Jayapataka Swami : I remember we were walking one time and Prabhupada said, “You build the buildings and people will come and stay here, you will get plenty of guests.” Some people expressed how are they going to come when it was such a remote place. And Prabhupada said, “No, people will come here. You will see, so many people will come.” And now Mayapur is packed with tens of thousands of people every day, twenty-five, thirty thousand people on the weekends in the winter. Big festive days, over a hundred thousand.
Initially there was nobody, it was very quiet in the early ’70s, and now it has become very active just as Prabhupada predicted. He had the vision. I remember one time he was walking with so many GBCs and he turned to one and then the other, and he would tell them how he was depending on one or the other to build a big temple in Mayapur. He was trying to inspire them to fulfill his mission. After telling them that they should do it, how he was depending on them, then he also told that he was depending on me. But he knew it was a team effort and it was going to require many devotees’ cooperation to pull it off. We’re building a spiritual city here and a temple and a Vedic planetarium which will propagate the message of Lord Chaitanya all over the world, fulfilling the desire of the previous acharyas.
Reference: Following Srila Prabhupada-A Chronological Series by Jayapataka Swami
