Portrait of Madhava Naidoo a Krishna devotee at the Hare Krishna Festival of Chariot in Washington Square Park.This brand of Hinduism the movement revere their God, Krishna .
Kirtan always means call – and – response devotional singing, aiming to solely glorify Krishna. Any other ‘kirtan’ chant that maybe expressing the current fashion is short lived and bears no lasting fruit.
At the beginning of the last century the powerful Vaisnava guru Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur forcibly reestablished pure devotional Gaudiya practices while driving out its pseudo and insincere counterparts. He thus revealed the authentic personality of Sri Hari Nama Kirtan as, ‘Krishna is His Holy Name, and the Holy Name is Krishna. Krishna Nama is the son of Nanda, Shyamsundar. Sri Nama Sankirtana is the best sadhana. That which is meant for gratifying the mundane senses is not Hari kirtana. That by which Krishna’s senses are satisfied is Hari Kirtana.’
Srila Prabhupada, the foremost disciple of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta, perfectly mirrored his guru’s spirit. He instructed that we should chant feeling the presence of Krishna. If we can’t do that then we should sincerely try to hear ourselves chant and the chanting should be done in a helpless, dependent attitude – like a child crying for its mother. ‘And you can see Krishna face to face in this very lifetime. I guarantee you,’ he says.
Chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra on sacred beads a prescribed number of times daily comprises one of our regulative principles and is called japa. Aindra das would say that good japa means good kirtan. Furthermore, he insisted that all the musicians chant during kirtan. ‘Else, whatever you do is zero,’ he’d say.