On this day 112 years ago, Abhay Charan De was born in Calcutta. He was educated at the Scottish Churches College in Calcutta, then was married with children and owned a small pharmaceutical business. In 1950, at the age of 53, he became a vanaprastha, a pious Hindu hermit, and in 1966 he founded the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in New York City. He took on the name Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
As a travelling monk and charismatic leader, Prabhupada became a highly influential figure in Western counterculture, attracting thousands of young Americans and other Westerners to his Hare Krishna movement. He was the editor, publisher and driving force behind Back to Godhead, the main magazine of the Hare Krishna movement, originally producing it in the front room of his house in Calcutta. He sailed to the USA in 1965 and established a group of devotees and a temple in New York in 1966. He started another centre in San Francisco in 1967.
Prabhupada spent some time in London speaking with the Beatles, particularly George Harrison, and by the time of his death in 1977 ISKCON had grown to a movement comprising more than 108 different communities. It is truly remarkable that one man who was almost 70 years old when he first landed in America with no significant prior contacts can have had such an impact on the West over the space of just twelve years.