01The order of 1922
Born in Kolkata on 1 September 1896, the day after Janmashtami, Abhay was a Gandhian student at Scottish Church College when friends took him in 1922 to meet Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati of the Gaudiya Math. At that first meeting the acharya told him to carry Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s message to the English-speaking world. He was initiated in 1933 at Allahabad. While running a pharmacy business and keeping a family he began the magazine Back to Godhead in 1944, writing, printing and selling it himself. He took sannyasa at Mathura in 1959 and moved to the Radha-Damodara temple in Vrindavan to translate the Bhagavata Purana.
02The Jaladuta and after
On 13 August 1965 he sailed from Kolkata on the cargo ship Jaladuta, suffered two heart attacks at sea, and landed at Boston on 17 September with a few dollars and his Bhagavatam volumes. He took a rented shopfront at 26 Second Avenue in New York and registered ISKCON there on 13 July 1966; that October he led kirtan under a tree in Tompkins Square Park. The first Ratha Yatra outside India rolled through San Francisco in 1967. In his last eleven years he went round the world fourteen times, opened temples on six continents and published the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. He died at Vrindavan on 14 November 1977, and his samadhi stands at the Krishna-Balaram Mandir there.
