Krsna Kirtana Songs
est. 2001 www.kksongs.org
KKSongs: A Retrospect
Today, the fourteenth day of December marks the
third year the Krsna Kirtana
songbook has been online. Today, thinking about the songbook and the website in
general and how it has been online for three years. It is remembering the
activities of the songbook as well as its parent
website that brings me to writing this article on memories of KKSongs.
The whole website concept was born on October 4,
2001, when I was a new freshman at college. One mataji
who has made a website and discussion forum on her own inspired me on creating
my own website. This was not the first website I owned. I had personal pages on
AOL, which served merely as personal pages and nothing more. My very first page
consisted of an index page which some links. First links were of my biography
and Krsna Calculus, which was a PowerPoint slideshow
presentation I created for students who were studying calculus and wanted a Krsna Conscious perspective on it. I knew many who were
interested in such a project, so I took up the task of project Krsna Calculus. In addition, I had a small little
“cookbook” on the site with some of my original recipes that I used for veggie
burgers, pizzas, and other foods.
In late December 2001, I had been meaning to start
off a website which had lyrics of many common and rare devotional songs
glorifying Radha Krsna,
Lord Caitanya, and Their devotees. Around my final
exam time, I started off a background page, very reminiscent of Navin Kabra’s Hindi film song
website. I never got time to really dwell into it at the time. I came home for
winter vacation. However, that winter break was an incredible one, as I had
association of devotee friends, the temple environment (Sri Sri
Gaura Nitai temple in
ISKCON New Jersey), and that homely environment I was familiar with. With such
inspiration from devotees, learning new bhajans, and
new insights in Indian music, I was charged to really start this site! I had
been familiar and interested in Indian music since 1997. This combined my deep
interest in Indian music as well as devotional poetry. The first page began in
late January 2002. The first songs were songs found in the Songs of the Vaisnava Acaryas book. I realized
that virtually everybody had access to these songs, so this site would not be
as different. I purchased the book, “More Songs of the Vaisnava
Acaryas” book to add lyrics of songs which are
popular to the Vaisnavas, yet not as popular as the
other book. February 6, 2002, I added these songs to the website. After adding
these songs to the website, the traffic increased slowly. I slowly found the
website on major search engines. I received sweet emails from visitors who also
provided me more songs to add to the site. In addition to effectively
communicate with the visitors and discuss the songs of our Vaisnava
movement, I created a web forum called “Krsna Kirtana forum.” Like the songbook, it was quite popular
when it was first introduced. To add more spice to the songbook, I added some
more haunting yet ever so sweet songs introduced from the Golden Avatar series
artists. Songs like Sabse Unchi
Prem Sagai, He Govinda He Gopal He Dayal Lala from Jagjit Singh’s “Samarpan” (1983),
“Mere Janma Marana Ke Sathi”, “Ehi Murari”,
“He Govinda He Gopala”, “Tum Vina Meri”
and “Jo Tum Toro Rama” from
Laksmi Shankar, and the
host of the bhajans from “Prabhupada
Krpa” by Hari Om Sharan were some of the
classics which had found a place on the website. The month of February, the
songbook was slowly gaining popularity. The month of March blossomed even more.
The month of March introduced songs rendered by His Holiness Bhakti Caru Swami. How can one
forget his ever so sweet and thought-provoking rendition of the Bhaktivinoda Thakura song “Ki Jani Ki
Bale Tomare Dhamete” or
“Sri Krsna Caitanya Prabhu Jive Doya Kori”? In addition to these, I added a series of
Bangladeshi bhajans to the pile. These included “Maribo Maribo Sakhi”,
“Bhaja Radha Krsna”, “Saje Naval Kisora” and Mira Bai’s “Minoti Rakhoye Giridhari Lal.” Nrsimhadeva’s Kavaca stotram was also a special feature included in the
compilation. In the spring 2002 season, the month of March might have indeed
been a peak period for the website’s progress. Due to the final exam and study
load in April, the progress rate slowed down a little. Nevertheless, Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s “Baul Sangit” was an unforgettable
addition to the overall collection of songs. In May 2002, this Mega-mega
songbook took a small break.
In August 2002, the songbook was awakened by the
search of more songs. In order to allow easier viewing of the songs, I had to
redo the page of the songbook opening page. The opening page originally had all
of the song titles listed on the main page. Realizing that this will be a
daunting task for me and the viewers to view and search, I made it in such a
way that songs could easily be found by clicking the appropriate letter of the
first word of the song, instead of scrolling up and down the page. I was
deciding on which should be the first set of songs to study. Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s “Gitamala” was the first one to start off the new season.
While reading the texts to the Gitamala, I truly
found it upsetting that these beautiful antique gems were not found in any
major Vaisnava songbook. I guess that is why I approached
Gitamala first. In September 2002, I approached the Saranagati and Gitavali books by Bhaktivinoda Thakura. After
finishing these two books, I was planning to start on Prarthana
by Narottama Das Thakura. Schoolwork and other circumstances put that
assignment temporarily on pause. October through December 2002 were really slow
months for the site. However, some very nice stotrams
were contributed and were very well liked. I remember in December 14, 2002 (the
first anniversary of the songbook), the song totals reached to a whopping 377
songs! Within that statistic, songs from Vaiyasaki prabhu’s “Hari Nama Ananda” were included. With Vaiyasaki prabhu’s help, he
provided the lyrics of “Mirar Prabhu
Eso Giridhari” from his
album “Divya Lila.” Bilvamangal
Thakura’s Govinda Damodara Stotram was also
included. To this day, I will say that 2002 was the most glorious year in the
history of the songbook so far. As far the overall site is concerned, Krsna Calculus slowly progressed. I had a small journal on
that site, but as it was abused, I removed it. I intended on having a raga and tala database on the site. However, with the work involved
for the songbook, the tala and raga database was
unnoticed by the viewers and me.
In the New Year,
Keeping up with the success of May 2003, the 2003 to
2004 was predicted to be one of the best ones, at least to me. In order to fit
more songs, I had made a new account with geocities. In order to transfer all
of those files to the new account, it would have been a long and dreadful task!
But, somebody’s got to do this! As I was almost half way complete with the
transferring process, my good friend from Pennsylvania, who is the webmaster of
the Pandava Sena U.S.
website, Abhijit Bhattacharjee,
had me reconsider options. The whole site has been in HTML. Abhijit
suggested new plans on converting it to PHP. It sounded like a great idea. As a
result of working on upgrading a new website, the geocities site, where the
entire songbook idea was borne, was no longer being updated. In fact, you’ll
still see statistics from May 2003. With help of one of my good friends, Nikhil Sreenath, founder of NOLS,
assisted us with web hosting. The songbook was renamed KKSongs,
or Krsna Kirtana Songs. We
also have been blessed with our own domain, www.kksongs.com. There are
so many wonderful things to say about this site, which I am sworn to secrecy. Abhijit has been very committed in working on this site.
Even though we started from September 2003 and it is now a little more than a
year later, I am very eager to see this site’s release. The future site
currently has a little over 900 devotional bhajans in
a wide variety of languages. After hitting the 900 mark in April 2004, I
decided to take a pause temporarily in the song search. I have been focusing on
the upkeep of my own website. Today, on the third anniversary day of songbook,
the KKSongs project, I pray for Krsna’s
mercy to accept this project as a humble offering to Him. All glories to Prabhupada’s sankirtana movement!
All glories to all Krsna Conscious musicians, poets,
artists, readers, philosophers, scholars, craftsmen, cooks, and devotees!
*** Since
this time of the publication of the author, the new domain name is www.kksongs.org with a different server. ***
UPDATED: July 10, 2009