Spice Up Your Spiritual Life at Bhakti

No need to be a lonely vegetarian on campus anymore­—just head to the Lerner Party Space at 7 p.m. on Tuesday nights.

The Bhakti Club’s first gathering of the semester drew about 75 students from the Columbia community, who formed a rapt audience for Gadadhara Pandit Dasa as he added ingredients to a steaming wok on a Bunsen burner. Pandit narrated the cooking process and answered questions from the audience about the night’s recipe, a mildly spiced stew of chickpeas, tomato, eggplant, and spinach. Pandit’s clothes, the typical ensemble of a Hare Krishna monk, matched the bright orange walls of the Party Space.

When the final elements—a splash of bottled lemon juice and a pinch each of sugar and salt—had been blended in, Pandit, who is Columbia’s first Hindu chaplain, bowed his head to recite a prayer under his breath. Some members of the audience closed their eyes and mouthed prayers of their own, but most stared politely and a little restlessly into space. They were clearly impatient for the meal to begin.

And yet prayer is at the heart of the Bhakti Club’s mission. “Bhakti” is the Sanskrit word for devotion, and the club convenes for discussions of the Bhagavad-Gita (a seminal Indian spiritual text) every Friday afternoon, yoga classes every other Thursday evening, and spiritual retreats every semester. The weekly cooking demonstration, which is followed by a free vegetarian meal, is the club’s most popular event, but Pandit sees cooking and sharing food foremost as a chance to serve God and the community.

“We understand that when we offer food to Krishna, it becomes sanctified,” he said. “That because selflessness involved in the cooking, and it wasn’t cooked for my pleasure but for the pleasure of God, for someone else, and then meant to be distributed.”

The Bhakti Club was formed seven years ago by a group of Hindu students at Columbia who asked Pandit first to lead them in philosophical discussions and then to teach them how to cook. Pandit’s first cooking demonstration took place in Carman Hall in front of an audience of five.

To understand how Bhakti has grown to attract such a large and diverse group of attendees, one need only look at its menu—this is no ordinary free campus meal. “They’re the best cooks. They’re the best,” said Lola Boatwright, CC ’10, a board member and publicity coordinator of the Bhakti Club. Boatwright attended her first Bhakti meeting last semester after learning about it at the club fair and having what she calls “the archetypal” Bhakti first encounter—“You get handed a flyer that says ‘free vegetarian cooking class,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m a vegetarian, and I can’t cook.’”

Bhakti feasts, which are served following each week’s cooking class, always include a vegan rice dish, one of many spiced vegetable dishes known as sabji, and the wildly popular dessert called halava (one of many variant spellings). A specialty from Pandit’s native North India, halava is made with semolina (often sold as Cream of Wheat), butter or oil, sugar or honey, and fruit—from pineapple to coconut to berries. The result is a thick, quivering pudding that can be carved into hunks with a spoon. “It’s usually the most favorite item of the students. No matter how elaborate a preparation I can make, they always love the halava the most,” said Pandit.

Pandit, who learned to cook in the communal environment of his downtown monastery, can’t transport all the dishes he’d like to Morningside Heights—soup and chapati (thin Indian flatbread), which would round out the meal, are too messy and time-consuming to bring from the temple every week. Even so, he said that he enjoys showing people how varied vegetarian cooking can be. Approached by a would-be vegetarian student who found meatless fare boring, Pandit said, “For two years straight I could teach you food, and I would never repeat anything.”

Last Tuesday after Pandit’s prayer ended, students formed a long line that snaked around the room as Bhakti board members and volunteers spooned out generous helpings of rice, the chickpea sabji that Pandit had just demonstrated, salad, and halava. Even though the servers worked as fast as they could, the queue seemed only to grow as students who had skipped the presentation sneaked downstairs and quietly fell in. Eventually, though, everyone had their fill—Pandit and his fellow monks, after years of practice, have figured out how to prepare enough food for a hungry crowd of students, some of whom go back for second or third helpings.

The crowd, for its part, seemed pleased. Christina Choi and Rebecca Greenberg, both BC ’11, who were attending Bhakti for the first time after Choi ran across its booth at this year’s activities fair, said that they would both probably come back. The best part of the experience? “The sampling of the food,” said Greenberg.
Pandit is not upset by the fact that many students seem to come mainly for the food, paying no heed to the club’s spiritual purpose.

“I know that it happens, I’ve seen it, and I’m not bothered by it,” he said. “I definitely feel that whoever, that they feel that there’s something more still than just a free meal here, ‘cause you can get free meals everywhere on campus. So even though they come for that, I feel like a deep spiritual reason is bringing them in here.”
That, and the halava.

More information about the Bhakti Club can be found at www.columbia.edu/cu/bhakti/.