Rumble Strip

**Note on title: One summer I was traveling with HH Radhanath Maharaja and we split up for three weeks so he could see a few close friends by himself. I was in California and happened to be there alone at the same time that our New Vrindaban Brahmacaris were on summer “Van’s Warped Tour” Distributing books. This is a punk rock hip hop music festival which travels around America for about two months. Thousands of youth attend each event. The organizers are wonderfully supportive and allow the Vaisnavas to share Prabhupadas books with all who come. Anyways, I traveled with the boys for two weeks all over the west coast. Each night we had to drive about eight hours to the next event. While one person drove and another was supposed to stay up talking with the driver the rest of us had to try to sleep. We were often woken up to the loud noise of that strip on the side of the road called the Rumble strip. This usually meant that the driver was falling asleep and we had drifted off to the side. The noise is supposed to wake us up. We would wake up yelling Gauranga! Krsna! Krsna! Prabhupada! We would drift off to sleep and many times just wake up chanting dreaming that we were driving off the road. We heard too many stories of dead sankirtan devotees. So I coined the title “Rumble Strip: Monks Not Dead”. For those in the who don’t know, within Punk rock there is a phrase” Punks not dead!” Since we were listening to 12 hours of punk rock each day I felt this was a great title for a documentary about Monks distributing books at the summer tour. So from now on any type of documenting, or blogging, in regards to us traveling via car van or anything with a motor will be titled Rumble Strip some thing or another.....