Here is a short extract from the memoir that I am writing. I hope you like it.

1968 was a year of youth unrest around the world. Students brought Paris to a stand-still, there were demonstrations in Mexico, and demonstrations in the U.S against the war in Vietnam reached a new peak with a violent confrontation of police and demonstrators outside the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August.

All of this turmoil was certainly one of the main reasons that I was now on a quest to find something new.  Instead of going to classes at Columbia University where I was enrolled in the School of International Affairs, I wandered around in New York City hoping to uncover the next steps on my path.

One day I was in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village on New York’s Lower East Side.  This park was one of the first places where the founder of the Hare Krishna movement held his outdoor chanting sessions starting in 1966, and today there is even a plaque in the park noting the event.

On the gray November day that I sat on broken park bench, there was not yet a plaque commemorating the Hare Krishnas and there was no chanting or drumming in the air. It was a bleak day in a seedy park.

Then, I looked up and saw someone who I instantly recognized. It was the frizzy-haired Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was one of the leaders of the demonstrations in Chicago, and was later indicted in “Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial” in which he and his co-defendants sparred with a stern old judge named Julius Hoffman (no relation).

Abbie Hoffman was one of the founders of the Youth  International Party, more popularly known as the Yippies.  It was not really a political party, but a loose movement of young people who used wild, theatrical means to mock the establishment.

Hoffman was a friendly guy and sat down on the bench with me. He gave me a hardboiled egg and as we ate together, he looked around at Tompkins Square Park and exclaimed emphatically, “This is a beautiful place.”

It didn’t look beautiful to me. There was dog excrement everywhere and it was as run-down as the neighborhood around it, but Hoffman insisted that it was a great place. He was trying with all the might of his mind to imagine how the park should be and not what it actually was.  This kind of idealism fueled his turbulent life.

Hoffman looked at a button that I was wearing.  It was a campaign button for someone running for office in Midtown Manhattan.  It said “Jeff Brand Works!”

“Who is Jeff Brand?” Hoffman asked

I said that I didn’t really know, because someone had given it to me.  Actually I didn’t tell him exactly how I had gotten the button.
About a week or two earlier one of my friends paid me a visit and saw that I was wearing a button that simply said Yippies!  He traded his “Jeff Brand” button for my “Yippies!” button, and when I met Hoffman I was wearing this button and not a Yippies button.

Who knows how the conversation might have developed if I had had the Yippies button on when I met Hoffman?  After sharing the eggs together, Hoffman went on his way.  But in any case, Hoffman’s view of a beautiful Tompkins Square Park eventually was realized.

I visited New York in 1996 after a long period abroad, and my colleague Dada Daneshananda took me for a tour of the City. One of our stops was Tompkins Square Park where we met our friend “Sparrow.” Sparrow is a New York humorist and poet whose satiric quest for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1996 was definitely in the spirit of Hoffman’s Yippie movement.

As we went through the park, I marveled at how it had been transformed. It was summer time and there were lots of families enjoying a warm outing with their children.  Everything was clean. The playground equipment was new, and there were no drug peddlers or winos around. It was indeed a very beautiful place.