Too bad the Hare Krishna leadership believes in karma, because they are in for a huge dose of it.
Did you or someone you care about attend any “Festival of Colors” event hosted by ISKCON /Hare Krishna? Website: www.festivalofcolorsusa.com.
Can you provide a ticket/receipt, photograph or other evidence as proof? If so, you could be entitled to substantial compensation for having been unknowingly exposed to inorganic chemical compounds long known for their role in diseases affecting the lungs, eyes, and skin.
Any Google search for “Festival of Colors” will produce an avalanche of images showing young participants engaged in a kind of group hysteria culminating in the aerial dispersal of massive clouds of brightly tinted powder.
What exactly is this substance and why is it so dangerous? See below:
Exposed skin, hair, and clothing are heavily coated with this substance, which is inevitably inhaled by them and anybody in the vicinity. That spells disaster for both participants (or, to be more precise, unwitting victims) and hosts.
It is hard to imagine a more self-incriminating collection of evidence than those thousands of photographs plastered all over the Internet.
For more than two decades, thousands of people worldwide have purchased tickets for the annual “Festival of Color” events hosted by The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (popularly known as ISKCON or Hare Krishna). Featuring live music and vegetarian food, they appeal to the perennial fascination of many people in Western countries for Eastern exoticism and spirituality.
These Festival of Color parties originate in the annual Holi celebrations (e.g., 25 March 2024) traditionally observed by Hindus worldwide commemorating an episode in the pastimes of the cowherd Krishna avatar and his many girlfriends. Today this holiday has devolved in cities across the Americas, Europe, and Australia into a clever money-making operation with minimal or no reference to its religious or national origins.1
Not only did the festival organizers spew toxins all over their guests, they also withheld information about their brutally ignorant racist, cosmological, and misogynistic beliefs.2 Municipalities where these events were held are also negligent for having issued event permits without conducting due diligence.
Despite its success in pulling the wool over the eyes of thousands of gullible partygoers for decades, the cult’s practice of hiding in plain sight was nevertheless doomed to come to an abrupt halt.
To expose your customers and guests to what they are told is a harmless substance when science tells otherwise is both foolish and counterproductive.
The recipe for the ”Holi” powder” sold by Festival of Colors organizers (and is standard in India) derives its brilliant colorants from minerals suspended in a cornstarch base to which mica is often added to produce the glittering shine that delights partygoers as clouds of the powder descend on them at the height of the outdoor festivities.
The “Festival of Colors” hosts import their Holi powders directly from India and also sell them on their website, claiming that they use ”permissible colors.” This is nonsense: Holi colors are not regulated in India or the USA or elsewhere. Moreover, even if such powders were manufactured using the purest cornstarch and organic food safe colors, they were never meant to be inhaled.
Those who attended these Hare Krishna festivals with their minor children should especially take note of this distinction. Inviting their guests to paint each other’s faces with these powders while recommending that some might want to don dust masks shows that the cult knew of the dangers but hid them from the public.
For example, participants at what is billed as “the world’s happiest transformational event” in Utah (particularly in Spanish Fork, Ogden, and Salt Lake City) are evidently unaware that the promoters are misery-mongers and idol worshippers devoted to a bizarre set of regressive beliefs out of a falsified “Hindu” version of the Dark Ages.
These nuggets of so-called wisdom—all propounded by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of ISKCON—include the following:
Black people (whom he asserted “are all ugly looking in the estimation of the civilized nations”) should be “kept under control as slaves and given “sufficient food, sufficient cloth, not more than that.”
Women enjoy being raped due to their lustful nature and should therefore undergo an arranged marriage by ages ten or twelve. Even if married to an old man while still adolescent children, the swami taught that they must submit themselves to their husbands as slaves and suffer beatings for disobedience.
The swami also repeatedly stated that men are always the intellectual superiors of women due to his belief that they possess half the brains of their male counterparts.
His laughable assertion that “You cannot find any big scientist, any big mathematician, any big philosopher amongst women,” demonstrates his willful ignorance of the history of science and his casual dismissal of facts when they contradict his personal prejudices.
Believed that the Earth is a circular disk supported by four elephants and the sun is ruled by the Sun God Surya, who traverses over a geocentric solar system in a chariot pulled by seven horses. While these ideas are obviously based on the folklore, flora and fauna of the Indian subcontinent, the ISKCON cult regards them as “Vedic Science,” when in fact a more ridiculous compendium of antiquated cosmological nonsense is hard to imagine. To call it pseudoscience is a vast understatement.
For example, this is how the swami reacted to the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969:
So they never worshipped Chandra [the moon-god], and how can they go to the Chandra planet? Then Krishna is false. Krishna is imperfect. They are defying Krishna's instruction. They have gone to the moon planet. Then our whole propaganda, Krishna consciousness, becomes bogus.
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
These and many more views the swami insisted are to be taken literally should warn would-be Festival of Colors participants to spend their entertainment dollars elsewhere.
The group responsible for organizing and staging these imitation Holi celebrations—complete with onstage bands, food, and the sale of imported Holi (known in India as “gulal” powder) as well as other merchandise—are the same Hare Krishna opportunists familiar to generations with their saffron robes and seedy money-making tactics. This latest public relations stunt has been going on for two decades with thousands of attendees buying tickets intent on spending an afternoon making clowns of themselves.
In reality, these fake “Holi” festivals are nothing more than public health nuisances disguised as entertainment venues. It is unimaginably irresponsible and self-serving for the Hare Krishna sect—in full knowledge of the massive pollution celebrants of the Holi (and Diwali) festivals in India inflict upon themselves and the environment—to risk the health of thousands of its guests worldwide.
Moreover, scientific research conducted under the auspices of governmental agencies both in the U.S. and India has long established an indisputable connection between the role contaminants in air, water, and soil play in the long-term degradation of the environment and the development of chronic disease.
Not only are such poisons major contributors to the deadly air and groundwater pollution that plagues India, they will also remain a menace to generations due to their stable chemical properties.
For example, according to a recent article published by the Wall Street Journal, between 2013-2021, India accounted for “nearly 60% of the growth in air pollution across the globe.” For the citizens of its capital city, implementing and monitoring recommended controls is a matter of life and death:
If India were to meet World Health Organization guidelines for particulate pollution, the life expectancy for residents of capital city New Delhi would increase by 12 years.
A recent article in The Hindustan Times reports on a wider range of Holi-related health issues:
… Unfortunately the colours we play Holi with nowadays are full of chemicals, mercury, asbestos, silica, mica, and lead which are toxic to skin and eyes. Apart from ENT issues from ear pain, ringing of ears, hearing loss, eye issues, respiratory problems like asthma, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are also common due to exposure to toxic colours.
This Essay continues in ISKCON’S FESTIVAL OF COLORS PART 2
Disclaimer: Nothing in this blog essay is meant as a substitute for professional legal advice. If you wish to proceed with any claims against the Festival of Colors organization either as an individual or as part of a class action settlement, it would be prudent to contact a reputable personal injury law firm in your area. Although I stand by the research findings in this essay, all of it and much more can be obtained using the services of any competent paralegal.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This essay and all of the charts and illustrations were prepared by and are the exclusive property of the blog author. Using any part of them in any manner, in print or online, is strictly forbidden. A standard link to this blog is a better alternative.
For Jamie 🌈🪷🙏🏼
NOTES
1. Although the Festival of Colors entity created by the ISKCON/Hare Krishna organization hosts the vast majority of these public Holi-themed events, others have taken note of their success and have launched their own versions. Some are advertised as “springtime” festivals, etc., but the central event also consists of aerial dispersion of colored powders. Those wishing to pursue a claim against any non-Festival of Colors entity should inform the personal injury attorney they contact of that fact.
2. https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2017/12/new-sex-starved-idiots-slaves-how.html.
https://harekrishnacultexposed.blogspot.com/2018/01/racism-and-caste-bigotry-in-hare.html.
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (also known by the abbreviation “ISKCON” or simply as “Hare Krishna” has been establishing and operating various fund-raising venues since its registration as a church in 1966. Currently these number at least 88 in the United States, with many others throughout the world. This organization was founded by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, an elderly Indian national who aspired to elevate a minor Hindu sect to worldwide prominence by taking advantage of the hippie generation’s infatuation with Eastern mysticism.
To this end, he presided as guru to thousands of gullible American and European youth, while demanding absolute loyalty and unquestioning obedience to a severe and rigidly structured set of practices governing virtually every aspect of his disciples’ lives. This fanaticism informed their interactions with the public, which generally consisted of accosting strangers on the street or at an airport. These shaven-headed, saffron-robed “devotees” would shove a book or magazine in the their target’s faces while delivering a sales pitch from which few could escape before grudgingly giving up money for a purchase that was typically dumped into the nearest refuse bin.
During the decades following Bhaktivedanta’s death in 1977, infighting between the disciples who many believed he had hand-picked as his successors (or simply declared themselves as such) threatened to diminish the aura of infallibility without which the cult’s hierarchical structure would collapse. Lawsuits regarding shocking allegations of child abuse at its “gurukula” boarding schools were widely reported for decades, culminating in a $400 million lawsuit filed by former students in 2000. After the cult filed for bankruptcy in 2002 (an obvious dodge to shield its assets from further scrutiny), it was ultimately settled for less than five percent of the original claim. Before long, the abuse continued at other gurukula schools while offenders who had been previously banished began to worm themselves back into the Hare Krishna cult. During this time and to the present, ISKCON has spent millions trying to revamp its image from a hippie era, crime-infested cult to an ancient branch of Hinduism.
