Somewhere In The Persian Gulf

This sixty-minute documentary shows the Birth of Bhakti-Vriksha In The Middle-East.

At the very beginning of the twenty-first century, somewhere in the Persian Gulf region, a Deity of Jagannath appeared in a coastal town surrounded by desert. After carrying the Lord onto a chariot, a group of Indian expatriates are pulling the chariot by hand in the same ancient procession as in the Lord’s home across the Indian Ocean.

This film shows the remarkable spread of devotion to Krishna from two ISKCON members in the early years of the new millennium, to two thousand practicing devotees in just one one decade, in just one country of the Persian Gulf region. No name is mentioned to identify the country, which is a strictly Islamic state; nor are the Hindus in this film trying to convert their Muslim hosts. 

Yet, the Bhakti-Vriksha approach to preaching is shown not to be restricted to Indians. Vijaya Venu-gopal Das explains in his running commentary that the same approach has been established in several countries of the ex-USSR. "There are no Indians there", he says, and yet Bhakti-Vriksha (the tree of devotion) program has proved to be working in Russia, In Argentina, in China, and as is portrayed in this film, now also in the Middle-East.