📣 New Vine of Devotion Discord channel!

Haribol everyone. Please accept my praṇāmas.

For a while now, I’ve been playing with the idea of making a Discord server for Vine of Devotion. Today, I finally decided to make it. For those of you who don’t know, Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat platform for building a community centered around specific topics.

A great thing with Discord is that we can make separate areas and chat channels so that all our conversations can stay organized and focused. You can join by clicking the link below:

Here are the areas and chat channels I made on it so far:

SVAGATAM

This area is for general chats, announcements and where you can introduce yourself.

CLASSES

📆 scheduling
This is where we'll work out the next time we'll meet for our next Rūpa-śikṣā class or if there is any change to our daily morning Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam reading.

🌱 rupa-siksa
Here you can post any question, quote, or anything else related to the Rūpa-śikṣā verses we're going over.

📖 daily-bhagavatam
Here you can post any question, quote, or anything else related to what we're reading in our daily Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam readings. This is basically a replacement for the WhatsApp group we had since I'm not able to use WhatsApp anymore.

VOD YOUTUBE & WEBSITE

🌞 rays-of-the-harmonist
Every week on the Vine of Devotion YouTube channel, I am posting a good quality recording where I read out an article from Rays of The Harmonist. Here we can discuss one of those articles or request which article I read out next.

💡 ideas-for-videos
I'm not able to make videos yet because I don't have a camera. But once I do get a camera, I'd like to have a bunch of ideas that have been brewing so that I have to come up with something from scratch every week. What would you like to see a video about? I'll share my own ideas here as well.

KIRTAN

🎤 kirtan-requests
As you may have seen when you subscribed, there are four levels of subscription and in three of them you can request kirtans from me to record for you every month. Here you can also request publicly and I can post the video recordings here as well.

📜 new-songbook
We are going to be working on the new version of Gaudiya Giti-guccha soon. Have any changes you'd like us to make? Suggest them here!

LIVE VIDEO CHANNEL

Whenever I do an online program, we can meet on Discord. It works just like Zoom. I’m not sure if we’ll use that feature or if we’ll just continue the Zoom classes, but at least the option is there!

This Discord group is an experiment. I know many people will not want to sign up to yet another platform. Who knows, it might be a total flop and no one joins, but I’m trying it out as an experiment. You can do many things on Discord that is not possible on WhatsApp or Telegram. To be honest, what really gave me that final push to make it is when I lost access to WhatsApp a couple days ago. (I think you all know by now that my phone was stolen.) This is a replacement (and a better one, I think) for the WhatsApp groups we had.

If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email.

I hope you are all having an inspired Caturmāsya vrata! I kept my vrata for this first month as simple as can be so that I could actually stick with it till the end.

That's all for now. See you in the next posting!

Aspiring to please Śrīla Gurudeva and the Vaiṣṇavas,

-Madhukar das