Sit Properly

Today is Ekadasi and I’ve got another kirtana for you! Last week’s was the bonus track from the Shelter CD. It was the first kirtana that I ever heard.

This one, however, is from an old ISKCON tape. I came across this one early on. Probably early 1994. I had heard the kirtana on the Shelter CD and was stoked. The kirtanas at the Philly temple’s Sunday feast were rocking. Some of the best kirtanas I’ve ever been in.

So I wandered into the gift shop after the feast one evening and was looking around for things to buy. I picked up some posters, a bead bag, a book or two and wanted some music. I wanted to somehow bottle these kirtanas.

I asked the devotee running the gift shop, “I want the tape with the most intense kirtana you’ve ever heard.” She thought for a minute and suggested the Ratha-yatra tape. Paramananda (Porcell to all the old folks out there), who was with me, agreed. Telling me that this one kirtana on the tape was very literally insane.

He was right. On the three hour drive home, I listened to this tape over and over. It kept me awake and more than likely kept me alive.

It starts slowly. Almost like a soft bhajana. I’m not sure who is singing, Visnujana Swami, maybe Acyutananda Swami. But it’s really sweet. This was recorded during a Ratha-yatra, the festival where we pull carts carrying a deity of Krishna through the city streets. It’s by far my favorite festival. And here you can almost picture the devotees slowly starting off, swaying and dancing on the streets, around the carts.

But then it picks up. More devotees enter the kirtana, more devotees are pulling the carts. The drumming and the dancing grow more intense, building to its inevitable conclusion… well, not conclusion, these things are cyclical. They build to pitched insanity and quickly calm down, only to build once again with more energy and more intensity than before. It’s something that you have to experience for yourself to really get.

But here it is, the second kirtana (aside from the live ones) I’ve ever heard.

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