Prabhupada went there at the same time. He participated in some of the rock concerts with musicians like Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead. That summer changed the tenor of the world because till then, life was all about materialism. The hippies began questioning everything that they had been conditioned to believe.