Panakam, also known as Panagam or Panaka, is a traditional South Indian drink that is especially prepared during the festival of Rama Navami. It’s a refreshing and cooling beverage made with jaggery, water, and spices, perfect for the summer season when Rama Navami is celebrated.
Here’s a simple recipe to make Panakam:
Ingredients:
½ Cup Jaggery – chopped
2 Cups Water
2 Tablespoon Lemon juice (or juice of one lemon)
¼ Teaspoon Ginger powder (or fresh ginger)
⅓ to ½ Teaspoon Green cardamom powder
⅛ Teaspoon Black pepper powder
1 Pinch Edible camphor (optional)
4 to 5 Tulsi leaves (holy basil, optional)
1 Pinch Salt
Instructions:
Dissolve jaggery in water until it is fully dissolved.
Add lemon juice, ginger powder, green cardamom powder, salt and black pepper powder to the jaggery water.
You can add tulsi leaves and a pinch of edible camphor.
Mix well and adjust the flavors according to your taste.
Offered it to Lord Rāma or krsna
This drink not only quenches thirst but also acts as a body coolant, making it a healthy alternative to soft drinks. It is traditionally offered to Lord Rama (specially on Rāma-Navami) and then distributed among devotees as prasadam.
“One must perform sacrifices as prescribed in the śāstras, and they must give in charity their hard-earned money for Kṛṣṇa’s cause. That is called dāna. Yajña, dāna and tapasya. Tapasya. Just like tomorrow is Śrī Rāma-navami. The tapasya will be that all the devotees will observe fasting from morning till evening. This is called tapasya.”. (Pandal Lecture, Bombay, April 7, 1971)
“Lord Caitanya’s Birthdate is on the Phalguna Purnima between 15 of Feb. and 15th of March. The full moon day is Lord Caitanya’s Birthday. I think you can send for Rayarama’s calendar which he has published. The exact day is 14th March, Thursday, 1968. The procedure is that you should fast from morning to evening (about 7:00) after that there should be offering to Lord Caitanya and prasadam should be accepted just like on Ekadasi day, and next day, Friday, full love feasting may be provided to as many devotees as you can.” (Letter to: Janardana — Los Angeles, 21 January, 1968)
“Our next ceremony is Lord Ramacandra’s Birthday, on the 7th of April. It should be observed in the same way as Lord Caitanya’s Appearance Day, namely, fasting up to evening and then accept Prasadam, and all our ceremonies should be performed with continuous Kirtana, of Hare Krishna, Hare Rama. That will make all our functions successful.” (Letter to: Mukunda — San Francisco, 26 March, 1968)
“So far the Advent Day of Lord Rama Candra, it should be celebrated as Lord Caitanya’s Birthday was done. Fasting up to evening, and then take prasadam, and chant Hare Krishna whole day, and be engaged in reading and chanting off and on, chant for some time, then read for some time, then again have Kirtana and so on, throughout the day. If you have not got a Ramayana, then you can read Bhagavad-gita or Srimad-Bhagavatam, that is all right.” (Letter to: Mahapurusa — San Francisco, 28 March, 1968)
“Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: So there will be an initiation on Rāma-navamī.
Prabhupāda: Rāma-navamī is upavāsa up till the… Go to observe fasting up to the evening.
Tamāla Kṛṣṇa: So moon.
Prabhupāda: Sunset.” (Room Conversation, March 26, 1977, Bombay)
Sunday, 06 April 2025 [Mayapura, West Bengal, Indian Time]
Sri Rama Navami – The Appearance Day of Lord Ramacandra
Srila Prabhupada: “The Personality of Godhead Śrī Rāma assumed the form of a human being and appeared on the earth for the purpose of doing some pleasing work for the demigods or the administrative personalities to maintain the order of the universe. Sometimes great demons and atheists like Rāvaṇa and Hiraṇyakaśipu and many others become very famous due to advancing material civilization by the help of material science and other activities with a spirit of challenging the established order of the Lord.
For example. the attempt to fly to other planets by material means is a challenge to the established order. The conditions of each and every planet are different. and different classes of human beings are accomodated there for particular purposes mentioned in the codes of the Lord. But, puffed up by tiny success in material advancement, sometimes the godless materialist challenges the existence of God. Rāvaṇa was one of them, and he wanted to deport ordinary men to the planets of Indra (heaven) by material means without consideration of the necessary qualifications.
He wanted a staircase to be built up directly reaching the heavenly planet so that people might not be required to undergo the routine of pious work necessary to enter that planet. He also wanted to perform other acts against the established rule of the Lord. He even challenged the authority of Śrī Rāma the Personality of Godhead and kidnapped His wife Sītā. Of course Lord Rāma came to chastise this atheist, answering the prayer and desire of the demigods. He therefore took up the challenge of Rāvaṇa, and the complete activity is the subject matter of the Rāmāyaṇa.
Because Lord Rāmacandra was the Personality of Godhead, He exhibited superhuman activities which no human being, including the materially advanced Rāvaṇa, could perform. Lord Rāmacandra prepared a royal road on the Indian Ocean with stones that floated on the water. The modern scientists have done research in the area of weightlessness, but it is not possible to bring in weightlessness anywhere and everywhere. But because weightlessness is the creation of the Lord by which He can make the gigantic planets fly and float in the air, He made the stones even within this earth to be weightless and prepared a stone bridge on the sea without any supporting pillar. That is the display of the power of God.”
Srila Prabhupada explains the amazing story of Sri Mula Rāma
“In the book known as Adhyātma-rāmāyaṇa, there are statements in Chapters Twelve to Fifteen about the worship of the Deities Śrī Rāmacandra and Sītā. There it is stated that during Lord Rāmacandra’s time there was a brāhmaṇa who took a vow refusing to accept breakfast until he saw Lord Rāmacandra. Sometimes, due to business, Lord Rāmacandra was absent from His capital for a full week and could not be seen by citizens during that time. Because of his vow, the brāhmaṇa could not take even a drop of water during that week. Later, after eight or nine days, when the brāhmaṇa could see Lord Rāmacandra personally, he would break his fast. Upon observing the brāhmaṇa’s rigid vow, Lord Śrī Rāmacandra ordered His younger brother Lakṣmaṇa to deliver a pair of Sītā-Rāma Deities to the brāhmaṇa. The brāhmaṇa received the Deities from Śrī Lakṣmaṇajī and worshiped Them faithfully as long as he lived.
At the time of his death, he delivered the Deities to Śrī Hanumānjī, who, for many years, hung Them around his neck and served Them with all devotion. After many years, when Hanumānjī departed on the hill known as Gandha-mādana, he delivered the Deities to Bhīmasena, one of the Pāṇḍavas, and Bhīmasena brought Them to his palace, where he kept Them very carefully. The last king of the Pāṇḍavas, Kṣemakānta, worshiped the Deities in that palace. Later, the same Deities were kept in the custody of the kings of Orissa known as Gajapatis. One of the ācāryas, known as Narahari Tīrtha, who was in the disciplic succession of Madhvācārya, received these Deities from the King of Orissa.
It may be noted that these particular Deities of Rāma and Sītā have been worshiped from the time of King Ikṣvāku. Indeed, they were worshiped by the royal princes even before the appearance of Lord Rāmacandra. Later, during Lord Rāmacandra’s presence, the Deities were worshiped by Lakṣmaṇa. It is said that just three months before his disappearance, Śrī Madhvācārya received these Deities and installed them in the Uḍupī temple. Since then the Deities have been worshiped by the Madhvācārya-sampradāya at that monastery.
As far as the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas are concerned, beginning with Rāmānujācārya, they also worshiped Deities of Sītā-Rāma. Sītā-Rāma Deities are also being worshiped in Tirupati and other places. From the Śrī Rāmānuja-sampradāya there is another branch known as Rāmānandī or Rāmāt, and the followers of that branch also worship Deities of Sītā-Rāma very rigidly. The Rāmānuja-sampradāya Vaiṣṇavas prefer the worship of Lord Rāmacandra to Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa.”
Śrīla Prabhupāda: “[…] One feature of the Supreme Personality of Godhead Lord Rāmacandra is omnipotence. The Lord can act without regard to material impediments or inconveniences, but to prove that He is the Supreme Personality of Godhead and was not merely advertised as Godhead or elected by popular vote, He constructed a wonderful bridge over the ocean.
Nowadays it has become fashionable to create some artificial God who performs no uncommon activities; a little magic will bewilder a foolish person into selecting an artificial God because he does not understand how powerful God is. Lord Rāmacandra, however, constructed a bridge over the water with stone by making the stone float. This is proof of God’s uncommonly wonderful power.
Why should someone be accepted as God without displaying extraordinary potency by doing something never to be done by any common man? We accept Lord Rāmacandra as the Supreme Personality of Godhead because He constructed this bridge, and we accept Lord Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead because He lifted Govardhana Hill when He was only seven years old. We should not accept any rascal as God or an incarnation of God, for God displays special features in His various activities.
Therefore, the Lord Himself says in Bhagavad-gītā (4.9):
janma karma ca me divyam evaṁ yo vetti tattvataḥ tyaktvā dehaṁ punar janma naiti mām eti so ’rjuna
“One who knows the transcendental nature of My appearance and activities does not, upon leaving the body, take his birth again in this material world, but attains My eternal abode, O Arjuna.” The activities of the Lord are not common; they are all transcendentally wonderful and not able to be performed by any other living being.
The symptoms of the Lord’s activities are all mentioned in the sastras, and after one understands them one can accept the Lord as He is.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: “[…] Somehow or other, Rāvaṇa was raised to an exalted position as the king of a great kingdom with all material opulences, but because of his sinful act of kidnapping mother Sītā, all the results of his pious activities were destroyed.”
If one offends an exalted personality, especially the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one certainly becomes most abominable; bereft of the results of pious activities, one must fall down like Rāvaṇa and other demons.
It is therefore advised that one transcend both pious and impious activities and remain in the pure state of freedom from all designations (sarvopādhi-vinirmuktaṁ tat-paratvena nirmalam). When one is fixed in devotional service, he is above the material platform.
On the material platform there are higher and lower positions, but when one is above the material platform he is always fixed in a spiritual position (sa guṇān samatītyaitān brahma-bhūyāya kalpate).
Rāvaṇa or those like him may be very powerful and opulent in this material world, but theirs is not a secure position, because, after all, they are bound by the results of their karma (karmaṇā daiva-netreṇa).
We should not forget that we are completely dependent on the laws of nature.
“The bewildered spirit soul, under the influence of the three modes of material nature, thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by nature.” (Bg. 3.27)
One should not be proud of one’s exalted position and act like Rāvaṇa, thinking oneself independent of material nature’s laws.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: “[…] The material opulences a person obtains by offering prayers to the goddess Durgā are temporary. As described in Bhagavad-gītā (7.23), antavat tu phalaṁ teṣāṁ tad bhavaty alpa-medhasām: men of meager intelligence desire temporary happiness.
We have actually seen that one of the disciples of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura wanted to enjoy the property of his spiritual master, and the spiritual master, being merciful toward him, gave him the temporary property, but not the power to preach the cult of Caitanya Mahāprabhu all over the world. That special mercy of the power to preach is given to a devotee who does not want anything material from his spiritual master but wants only to serve him.
The story of the demon Rāvaṇa illustrates this point. Although Rāvaṇa tried to abduct the goddess of fortune Sītādevī from the custody of Lord Rāmacandra, he could not possibly do so. The Sītādevī he forcibly took with him was not the original Sītādevī, but an expansion of māyā, or Durgādevī. As a result, instead of winning the favor of the real goddess of fortune, Rāvaṇa and his whole family were vanquished by the power of Durgādevī (sṛṣṭi-sthiti-pralaya-sādhana-śaktir ekā ).”
Each madman with his subject means that each person gets involved in life with the subjects according to his interest. In this world there are five themes, I will try to explain them,
First religion, in human society there are various religious concepts described as Hindu, Christian, Hebrew, Mohammedan, Buddhist, etc., hypocritical people need to put a label or stamp and say I belong to this religion or that one, but we see in practice that nobody obeys the precepts of their religion and thus they deceive themselves and others, true religion means knowing God and loving him, but people do not know what and who It is God, no one can love someone they do not know, from the very beginning of Srimad Bhagavatam those deceiving religions are rejected. Srila Prabhupada always said that what people like the most is to suffer and to be deceived, that is why those deceitful religions have so many followers, and they also fight among themselves saying that my religion is better than yours.
In deceitful religions God is asked for money, health, etc., in other words economic development, and for what…. To satisfy the third theme which is sense gratification, people use their intelligence to know which alcoholic beverage is best, which restaurant is the best, which nightclub is the best, etc., nowadays people achieve development economic without having to go to God, that’s why the fashion today is to be an atheist, and I live to the hole, and dead to the hole, nobody is interested in knowing God and loving him, people only believe in money and in power, the fourth theme is liberation, when the spirit soul tires of deceiving itself and others, of thinking that the purpose of life is to fill the belly, full belly, happy heart, to lead a life full of self-indulgence. the senses, there ignorance deceives you and you think you are God, and you want to merge with God, that is called spiritual suicide, it is like the prisoner who suffers a lot in jail and thinks that if I commit suicide this suffering will end.
But there is hope and that is where the fifth topic comes in, the fifth topic is knowing God and loving Him, and how only God and His energies exist, naturally when a person awakens their love for God they will love everyone and everything, because they will see it. everything in relation to God. Srila Prabhupada gave us 80 books of 400 pages each that describe the unlimited names of God or Krishna, His forms, His qualities and His pastimes, and there are all the spiritual instructions necessary to know God or Krishna and love Him.
I once saw a video of Nostradamus saying that an elderly person would come from the East who always goes with a cane to inaugurate the universal religion, the chant of the Holy Names of God The Maha-Mantra: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare (H is read as J for jota), when Srila Prabhupada arrived in New York he sat in a park and chanted The Hare Krishna Maha-Mantra, and there began his movement.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: “[…] The separation of Lord Rāmacandra from Sītā is spiritually understood as vipralambha, which is an activity of the hlādinī potency of the Supreme Personality of Godhead belonging to the śṛṅgāra-rasa, the mellow of conjugal love in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world the Supreme Personality of Godhead has all the dealings of love, displaying the symptoms called sāttvika, sañcārī, vilāpa, mūrcchā and unmāda. Thus when Lord Rāmacandra was separated from Sītā, all these spiritual symptoms were manifested. The Lord is neither impersonal nor impotent. Rather, He is sac-cid-ānanda-vigraha [Bs. 5.1], the eternal form of knowledge and bliss. Thus He has all the symptoms of spiritual bliss.
Feeling separation from one’s beloved is also an item of spiritual bliss. As explained by Śrīla Svarūpa Dāmodara Gosvāmī, rādhā-kṛṣṇa-praṇaya-vikṛtir hlādinī-śaktiḥ: the dealings of love between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa are displayed as the pleasure potency of the Lord. The Lord is the original source of all pleasure, the reservoir of all pleasure. Lord Rāmacandra, therefore, manifested the truth both spiritually and materially. Materially those who are attached to women suffer, but spiritually when there are feelings of separation between the Lord and His pleasure potency the spiritual bliss of the Lord increases.[…]”
Śrīla Prabhupāda: “Modern Rākṣasas, posing as educationally advanced merely because they have doctorates, have tried to prove that Lord Rāmacandra is not the Supreme Personality of Godhead but an ordinary person. But those who are learned and spiritually advanced will never accept such notions; they will accept the descriptions of Lord Rāmacandra and His activities only as presented by tattva-darśīs, those who know the Absolute Truth. In Bhagavad-gītā (4.34) the Supreme Personality of Godhead advises:
tad viddhi praṇipātena paripraśnena sevayā upadekṣyanti te jñānaṁ jñāninas tattva-darśinaḥ
‘Just try to learn the truth by approaching a spiritual master. Inquire from him submissively and render service unto him. The self-realized soul can impart knowledge unto you because he has seen the truth.’ Unless one is tattva-darśī, in complete knowledge of the Absolute Truth, one cannot describe the activities of the Personality of Godhead. Therefore although there are many so-called Rāmāyaṇas, or histories of Lord Rāmacandra’s activities, some of them are not actually authoritative. Sometimes Lord Rāmacandra’s activities are described in terms of one’s own imaginations, speculations or material sentiments. But the characteristics of Lord Rāmacandra should not be handled as something imaginary. While describing the history of Lord Rāmacandra, Śukadeva Gosvāmī told Mahārāja Parīkṣit, ‘You have already heard about the activities of Lord Rāmacandra.’ Apparently, therefore, five thousand years ago there were many Rāmāyaṇas, or histories of Lord Rāmacandra’s activities, and there are many still. But we must select only those books written by tattva-darśīs (jñāninas tattva-darśinaḥ), not the books of so-called scholars who claim knowledge only on the basis of a doctorate.This is a warning by Śukadeva Gosvāmī. Ṛṣibhis tattva-darśibhiḥ. Although the Rāmāyaṇa composed by Vālmīki is a huge literature, the same activities are summarized here by Śukadeva Gosvāmī in a few verses.”
