I want to share a story about my Guru and Akhand Jyoti.
It’s a simple magazine he began self publishing as a youth. He recognized the gap between Dharmic institutions and the people they are supposed to serve. He wasn’t a fan of the gate keeping so he made the knowledge of the Rishis available in the common vernacular, Hindi.
Not sure where he started as a writer. But he definitely didn’t have a machine to print with or distribution channels.
So he took from us Yanks and pulled on those bootstraps.
Printing his own zines by hand. Then delivered them himself.
Wild to see where it ended up. I’ve been to the printing press and the broader media division a handful of times. Impressive the scale of their operations. Fun group of people.
Eventually they needed a digital distribution. Task was given, and so it was done. My family is the receipts.
My father ran an international email list for years that shared new releases to global parijans. Not to mention coordinating the effort to digitize Gurudev’s works. (I’ve already made my complaints heard for years on the state of their Wordpress site to no avail).
My mother still runs global Swadhyay calls at confusing hours of the day. She also tracked the birthdays folks left on the paper form and manually entered them into a spreadsheet so the mahraj could make the calls, but that’s out of scope.
And of course their basement doubled as as a warehouse. Complete with a child manning the booth at functions.
A man wanted to bring a new light to the culture. Doors were shut. So he built his own.