Rupa Vilasa das : There was a teacher who I had been cultivating. He was teaching in the public schools, and he had won the award for being the best teacher in the county and he was interested in Krishna consciousness. But he had somewhat of a disaster in his life because he had doubled as a bus driver and on Valentine’s Day one of the children he had let off the bus had crawled under the bus to retrieve a Valentine and he had run over this child and killed it, not knowing the child was there. So he wanted to meet Prabhupada, but at the same time he was in distress. So I asked Prabhupada if he could see him and he said, “Yes, bring him this evening at seven.” I explained to Prabhupada that he had this concern because he was being sued by the parents. So Prabhupada began to ask him so many questions to get all the details of the story, and I was kind of surprised. “Did you have insurance? Did you look both ways?” He was asking almost like his attorney, asking him all the particulars of the case. Then after he had heard everything, Prabhupada said, “It’s all right. No court of law will hold you responsible for this. You did everything you were supposed to do.” Then this boy was completely relieved. It was then that Prabhupada actually began to seriously preach to him, and he began to tell us a story about Wernher von Braun, the V-2 rocket scientist from Germany that had come over to help develop the missile program in this country. Apparently Wernher von Braun and an assembly of scientists had stated that he thought the whole purpose of science is to prove the existence of God. So Prabhupada was making arrangements that some devotees would bring him copies of his books. Then he began to explain how the universe was like a machine and that God was ultimately the driver of the machine. So then I got excited. I said, “Prabhupada, this is wonderful. He’s such a famous person. If he becomes a devotee, then…” and he cut me off. He said, “We are not interested in speaking to him because he is a famous person.” He said, “We are interested in speaking to him because he has come to the right point. That is our interest.” So he immediately corrected me that he wasn’t cultivating the man because he was famous or that he could do something for us, but rather because he had actually come to this serious point of inquiry.
Reference: Following Srila Prabhupada – Remembrances by Yadubara Dasa
