Tripurari Swami: The Chicago O’Hare Airport was a place where we distributed a lot of books, and we were there day in and day out. And some of the people who were also there day in and day out, the employees, they didn’t appreciate our presence there; and some of them were antagonistic even, and some of them on occasion caused bodily harm to some of the devotees who were distributing Prabhupada’s books. In retrospect, I can understand why they were agitated and why we irked them to the extent that we did; but they, of course, had no access to our motivation and what we were really about. In my mind, it was an awkward place for Prabhupada to be coming. There were so many books that had been distributed there and it was auspicious in that regard but, in ISKCON terminology, there were demons there also. So Prabhupada got off the plane and I’m thinking, “I’ve got to protect Prabhupada. Who knows? One of these crazy guys here could run up and throw something at him,” or who knows what because they had done things like that to his disciples. So I was standing next to Prabhupada and protecting him from the crowd in my mind. We were walking towards the door to go out onto the curb and the access funneled down, and to go through the door only one person could go through. Here I was preoccupied with this idea that I’m going to protect Prabhupada and get him through the door safely, and Prabhupada just went like this with his left arm when I was standing on his left side. The next thing I could remember, I was at the back of the crowd, everybody was in front of me, and Prabhupada was in the car and the devotees were ushering him off to the temple. It was very mystical to me because I thought, “Oh, here I was thinking I’m protecting the spiritual master and he’s showing I’m protected by Krishna and ‘I could protect you also.’”
Folio views – Following Prabhupada – Remembrances
