A new entry every few days until the demand is delivered on 6 October.
"What is the ultimate goal?"
A disciple of Śrīla Prabhupāda asked it straight out, in a group conversation, and it deserves a straight answer.
The stated goal is the one written into the demand: that the original editions come back as the standard, and that any revised edition carry a different cover, the editor's name, and a list of what was changed. If the directors do that, this ends.
If they do not, there will still be a dated record of who was asked, on what day, and what each of them did with it. Nobody will be able to say afterwards that they never knew.
Behind that there is a longer calculation. Arguments in forums are scrolled past the same afternoon they are written, while something built carefully stays where it was put and can still be read in five years. The trailer of Wolves in Saffron changed more minds in a week than years of arguing had, because there was nothing in it to argue with.
That trailer showed how fast things scatter when the light goes on in the kitchen. What is feared here is being looked at.
Hence the work of these weeks. One page, sealed and dated. A register of names, with the year and the place beside each one, that anyone is free to go and check.
Why some disciples do not sign
Seventy-two disciples of Śrīla Prabhupāda have signed. The records hold about four thousand seven hundred names. The gap is worth explaining, because four reasons account for most of it and only one of them has anything to do with the demand itself.
Most have never heard of it. There is no list of them anywhere, and they can be reached only one at a time, through devotees who know other devotees. That is slow work and we are slow at it.
Some cannot work the form. This generation is in its seventies and eighties. Thirty-three of them signed and never opened the confirmation link, which had gone to a spam folder they have never once looked in.
Some are tired of the subject. They raised it in 1978, and again in 1986, and again in 1990, and were answered with silence every time. After fifty years a devotee is entitled to expect the same again.
And some suspect a faction is behind it, because for fifty years the books have been used as ammunition in other people's quarrels. That suspicion has been earned by others, and it is the one that deserves an answer.
The demand names no guru, no temple and no succession, and takes no side in any dispute inside ISKCON. What it asks for is ordinary in publishing: that a revised edition say on its cover that it is revised, name its editor, and list what was changed. Every serious publisher does this already.
Nobody is being asked to say the revisions were wrong, which is the part most devotees assume before they read it. If the revisions improved the text, put that on the cover and let the reader choose. An improvement survives being labelled. A change that cannot be defended is the only kind that needs to travel unmarked.
Signing costs a name, a year, and the place where Śrīla Prabhupāda gave it. Those two last details are what make the register evidence rather than a petition: anyone who was there that day can confirm them or deny them, and most of those people have not signed.
Why temples stay silent
Hardly anyone has signed from South America, Spain or the rest of Europe. The whole site is translated, and it has reached those countries.
What holds devotees back is fear, and it should be named accurately: the fear of losing the temple, the guru, the community that has been somebody's entire world for thirty years. A signature can cost a devotee all of that. It is a real price, and pretending otherwise would insult anyone who has to weigh it.
Nobody here is being asked to be brave. There is one question, and each devotee answers it alone:
Does belonging have a price, and is the price your silence?
Anyone who has sat through a temple meeting where the changes to the books were never once mentioned knows how that kind of silence gets built. Everybody in the room is waiting for somebody else to speak first.
Ostracism holds together for exactly as long as each person in the room believes he is the only one who thinks what he thinks. It comes apart when one of them says it calmly out loud, and that is usually the end of it.
A signature is no revolt against anyone. It names no guru, no temple, no succession. It asks the BBT to do what the BBT was founded to do, and no leader can be shown it as an attack on himself.
Fifty disciples
Fifty disciples initiated by Śrīla Prabhupāda have signed. Each one publishes the year and the place of his initiation next to his name, and each one has been checked by hand against the published records — two databases, some four thousand seven hundred entries each.
Four of those checks came back wrong, and they were my fault. Sarvadṛk, Bhrājiṣma, Sudhīra and Ṛddha were all in the records. I had been spelling them the way an English speaker would.
Five hundred in one day
The demand reached the temples around ISKCON Bangalore, and in one day more signatures came in than in the four days before it. Jaipur sent the most.
Nobody there had to be convinced. They have been printing the original editions for years.
Day one
The text went out sealed in the Bitcoin blockchain, so nobody can say later that a word was moved. The notice went to the BBTI's registered office in Los Angeles the same morning.
Six people signed. The second was a disciple of Śrīla Prabhupāda.