Padmanabha: In Denver, every night we would sit outside and read Krsna Book to Srila Prabhupada while he rocked back and forth in his rocking chair and sometimes massaged his temple. When the chapter ended, Prabhupada would look up. The person reading would continue, “Chapter 13, The Stealing of the Boys and Calves by Brahma,” and Prabhupada would say, “Oh, good, go on.” For an hour or an hour-and-a-half Prabhupada was immersed in Krsna Book, and I would think, “Does he even know that he wrote this book?” He had no ego like, “This is a book I’ve written.” If I’d have written the book, I would have been proud. But self-acclaim and taking credit for having written the books was not part of Prabhupada’s personality. Prabhupada could sense that I was over-enthusiastic and I wanted to be special. One night, in July of 1975, we had just gotten the sankirtan results and the Denver temple had come in third in the world. I was brimming with pride and I wanted to tell Srila Prabhupada. When the Krsna Book reading ended and Prabhupada stood up to go back to the house, I said, “Srila Prabhupada! Srila Prabhupada!” He said, “Yes?” I said, “Last week Denver was number three in the world in book distribution!” We had done three thousand big books and only Los Angeles and the Radha-Damodar party had done better than we did. We only had seventy devotees while the Los Angeles temple had hundreds of devotees and the Radha-Damodar party had five buses. I thought we had done dang well and that Prabhupada was going to say, “That is wonderful!” But he looked at me and said, “Then you make it number one!” (laughs) I wasn’t expecting that. I thought, “How are we going to do that?” But I said, “Oh, wow, okay, yeah!” Srila Prabhupada was always encouraging us.
Reference: Remembrances by Sidhanta Das- Folio Vedabase
