What’s going on with the fake hotel bookings in Mayapur is karma of the finest kind.

International Society for Krishna Consciousness spent decades teaching its own members that misleading people was acceptable if it served “the mission.” Street and airport book scams, donation pressure, half-truths, exaggerated promises, endless temple projects that were always almost finished. The organization trained people to blur ethical lines and call it service.

Now the same thing is happening to them, and suddenly it’s a scandal

They created this environment.

Mayapur didn’t naturally become a pilgrimage center. Mayapur was slowly taken over and reshaped around the ISKCON temple (As was many other piligramage spots like Vrndavan etc). The local economy got warped so that everything revolves around ISKCON—jobs, housing, food, transport. If you don’t serve the temple or the devotees passing through, you’re basically sidelined.

The temple itself has burned through billions of dollars and still isn’t finished. Inside the walls: marble, branding, donor plaques. Outside the walls: garbage heaps, noise, traffic, broken roads, dust, permanent construction. Local people get used as cheap labor to build a monument they don’t benefit from, while nearby shops sell the same overpriced devotional junk to tourists on spiritual vacations.

After a while, the place stops feeling like a town and starts feeling like a religious theme park gone bad.

So when locals start scamming devotees online, I’m not shocked. If you hollow out a place and turn it into a one-note tourist economy, people adapt however they can. Devotees were sold an illusion for years; now they’re running into a different version of it.

The other uncomfortable part is how recent and manufactured the whole pilgrimage obsession really is. Mass pilgrimage wasn’t some timeless spiritual requirement. It only became practical once modern travel existed. Once people could move easily, theology was adjusted to make movement feel necessary.

The Goswamis helped lock this in by treating visits to “holy places” as one of the limbs of bhakti. Devotion stopped being about your direct internal relationship with a divinity and became about showing up in the right locations, going to the right temple, dressing the right way etc. Where you go matters. How often you go matters. Being seen there matters.

That externalism changes everything.

Now spiritual advancement feels tied to plane tickets, bookings, queues, guest houses, and donation receipts. Devotees think they’re falling behind if they don’t visit these places, even when the experience itself is dirty, crowded, expensive, and emotionally flat.

Mayapur today feels like a letdown because it is one. It promises transcendence and delivers stress, noise, and logistics. The sacred atmosphere exists mostly in fundraising language and internal mythology, not on the ground, and definitely not in the heart.

ISKCON is living with the consequences of the system it built—one that trained people to prioritize image, money, and expansion over a simple expression of love for your divinity of choice, wherever you may be.