Sunday, April 20th, 2003
Tomsk, Siberia, Russia.

Travelling To Tomsk
Observing winter's retreat

Early in the morning, we cross the river Ob on the northern boundary of Novosibirsk as we drive northeast to Tomsk, a major river port and industrial center in central Russia, with a population of half a million.

It is a little colder than yesterday, but still quite warm. Winter is beaten, and she knows it. This half-hearted attempt is not fooling anybody.

The only signs of Winter that we see are a few spiteful slivers of ice and snow where she spits defiantly at the sun as she sullenly slinks off to the one place where the ever-increasing warmth of his rays cannot yet penetrate: the dark recesses of the forests.

She will be quite content to recuperate there, biding her time, licking her wounds and glaring balefully through the trees: she knows from past experience that once the sun realizes that his flank has been left exposed on the Tropic of Capricorn and rushes south to defend it, she will emerge with a vengeance to recapture the land she temporarily lost...

It is a seesaw battle that has been going on for millennia: she longs for the good old days, the dimly remembered Ice Age, when she captured the entire planet, when she smothered the whole world with her cold body... Maybe next year...

We arrive in Tomsk shortly after noon, and go to Naradeva Prabhu's apartment. We take a shower and have something to eat.

At three o'clock we drive to the Aelita Theater in downtown Tomsk, where the "Open TV" Russian TV station interviews Goswami Maharaj for their "Good News" program.

At four o'clock we address about 120 people who have come to hear something about "The Subjective Evolution of Consciousness."

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