Today I have added the first flash element to my site. You would have seen it on your arrival. Turn on your speakers for the full effect....
: – )

Well it's been some time since an update, for many reasons. A very busy festival season in Nabadwip through February and March, and further after that. So the site has remained quiet. But by writing a new blog and posting it, it gives me the impetus to commit to the next phase of this site. Which will be a step in the mridanga side of things. Fresh audio and video files, and some focus on the training and teaching of this beautiful art. Expect an update within a week.

So Sunday was the weekly street sankirttan on the famous Nevsky Prospect of Saint Petersburg. Sripad Madhava Maharaj was in full voice along with Sripad Siddhanti Maharaj and about 30-40 devotees. I had done this sankirttan many times in previous years and it was once again special to return. On this occasion there was a particularly special addition and I have been waiting for Ashutosh Prabhu to post the pictures on harekrishna.ru in order to see this addition.
And what was it? Well for the first time ever, they miked my mridanga with two FM microphones to a second amplifier carried by the devotees. I joked, that finally I had someone who could play synchronously with my playing, pointing to a devotee with the amplifier around his neck. As far as whether it worked or not, I have to say it was a wonderful success and I found that I could stay back in the centre of the kirttan party dancing with the devotees while my amplifier stayed alongside Madhava Maharaj at the head of the kirttan supplying the beat for him. Really the Russian devotees do a very good job of supplying the technological advantage in the preaching and distribution of Mahaprabhu's message, and once again they came through with flying colours. I have to say I'm looking forward to next Sunday...

Now that I've arrived here in Russia, I'm doing classes 3 or 4 times a day with many of the devotees here. Everyone wants to learn. Which prompted me to consider what it means to produce a multilingual website... considering also that there are Spanish-speaking devotees who are also keen to learn. So Prithu Prabhu a resident brahmacari here pointed me to an interesting site... www.translate.ru which has an English version of their site. The site will freely translate any url you feed it. So we put my site in and had a look at the result. I've pasted it in here, beautifully captured as a whole page by the excellent program Papparazzi.
But seriously, I'm looking into this now, and I think I will have a solution within a week or so.