Book review: The Divine Love Memoir

For this year’s first post, I am coming up with the review of a book authored by His Grace Sriman Sankarshan Das Adhikari, famous ISKCON Guru and online preacher.  His website www.backtohome.com is famous all over the world and he has online students in the thousands. He posts daily Thought for the Day messages which he emails to subscribers and also writes weekly lessons in which he guides everyone in the path of Krishna Consciousness.

               I found this book uniquely interesting and reading it felt like an adventure in which one discovers one’s own eternal and noumenal personal identity.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone on the path to Krishna Consciousness and willing to discover Indian wisdom and spirituality.  Reading it makes people discover what it means to be authentically following spirituality, especially the Vedas.  The book is about 200 pages which makes it fairly easy to read.

               The book describes the author’s search for the truth and his pursuit of the teachings of ancient India.  The author describes an epoch during the Vietnam war in which there was a strong counterculture led by the hippies who eventually became the ‘happies’ thanks to such movements as the Hare Krishna movement which brought a new era of truth and spirituality to the world.  From this counterculture movement sprung many movements, namely the movement to free our own consciousness from whatever was hindering it, the vegetarian or vegan movement and the movement to create the internet which freed the world by democratizing information.

               The hippies were also notably very much against war and its invidious effects.  The author describes a period when he was himself a hippy.  This underscores how people in this era were in search for the truth and some of the later hippies included the likes of Steve Jobs.  The author describes his encounter with the Hare Krishnas who brought forward the ancient teachings of the Bhagavad Gita in a new light.  He also described his meeting with his own Guru, His Divine Grace A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder acharya of ISKCON.  Srila Prabhupada’s own journey started in a very humble and modest way. He started his movement by doing kirtan in Thompkins Square Park in New York.

The counterculture of those times also rejected materialism as the sole criterion of societal progress and thus we can see that today we have other measures of progress apart from GDP, namely Gross National Happiness, used by Scandinavian countries.  ISKCON freed its members from many vices such as illicit sex, gambling, intoxication and meat eating and taught them an alternative lifestyle.  That alternative lifestyle led many to become leaders in their own fields such as Sriman Sankarshan Das Adhikari himself.  Srila Prabhupada in those days taught people in general the Hare Krishna Maha mantra, authentic Indian vegetarian cuisine and kirtan.  Some of the famous kirtan movements around the world include the kirtan mela and 24 kirtan mandali in Vrindavan Dham.

               The book also aptly informs the reader of divine love and informs the reader that the way to reach it is through the chanting of God’s holy names.  Chanting the Holy names purifies people’s heart and enables people to associate with the Lord directly thus qualifying one to receive God’s blessings.  The author also describes the first ratha yatra in San Francisco and his first celebration of it.  From there, the author’s journey led him to become a famous ISKCON Guru, a spiritual leader and his successful future in ISKCON is epitomized in his work to guide people in the thousands through his online work and he, to this day, travels around the world in order to teach the Vedic wisdom to everyone. 

The book can be purchased at  https://tinyurl.com/tdlm1801

By KLP (August 18, 2025)

The author: Sriman Sankarshan Das Adhikari

His Divine Grace A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada