"Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow in his footsteps. And whatever standards he sets by exemplary acts, all the world pursues." — Bhagavad-gītā 3.21[^1]
The Story
Anand Bhandarkar walked into the ISKCON temple in NVCC for the first time on the second Sunday of March, on the strength of a single sentence from a colleague at his architecture firm.
The colleague, a quiet senior named Krishnan, had noticed Anand sitting alone in the office canteen reading a Jordan Peterson book and had said, without preamble, "If you're looking for what that book is pointing toward, the Bhagavad-gītā actually has it."
Anand was thirty-three years old. He had been married to Priya for five years. They had no children yet, by mutual agreement — they were going to wait until both their careers were stable. Priya was a dentist; she had her own small clinic in Aundh, doing well, two assistants, a steady patient list. Anand was three years into a senior associate role at a mid-sized architecture firm in Bavdhan, working on commercial projects, often late, sometimes Saturdays.
By every measurement, theirs was a good marriage. They had met through common friends in their final year of college, dated for two years, married in their late twenties after both sets of parents had got comfortable with the inter-caste arrangement. They liked each other. They genuinely enjoyed Saturday mornings together. They had a four-year plan that included a Mahabaleshwar holiday cottage and one child by 2027. Priya was the more verbal one; Anand was the steadier one. They balanced.
The first six months after Anand's Sunday programme were, in Priya's later memory, charming. He came home from the temple smelling of incense. He chanted softly on a borrowed mālā while making tea on weekend mornings. He asked her if she wanted to come along one Sunday and she did — she sat through the programme, ate the prasāda, found the kīrtan unexpectedly moving, and told him on the drive home that she was glad he had found something that made him so visibly happier. She did not feel the call herself. She had no quarrel with religion; she had simply not been raised with any particular intensity around it, and her own inner life was organized around her work, her patients, her sister, her parents, and her husband. She was content. She did not need a path.
She was, in those first months, supportive. She bought him a Bhagavad-gītā As It Is for his birthday in May. She did not complain when he started attending Sunday programmes regularly. She did not complain when he began chanting four rounds before work. She mentioned to her own mother, on a phone call, that Anand has become a bit spiritual these days, it's quite sweet actually.
Then, somewhere in the seventh or eighth month, something shifted.
Priya could not, even years later, point to the specific moment. It was not a fight. It was not an ultimatum. It was a slow change in the texture of her husband, like watching a familiar room being repainted one wall at a time so gradually that you do not notice until one day you walk in and realize nothing on the walls is what it was.
It started with small corrections.
She brought home a bottle of wine for their Saturday dinner — a habit they had had since the second year of marriage, one nice bottle on Saturday, a cheese plate, a movie — and Anand said, quietly but with the new firmness she was beginning to recognize, "I'm not going to drink anymore, Priya. It's one of the four regulative principles." She had no problem with that. She drank her glass alone, told herself he was free to make his own choices. The next Saturday she did not bring out the wine at all.
It continued with food. The pork roast she had made for his birthday for five years was now off the table, because pork was tāmasic, and even though she still ate non-vegetarian, she found herself slowly cooking less and less of it because Anand could no longer eat with her at the same table when she did. By month nine, the kitchen had become quietly vegetarian. She did not protest. She told herself it was a small adjustment. She started eating chicken at her clinic, alone, at lunch.
Then it became the bedroom.
In month ten, Anand told her — without warning, on a Tuesday evening — that he wanted to follow the second regulative principle as well, the one about illicit sex, which in the framework he was now learning meant sex only for procreation, which in their case meant they were not going to be intimate again until they had decided to have a child. Priya stared at him. She had been his wife for five years. She had been his lover for seven. She loved this man, and she was being told, without consultation, without a conversation, that a major dimension of their marriage had been unilaterally renegotiated by him, with someone else, somewhere else, without her in the room.
She did not say anything that night. She turned over and stared at the wall for a long time. She told herself this was a phase. She told herself her husband was sincere and she should not interfere with sincerity.
By month twelve, the corrections had become a vocabulary. Whatever she said, whatever she did, whatever she felt — there was now, in Anand's responses, a layer of philosophical observation she had never heard from him before. When she was upset about a difficult patient, he told her gently that we should not identify so much with the body. When her sister got engaged to a man Priya was not sure about, Anand offered that karma is mysterious and we cannot judge. When she complained about a particularly exhausting clinic day, he reminded her that material work cannot give lasting satisfaction.
He was not unkind. That was the worst part. He was kind. He was a kind, gentle, patient, slightly distant man who had once been her husband and who now was a kind, gentle, patient, slightly distant teacher.
She did not know when she had become his student.
In month thirteen, Priya's father was diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer.
The diagnosis came on a Thursday afternoon. Priya was at her clinic when her mother called. She left a patient mid-procedure, told her assistant to manage, drove to the hospital in Kothrud with her hands shaking on the wheel. Her father was in the consulting room with the oncologist; she sat with her mother in the corridor. The corridor smelled of disinfectant and instant coffee.
She called Anand at four-forty in the afternoon. He did not pick up.
She called him again at five. He did not pick up.
She sent him a message: Papa diagnosed with cancer. At hospital. Please come.
At six-thirty, Anand called back. He was at the temple. He had been in a lecture — a special programme for the appearance day of one of the ācāryas — and his phone had been on silent. He said he was sorry. He said he would come home as soon as the programme finished. He said something else, gently, that Priya did not fully register and would only remember weeks later: he said that we should remember at such times that everyone has to leave the body, and the soul is eternal.[^2]
He came home at nine-fifteen that night. Priya was not there. She was at the hospital. She had eaten a samosa in the corridor for dinner.
He came to the hospital at ten. He sat with her. He held her hand. He said he was sorry. He said the right things, mostly. But Priya, sitting there beside her father's hospital room, looking at her husband's face, realized that her husband was not present with her. He was managing her. He was managing her grief with the philosophical framework he had been studying for the last fourteen months, and somewhere in the part of his mind that was now louder than his heart, he was already constructing the response that would help her see her father's illness in the correct spiritual light.
She wanted him to be confused. She wanted him to be devastated. She wanted him to be unsettled by what was happening to her father, the way he would have been unsettled fourteen months ago, the way he had been unsettled when her dog had died in the second year of their marriage and he had sat on the kitchen floor with her and cried.
She did not want a teacher in the hospital corridor.
She wanted her husband.
The next three months were the worst of Priya's life, and she got through them without telling Anand most of what she was feeling, because telling him would only have triggered more philosophy.
Her father died in late October. The cremation was at Vaikunth Smashan in Navi Peth. Anand attended; he was decent at the rituals, helpful with the logistics, kind to her mother. He stood beside her through the ceremony. He held her hand at the right moments. He said the right things to relatives.
And on the drive home from the cremation, he said — softly, looking at the road ahead, not at her — "It's good that you're not too disturbed, Priya. The soul is never destroyed."[^3]
She did not respond. She looked out of the window at Pune's evening traffic. She thought, with a clarity she had not had before in fourteen months of marriage, I do not know if I can stay married to this person.
In the third week of November, Anand received a call from a senior devotee couple, Hari Mohan Prabhu and his wife Lakshmi Mātājī, who had been initiated in the early 1990s and ran a small Bhakti Vṛkṣa programme in Wakad. Lakshmi Mātājī had met Priya twice — once at a temple programme, once at a small house gathering — and had liked her immediately. They had exchanged numbers, the way women sometimes do, and had occasionally messaged about small things.
Two weeks after the cremation, Priya had called Lakshmi Mātājī one afternoon and, to her own surprise, had cried on the phone for twenty minutes.
It was Lakshmi Mātājī who told her husband. It was Hari Mohan Prabhu who, that Sunday after the programme, asked Anand to come for a cup of herbal tea at his house in Wakad. Anand assumed it was for a sevā discussion.
When he sat down on the couch with his tea, Hari Mohan Prabhu — who had been a devotee for thirty-one years, who had raised three children in Krishna consciousness, who had a wife who loved Krishna and a marriage that had survived everything — looked at him and said, without any preamble:
"Anand prabhu, your wife is preparing to leave you. Do you know this?"
Anand stared at him.
"I am telling you this because no one else will. Lakshmi has been with her. Your wife loved you very much. She still loves you. She thinks you have become a stranger to her, and she is grieving you while you are still alive in her house. Her father has died and her husband was not there. Do you understand what I am saying?"
Anand could not speak.
"You are not bad. You are not insincere. You are doing what every man does in his first year of bhakti. But Krishna is not asking you to perform devotion at your wife. He is asking you to be a husband in such a way that He is pleased. Those are different things, prabhu. Very different. I made all the same mistakes. My wife almost left me in 1996. I am telling you so that you do not lose what I almost lost."
Anand put down his tea. He could not pick it up again. They sat in silence for a long time.
Before Anand left, Hari Mohan said one more thing.
"Go home tonight. Do not preach. Do not philosophize. Do not even say you are sorry, because she has heard your sorries before. Sit with her. Hold her hand. Ask her about her father. Listen to her without correcting anything she says. Do this every evening for one year. After one year, we can talk about your sādhana again."
What followed was not a redemption story. It was a recovery story, which is a different and slower thing.
Anand went home that night. He sat on the bed beside Priya. He did not chant. He did not bring up the temple. He asked her about her father — not about her grief, but about him, about who he had been, about the things she missed about him. She talked for two hours. He listened. He did not correct anything. He did not philosophize anything. At some point in the second hour, she cried, and he held her, and he cried too, and the crying was not theological.
It did not fix the marriage in one night. The marriage took two years to fully recover. There were many evenings when Anand wanted to insert a verse and stopped himself. There were many mornings when Priya was still cold and silent. There were Sunday programmes Anand skipped because Priya needed him at home. There were japa rounds that did not get chanted because his wife needed the conversation more than his beads needed the count.
By the third year, the marriage was no longer wounded.
By the fifth year, the marriage was better than it had ever been before bhakti.
Priya never became a formally initiated devotee. She comes to the temple twice a year — Janmāṣṭamī, and the appearance day of Hari Mohan Prabhu's spiritual master, who has since become someone she respects. She does not chant rounds. She does not read the Bhagavad-gītā. She is, by every external measure, not a devotee.
She is also the reason Anand is still a devotee.
Because the bhakti that survived in Anand was the bhakti that finally learned to live inside the marriage, instead of trying to consume the marriage from the inside.
The Mistake Named
Anand's mistake was not that he became a devotee. Anand's mistake was that he stopped being a husband.
He did not stop being a husband through any single dramatic act. He stopped being a husband through a thousand small substitutions — the gentle correction instead of the warm laugh, the philosophical observation instead of the listening ear, the temple lecture instead of the hospital corridor, the holy name instead of his wife's name.
He thought he was adding bhakti to a good marriage. In fact he was replacing the marriage with a performance of bhakti, and the performance had an audience of one — Priya — whose role in the performance was to gradually shrink until she disappeared.
Let me name the specific mechanism, because this is the trap and you must see it clearly.
When a sincere new devotee begins to live with his pre-bhakti spouse, he encounters a problem he does not know how to solve: his enthusiasm has nowhere to go. At the temple, his enthusiasm finds appropriate vessels — kīrtan, sevā, lectures, fellow devotees. At home, his enthusiasm finds only his wife. And his wife is not, by his new measurement system, an appropriate vessel for spiritual enthusiasm. So his enthusiasm, having no outlet, turns toward her as its subject. She becomes the project. Her advancement becomes the goal. Her resistance becomes the obstacle. Her grief, her work, her father's cancer — all of these become material through which he can demonstrate his philosophical maturity.
The wife who was, before bhakti, the centre of his domestic life, has become — after bhakti — a case study.
She knows this. She cannot articulate it, but she knows it. Every woman knows when she has been demoted from beloved to project. And the response of every woman who has been so demoted is the same: she withdraws her heart, slowly, quietly, completely.
The husband does not notice the withdrawal because he has stopped looking for the kind of presence that has withdrawn. He is looking for spiritual presence, which she has never offered. He is not looking for the ordinary, daily, warm presence of his wife — because he has decided, without telling her, that ordinary presence is no longer the standard.
By the time he notices the absence, it is months or years later, and the absence is now the architecture of the marriage.
This is the husband's mistake.
It is not loud. It is not dramatic. It is not, in any single instance, an obvious offense. It is the slow, gentle, kind substitution of devotion-as-performance for the actual duty of being a husband — which is a duty Krishna Himself addresses in the Gītā, and which Krishna Himself, in the form of an arranged marriage or a love marriage or any marriage, has placed before the devotee as a vow.
The vow was: to be her husband.
Krishna is not pleased when one of His vows is broken in His name.
The Śāstra
Bhagavad-gītā 3.21 contains a sentence that the new male devotee must memorize, fix to his bathroom mirror, and read every morning for the first three years of his bhakti:
Yad yad ācarati śreṣṭhaḥ — tat tad evetaro janaḥ — sa yat pramāṇaṁ kurute lokas tad anuvartate.[^4]
"Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow."
The verse is normally cited in the context of preaching, and it is usually taken as a charge to devotees to set good external example. That reading is correct but incomplete.
The deeper reading is this: the wife of a new devotee is, by default, the closest "common man" in his life. She is the person who will form her entire impression of bhakti — and very likely, the entire impression of Krishna Himself that she will carry to her death — from the conduct of the one devotee she lives with. She is not following the temple president. She is not following Prabhupāda. She is not following the senior Mātājīs. She is following you, the husband who shares her bed, eats at her table, and represents — whether you like it or not, and whether you have asked for the role or not — the entire Gauḍīya tradition to her.
If your conduct as a husband communicates that bhakti is the thing that turned my husband into a stranger, then your conduct has, by Krishna's own measurement in BG 3.21, become a force that drives common men away from bhakti.
This is no small offense. Krishna is not flattered by your sixteen rounds if your sixteen rounds were chanted while your wife was crying in the next room and you did not go to her because the round was incomplete.
Krishna's instruction to Arjuna in the third chapter is sustained and severe on this point. The whole logic of the chapter is that the advanced person's conduct is the standard the world adopts. If the advanced person renounces his duty — even for a higher reason — he produces, in others, the same renunciation without the higher reason. Krishna gives Himself as the example: He has no duty in the three worlds, nothing to attain that is not already attained, and yet He performs prescribed work, precisely because if He did not, "these worlds would be put to ruination."[^5]
The principle scales down to a marriage. If the husband renounces his duty as a husband — even for the higher reason of his sādhana — he produces, in his wife, not advancement but ruin. She does not become a devotee in his absence. She becomes a wounded woman, and a wounded woman is harder to reach with Krishna's name than an indifferent one.
Śrīla Prabhupāda's general teaching to married disciples — sustained across his letters, lectures, and conversations on gṛhastha life — is that the householder's primary duty is to manage his family in such a way that Krishna is satisfied, which begins with caring for the wife and gradually drawing her toward devotional life through kindness rather than coercion.[^6] The wife is not converted by being neglected for the temple. The wife is converted, if at all, by being so well loved that she eventually asks her husband: what is the source of this love?
The source is bhakti. But bhakti has to show up as love first. If it shows up as correction, withdrawal, philosophy, and absence, the wife will reasonably conclude that the source is something dark, and she will protect her heart from the source for the rest of her life.
The principle at work here is adhikāra — the qualification a soul has, at any given moment, for a particular kind of practice. The wife of a new devotee almost never has the same adhikāra as her husband on the day he begins to read the Gītā. Her path may have been different. Her karma may be different. Her conditioning may be different. Her timing in Krishna's plan for her may be different.
When the husband tries to force his wife's adhikāra forward — by removing wine from the house, by ending intimacy, by withdrawing from her grief, by inserting philosophy into her ordinary days — he commits two offenses at once. He damages her adhikāra (which Krishna had set carefully for her) and he damages his own (because his bhakti is now being performed at her instead of offered to Krishna).
The bhakti that draws others naturally is the bhakti that does not perform itself. It simply is.
Anand's bhakti, in his first fourteen months, was performing itself at his wife. The bhakti that drew her, eventually, was the bhakti that stopped performing — the bhakti that sat with her in the bedroom and asked about her father.
That bhakti was the real one.
The earlier one was a costume.
The Way Out
If you are Anand — or about to be Anand, or have been Anand — here is the way back, in the order it must be walked.
First, stop performing. This is harder than it sounds. The new male devotee has wrapped his identity around his philosophical vocabulary; removing the performance feels like removing the bhakti itself. It is not. The performance was never bhakti. The performance was your spiritual ego using bhakti as a costume. Let the costume fall. You will feel naked for several months. This is correct. You were always naked. You only thought the costume was you.
Second, return to your wife as a husband, not as a teacher. Talk to her about her work. Ask her about her patients, her cases, her colleagues, the small irritations of her day. Eat what she cooks. Watch the show she wants to watch. Take her to the restaurant she likes. Hold her hand in the autorickshaw the way you held it three years ago. Do this not as strategy — she will see through strategy — but as return. You went away. You are coming back.
Third, ask her, sincerely, what she has lost. This is the conversation no new devotee wants to have. It will hurt to hear. She has lost things. She has lost the husband who drank Saturday wine with her. She has lost the husband who held her in bed without theological qualifications. She has lost the husband who was rattled when her dog died. Ask her to tell you what she has lost. Listen without defending. Do not say but Krishna. Do not say the soul is eternal. Do not say I was trying to. Just listen. The listening itself is half the recovery.
Fourth, restore the small things she did not ask you to remove. If you removed Saturday wine from the house and she misses it, bring it back into the house for her. You do not have to drink it. You do not have to approve of it. You simply have to stop legislating her life from inside your unilateral spiritual program. (If the regulative principles are causing a conflict, that conflict is yours to resolve with your guru and your senior devotees, not by imposing the resolution on her.) Restore the pork roast, the movies, the holidays, the rituals of your marriage that were never anyone's offense to remove except yours.
Fifth, attend the empty temple of your own marriage. This is the harder version of the practice from Chapter One. The empty temple was easy — you stood at the back of an actual temple on an actual Tuesday. The empty temple of your marriage is harder: it is the ordinary evening when there is no festival, no programme, no devotional drama, just the two of you and the dishes and the news on the television and your wife who is tired. Be there. Without performance. Without philosophy. Without inner rehearsal of what you would say if she opened the door for a Gītā discussion. Just be there, fully, with the woman Krishna gave you.
That presence is bhakti. The rest was a costume.
Sixth, accept that she may never become a devotee — and that this is not your failure. This is the hardest instruction in the chapter. You must release the project of converting your wife. Not because conversion is wrong, but because the project itself is the offense. If Krishna wants her to become a formal devotee, Krishna will arrange it through someone other than you, in time, in a way that does not damage your marriage. Your job is not to be the agent of her bhakti. Your job is to be such a good husband that bhakti, through you, becomes the most attractive thing in her life — or doesn't, and that's also fine, because Krishna's plan for her is not your responsibility.
The wife who never formally becomes a devotee, but who lives her life beside a husband whose bhakti has made him a kinder, more present, more loving man — that wife has received bhakti's mercy too. It looks different. Krishna sees it. You do not need to see it.
Seventh, find a Hari Mohan Prabhu. Every new male devotee needs an older married Vaiṣṇava who has walked this exact road, who has nearly lost his wife once, who will speak to you without flattery. If you do not have such a man, find one. Ask your temple authorities to introduce you. The path is not walkable alone; the path is especially not walkable through marriage alone. The senior couple — both of them, the husband for your conversations and the wife for your wife's conversations — is one of Krishna's most underused mercies in the modern devotional world.
If your temple does not have such couples, find one in another temple. Travel for it. It is worth the travel.
The One-Line Close
A wife is not a soul to be converted. She is the soul Krishna has given you to walk beside.
Notes
[^1]: Bhagavad-gītā As It Is 3.21, translation by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda. Sanskrit: yad yad ācarati śreṣṭhas tat tad evetaro janaḥ / sa yat pramāṇaṁ kurute lokas tad anuvartate. In his purport to this verse, Prabhupāda elaborates that exemplary persons must take particular care that their conduct does not mislead common people who naturally follow their lead.
[^2]: An echo of Bhagavad-gītā 2.20: na jāyate mriyate vā kadācit — "For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time." The point of the chapter is not that this truth is wrong — it is exactly right — but that the timing and tone of its invocation, delivered to a grieving daughter who has just learned her father is dying, takes a teaching that was intended as Arjuna's medicine and turns it into another person's wound.
[^3]: Same source as note 2: Bhagavad-gītā 2.20, on the indestructibility of the soul. Krishna gives this teaching to Arjuna at the very beginning of his crisis, before any of the higher instruction unfolds, precisely because the mourner needs the steadying ground of eternal identity. Krishna delivers this teaching with full presence to Arjuna's grief. Anand delivers it from a managed distance to his wife's grief. The teaching is identical; the application is opposite.
[^4]: Bhagavad-gītā As It Is 3.21, full Sanskrit. See note 1 for translation and source.
[^5]: Bhagavad-gītā 3.24: utsīdeyur ime lokā na kuryāṁ karma ced aham — "If I did not perform prescribed duties, all these worlds would be put to ruination." Krishna's argument across Bhagavad-gītā 3.20–3.26 is sustained: the example set by the advanced person is itself a form of teaching, independent of his philosophical statements. The verse cited here is the most direct statement of the principle, with Krishna offering Himself as the model of one who performs duty even without any personal need to do so.
[^6]: This is a paraphrase of Śrīla Prabhupāda's general teaching to gṛhastha disciples on the householder's duty to manage the family with care and consideration, drawing the spouse toward devotional life gradually rather than imposing practices unilaterally. This thrust is repeated in many places in his letters, lectures, and morning walks.