INN

Naveen leading kirtan at 11am at the New Govardhana 12 hour kirtan

Currently broadcasting one of the best streams yet - the 12 hour kirtan in New Govardhana with Amala Kirtan.

Check out the feed on the Kirtan Australia Internet Radio page.

Sunday 25 July, 2010 9am - 9pm 12 hour kirtan New Govardhana

Current time and date in New Govardhana:

Here's the line-up:
11.30am Vrndavanchandra
12pm Binod Bihari
12.30pm Janna Griffith
1pm Jada Bharata
1.30pm Chandra Vallabha
2pm Mallika
2.30pm Mohini Murti
3pm Bhusaya
3.30pm Janardana
4pm Hari Bhakti
4.30pm Amala Kirtan
6.30pm Sridhama Navadwipa
7pm Krishnapada
7.30pm Sitapati
8pm Prema Yogi
8.30pm Vrajadhama

Ekendra is at the controls of the main mixer, a Mackie Onyx 1640i, which is also feeding a multitrack recording via firewire. I'm getting my feed via an aux channel on the desk and piping it through a USB sound card into a laptop running Fedora 11, then using darkice to send it via wireless 3G to a server in Los Angeles running RHEL 5 and Icecast, using Centovacast front end, and then it comes down to you, in whatever client you want, via a link on the Kirtan Australia Internet Radio page.

Ekendra running the main sound and multitrack recording

The computer being used for the webstream, via the 3G key on the left. The Tascam is doing a backup recording of the stream that is going to the web

This is a +12dB gain antenna for the 3G wireless key. I bought this after we had problems streaming the Canberra Maha Kirtan - "never again" ;-) (Krishna willing)

Amala Kirtan and Tahir Qawwal rock it live at the Byron Bay Community Centre Theatre.

The Yoga Bliss Tour hits Brisbane.

The entire tour was dedicated to Aindra. We learned of his death on the first day of the tour as we sat in the 24 hour kirtan in Canberra.

At the Harmony Centre in Sydney.

Mercifully I was sitting in the 24 hour kirtan in Canberra when news of Aindra Acarya's death reached me. Two of my godsisters in South America sent me the news via internets, which I was monitoring for feedback on the live stream of the kirtan.

The first question I asked when I heard, was: "What is the pramana (evidence)?" Carana Renu, my godsister in Brazil, forwarded me an email from a PAMHO mailing list.

I told Krishnapada after the first report that this news was out there, but that I was awaiting confirmation, and when Sati devi from Peru sent me an email announcement from ISKCON Desire Tree I informed Amala Kirtan. Then devotees passed my iPhone with the news around while the kirtan continued.

After 15 minutes Amala Kirtan's turn came on the roster, and we took a brief break to announce the news of the end of Aindra's manifest pastimes. Amala then lead a tribute to Aindra kirtan, which became our meditation for the remaining 20 or so hours of the kirtan.

I had planned to go home and sleep during the night, as we have a week or traveling and late nights doing kirtan ahead of us, and I just got back from an intense world trip, but after this news I couldn't go. I slept for a few hours in the temple lobby, where I could still hear the kirtan. Our time is limited, and we should never leave the kirtan of the devotees.

We are now traveling on the tour with the above picture of this modern-day incarnation of the sakti of Haridas Thakur.

Amala Kirtan sings after the news of Aindra's death reaches us

Kirtan is ever blissful, renders eternal benefit, and is our only shelter in this world

Once again, devotees from all the major centres of Australia gathered in Canberra to do kirtan together

Aindra has influenced an entire generation of kirtaniyas and contributed not only a distinctive style of kirtan, but also a culture of kirtan, inspired by his quarter century-long non-stop 24 hour kirtan

Kirtan means the glorification of the Supreme. Sankirtan means the congregational glorification of the Supreme. Kirtan is the great unifier

Let this glorification go on eternally in this world and may we always be part of it, wherever we may be

I'm currently in the Czech Republic, working on JBoss Clustering docs in my hotel room and banging my head to some Czech Krishnacore: Kashmir 9:41.

Meanwhile, back in Australia, David Jorm just sent me the photo above. It's a tour poster for Amala Kirtan's upcoming Australian tour. I should arrive back in AU just in time to hit the road for 10 days of kirtans and concerts. Check out the tour schedule at Kirtan Australia.

So far I've been to the US and Czech republic; tomorrow I fly to Switzerland, and then to the UK, before heading back to Australia.

I'm working on my tour report for my work colleagues at the moment. The trip has been super productive in many ways.

As well, I managed to hit up a few KC things as well. Highlights include:

• 24 hour kirtan in New Vrndavan, where I played bass for Madhava, had Amala Kirtan and Ananta Govinda backing me up, and helped with the sound
• Meeting Madhava Ghosh in person. He took me to his place, but I hadn't slept in 72 hours, so I kept blanking out
• East Hartford Ratha Yatra
• Visiting the Bhakti(pada) Center in New York. Radha Vallabha, one of the residents there, took me on a whirlwind tour of New York's Holy Places
• Visiting Matchless Gifts, Srila Prabhupada's first Hare Krishna center in the West
• Visiting Tompkins Square Park and the tree at Ground Zero of the kirtan movement in the West
• Visiting the Haribol Restaurant in Brno, Czech Republic
• Meeting irl various people who are friends on Facebook

I have a bunch of videos and photos that I will try to get uploaded. I bought a Flip HD video camera from Amazon in the States to record some of my travels and also the Amala Kirtan tour when I get back to Australia. See you there! (Or in Switzerland, or the UK!)

This weekend I'm in New Vrndavan, West Virginia, USA for the 24 hour kirtan festival. Right now H.H. Sivarama Swami is leading kirtan in the temple room.

You can watch this kirtan now at the NYC 12 hour kirtan channel on Ustream.

Free TV Show from Ustream

The 24 hour kirtan starts tomorrow at 12pm local time, which is 2am on the east coast of Australia. I will be singing at 5pm - 5:45pm local time, which is at 7am - 7:45am in Oz.

While I'm here, I hope to meet up with Madhava Ghosh, a long-time Planet ISKCON blogger who lives here.

Here I am, using a blog for what God intended - to complain publicly about a service provider.

A friend suggested that I use Paypal as a reliable means to transfer money to him overseas from Australia.

I got my Paypal.com.au account linked to my bank account and verified. This took a few days. I had to wait for Paypal to make two small deposits in my account, and then enter them in Paypal.

Once I did that, I logged in to Paypal.com.au to transfer the money. There were two options - one that used Direct Debit, and one that used "Top up" through bank transfer.

Being used to doing bank transfers online, I chose that option. Paypal then gave me the details for the BSB and account that I was transferring into. I thought at the time that perhaps they had a unique generated account number per transaction, or per customer. I did the transfer, and waited for the 3-5 business days for the money to show up in Paypal.

Seven days later, still no sign of the money.

I rang Paypal this morning, and after navigating their painful phone menu, spoke to someone in what sounded like a Philippine call center. He took some details from me, and told me that it was a known issue and that many other people were having it. He told me that he would add my details to a queue, and that they would find my money.

I rang back this afternoon to ask how often I would be updated on the situation. I spoke to a different person, who asked me for more details, and told me that it was a developing situation, and that the call center workers were getting changing instructions on what information to get from customers to enable their funds to be found.

She told me that insufficient details had in fact been captured in the earlier call for a search to be made (lucky I called back!), and sent me an email with a list of details to give her.

I replied to her email with the details she requested, and immediately received an automated reply saying: "Sorry, we can't reply to emails sent through this address. Try calling us."

Later in the day I called back again, to see if they had in fact received the email. The third person I spoke to in the call center tried to reset the conversation, asking me: "When did you transfer the money?"

I told him that I had spoken to two people already about this. He checked into my account and told me that he could see the details I had sent, but the crucial piece was missing - the "Customer Reference ID". In filling out the details requested in the email, referring to the record in my bank's online transaction receipt, I couldn't find anything that matched this.

Thinking back to last week when I did the transfer, I remember thinking this was my receipt number from Paypal for the transaction. No, in fact Paypal's "Customer Reference ID" is the number that I was supposed to enter into the "To account description" field in my bank transfer.

I figured this out after some time on the phone with the third guy, and he insisted that it was my fault because I had not entered the code in the bank transfer.

Sorry, major interface failure - and the fact that it's not just me (a pretty savvy person with computer systems) bears that out. The "Top Up" transfer feature has been disabled because they have been having some "technical difficulties" with it.

Those are not technical difficulties, that's a design fault.

Blaming users for being too stupid to understand a poorly labelled interface and poorly documented procedure is a design failure (in fact, in this case the labelling of the fields is the procedure documentation).

The inability to explain the problem to customers who ring up for resolution is another problem. What the call center workers need to say is: "You didn't get your Top Up? OK, please tell me the date, the account you sent it from, and the 'To account description'"

If I hadn't rung back three times and continued to press the call center workers, they would not have collected the necessary details from me. I'm still not confident that they have everything they need correctly logged. We'll see.

I understand that the guys in the call center are just doing a job, and that they are part of a low-cost off-shore outsourcing operation that is paid to read scripts to people, not adaptively solve problems.

I worked for Red Hat for two years in technical support, alongside colleagues who came from just such a center in the Philippines when Red Hat brought phone support back in house and started to build an agile knowledge organisation. The smartest guys got hired by Red Hat, and the script monkeys got left behind.

It's exactly this inability to solve complex problems that is the weakness of the model that Paypal.com.au are using. Those people are not being paid enough to care about customers, and the system is set up to work well when the situation is well defined and all the customer needs is for someone to read the FAQ to them.

It was probably thrown into stark contrast because I spent another significant portion of my day today talking to an American Express travel agent, who put together a last minute complex travel and accommodation plan for me, taking me across the US and to Europe over the next three weeks. I called her three times today, gave her complex and changing requirements, and got extremely coherent advice and, after several iterations, a complex solution. She even stayed back 45 minutes after her shift ended to book my tickets, as today is the last day they can be booked.

Well, I don't mind the service when Paypal is just charging me cents - you get what you pay for. The problem is that right now, I'm not getting what I paid for, and it's more than a few cents!

Something to do with kirtan? The Paypal money is to bring Vaiyasaki to Australia in November. The trip to the US takes me to the 24 hour kirtan at New Vrndavan in the weekend before a series of business meetings on the East Coast. I couldn't think of a better way to prepare. :-)

There are 12 hours left on the ebay auction for my rack-mounted autotune unit. It's currently going for $155, so you could get it for a song. It seems that the world of kirtan is not yet ready for Autotune, but as Castro said: "History will be my judge".

Here are the mp3 files of yesterday's Maha Kirtan 6 in Brisbane.

• Acyuta-priya dasi
• Alyona and Ali
• Janna Griffith
• Krishnapada das
• Madhava Javeri
• Maha-mantra das
• Naveen Gupta
• Prema Yogi das
• Ramananda das
• Rasika Seva dasi
• Sita-pati das
• Vikas Gupta / Niti Sheth (These two were not separated)
• Vikash Gupta
• Vrajadhama das

Version 3.3.4.1 download monitor plugin for Wordpress, which we use on kirtanaustralia.com, seems to be broken at the moment, so I've linked them from here, until it's fixed.

The Third ISKCON Studies Conference is on July 16 - 19 in Italy. I won't be going, because I'll be rocking it with Amala Kirtan on his Australian visit at that time.

However, I will be sure to tune in to the mp3 recordings afterwards.

This year's theme is "Education, Preaching, and Conversion"

It's billed as "a forum for presentations of research and open discussion among the participants", which sounds pretty cool to me.

Here are some of the presentations that will be going on:

• Meditation as a Devotional Practice in Jiva Gosvami’s Philosophy of Education (Barbara Holdrege)
• Preaching in ISKCON: An Analysis (Ravindra Svarupa Dasa)
• Scholarship and Spiritual Life (Gopinathacarya Dasa)
• Conversion, Preaching, and Western Cultural Identity (Jan Olof Bengtsson)
• The Meaning and Form of Conversion in Gaudiya Vaisnava Tradition (Kumaripriya Dasi)
• Conversion, Experience, and Narrative: Examples from the Hare Krishnas
  (Hrvoje Cargonja)
• Education (Urmila Dasi)
• Preaching Conversion or Education? The Case of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (Pranava Dasa)
• The Future of Education in ISKCON (Shaunaka Rishi Das)
• Panel Discussion: Joining Worlds of Knowledge: Secular and Vaisnava Academies

Check out the ISKCON Studies website for more deets.

Now, what would be really cool is if they could live stream video via UStream, or at least a live audio feed of the event. I'd stay up all night for that.