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Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #1 – Happy 9th Birthday Monday Morning Greetings!

December 30th, 2024

Every year I celebrate the birthday of Monday Morning Greetings, January 4, 2016, by dedicating my post on the Monday closest to the New Year to an aspect of the process of my writing.

 

This year I will discuss my voice in writing, the consistent style or personality in my composition. Looking at it from just a slightly different perspective, when you read my posts, I hope my voice comes through as if you were personally hearing me speak. Are you hearing my voice now?

 

In the “Zonal Ācārya Days” they had a unique arrangement in the Krishna Balaram Mandir in Vrindavan for the morning Bhāgavatam class. Towering over the vyāsāsana for the Bhāgavatam speaker was an adjacent and bigger marble vyāsāsana. If in attendance, one of the eleven “ācāryas” would sit there facing the audience. One day during my class, Bhavananda, the local ācārya, was sitting next to me. He is certainly, to say the least, a flamboyant and dramatic person. That day he really liked my class. Immediately after it was finished, he raised both hands above his head with palms out and fingers gently moving back and forth. He pointed towards the audience and declared in the confident mood and voice of a born and bred New Yorker (although I think he is from Jersey City just across the Hudson River):

 

“I like Dhanurdhara Swami because he is from New York, Jewish, and a devotee!”

 

He paused and then with even more drama declared:

 

“In that order!”

 

I hope my readers hear my “voice” in my writing, but not in that order. I am first and foremost a devotee and from Vrindavan, and I hope that voice drowns out my Brooklyn accent, which I am told persists a bit after almost fifty years in Vrindavan. I am also karmically packaged from New York and if you also hear that voice, so be it, especially if it flavors my overall voice in writing in Krishna’s service.

 

The most important point is that I and the regular readers of Monday Morning Greetings have been together for many years. You hear my voice every week and thus know me and I guess we are all therefore friends. I don’t write from a distance. I share my life, and even a little of my struggles, which I hope makes my writing somewhat authentic.

 

A few other observations about my writing:

 

Writing is like giving birth to a child. It also takes birth after labor and when it is born, there is great joy. For parents to get the joy of parenthood they must wait nine months in addition to enduring the labor of the mother during birth, and to produce a book and get that joy takes even longer, sometimes years. What I like about my writing is that I don’t have to wait to get that joy. I get it every week by giving birth to Monday Morning Greetings. I therefore thank you for lending me your time by reading it. Now I will reveal something personal about Monday Morning Greetings that you may find interesting.

 

I have a penchant for branding. Do you know where I got the title for this weekly publication?

 

Well, before Krishna consciousness I was, like many Americans, a sports junkie, so to speak. I especially enjoyed the football (not soccer) games on Sunday. The person with the most responsibility in directing the football team during the game is the quarterback. When someone criticizes or gives advice about a game after it has been played, that person is therefore called a Monday-morning quarterback. The term has become a general term for someone who passes judgment on and criticizes something after the event. Now, I am not exactly doing that in Monday Morning Greetings, but I got the name after a famous football column called “Monday-Morning Quarterback” which reviewed the games each Monday, a day after they were played. When branding my column, I thought the appearance of the column on Monday would help people greet the coming week with some wisdom teachings rather than something mundane. Monday Morning Greetings, like Monday-morning quarterback, seemed to me a catchy title. I think it works.

 

I think the main voice I would like the reader to hear is a devotional intellectual who shares his realizations on relevant topics from devotional practice to societal issues, mostly within a spiritual movement. Sometimes, like this week, it becomes more personal, and perhaps you hear that voice today more prominently.

 

Well, I am a proud father. Happy ninth birthday, Monday Morning Greetings![1]

 


[1] Every week Rathi Krishna sends me a list of people who clicked on my articles so that I get a sense of the audience and some people occasionally write me to appreciate or comment on an article. It helps me to know my audience. I see on the list many people I met years ago. If any of the readers would like to drop me a line and say hello or introduce themselves, I welcome that, and this is the time. Perhaps some could even pick out an article they especially liked and explain why. They are all listed on www.wavesofdevotion.com.

 

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