Amish In the City

[Guest guest]

Hare Krishna, please accept my humble obeisances.

All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

 

There is a show on North American television called "Amish in the City".

The last episode of this show had a long segment showing the L.A. Temple

Ratha Yatra. There were also a couple of parts where devotees at the temple

were explaining about Srila Prabhupada and also about Krishna Consciousness.

This is really great because it is a very popular show that millions of

people are watching.

 

To my understanding, the Amish are a group of fundamentalist Christians

coming from German or Dutch (?) ancestry. They live apart from modern

civilization and they follow their religious lifestyle very strictly. They

try to live very simply, without most of the modern "conveniences".

 

This new television show is part of what is called reality television...

like a documentary, but with set up situations for the purpose of making an

"entertaining" television show.

 

This show has a group of Amish youth (in their early 20s) moving from their

secluded Amish community life to the city of Los Angeles to live in an

apartment with a group of diverse city youth. It is considered to be a test

of the Amish youths' dedication to their religious way of life... a chance

to either leave their community or to decide that the "outside" world holds

no appeal for them and to move back to the Amish community (after the test

period is over).

 

It is good in a way because they touch on religious morality (even though

most of this kind of television is totally nonsense!)

 

In this last episode they had a long segment where the Amish were taken on

an outing to the Hare Krishna Ratha Yatra Festival in L.A.

They had very nice things to say about the devotees. They spoke about

spiritual life and how it is the most important thing. They sat down and

took prasadam and had a question and answer session with devotees! The

Amish found themselves feeling a kinship with the devotees. The devotees

were shown as being very spiritual, straightforward and attractive (not

strange or weird which is often how devotees are portrayed).

 

It is exciting because the devotees had postive exposure on a prime-time,

widely viewed television show. I expect that the rest of the series would

not be worth watching at all... I am not promoting watching something like

this! It's just all junk mostly.

 

Your servant,

Syama dasi.