Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: That description you give in the Bhāgavatam, Śrīla Prabhupāda, at the time of death.... It's in the Fourth Canto. It's very, very graphic. During that Purañjana, the story of Purañjana, how the fire starts to build, an attack is given on the kingdom. Oh, boy, anyone who reads that will become very much...
Rāmeśvara: Sober.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: ...sobered up. These books are a real slap. They make you awake very quickly. We always.... I used to lecture from that to the new men to bring them out of their māyā quickly. People don't like to think of death. They try to forget it. It's so fearful to them. And that brings all of the horrors of death very graphically in front of them. You describe how the soul is kept.... The body is burning like a big fire, and the soul is trying to get out, but all of the holes are blocked. Just like a man in a house that's burning and he can't get out. Fearful condition.
Rāmeśvara: (break) ...numbers of men, big temples, it is all due to our books, to your books. So I was thinking that if one day this Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement becomes so powerful that even it is giving instruction to governments, that will also be because of...
Prabhupāda: That is very easy. If you increase the number of your devotees, government hears you(?). That is not very difficult thing. Simply you have to increase our supporters; then the government is there.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: Actually, although the actual number of initiated devotees is still few, there is a growing, ever-growing number of sympathizers.
Prabhupāda: Supporters, yes.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: Tremendous number, Prabhupāda.
Prabhupāda: So you make good supporter, then government is yours.
Rāmeśvara: Then it's all based on selling your books more and more.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Oh, yes.
Rāmeśvara: That is the principal way to increase our supporters and thus deliver the whole world.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: When people ask me, "How many members do you have, how many people?" I don't answer any more "Five thousand," or something like that. Now I tell them many millions. Because the thing is when they ask, when you ask someone how many Christians are there in America, of such and such sect, they don't mean priests, they mean also the people who are coming.
Rāmeśvara: Congregation.
Prabhupāda: Congregation.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: So we should give that number, not as five thousand, but as so and so many millions.
Prabhupāda: That I say, when people ask me that how many followers you have got in India.... They're wholesale.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: The whole country.
Rāmeśvara: The whole country. Yes.
Hari-śauri: Yes. That man was amazed when on the plane when he asked me, he said, "How many members of your religion are there?" So I said, "Well, in India there are hundreds of millions." He couldn't imagine it.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: That's what we should say, two million, like that. American, five hundred thousand. Why should we say five thousand?
Hari-śauri: Śrīla Prabhupāda? Before you were mentioning that we should start to try to get on friendly terms with some of these governmental people. Would that be done in the same way as they do in India? Just like we have so many government ministers that have become life members and things like that. Is that possible to do in America?
Prabhupāda: Yes. There are many government men. Why not? Human psychology is the same.