In America and Europe, one often encounters white men dressed in orange robes, wearing beads and garlands around their neck, vertical marks on their foreheads, holding kettle drums in their hands, singing and dancing—a format that many find colourful, amusing, mildly irritating but harmless. They keep chanting Hare Ram, Hare Krishna. These are members of an international society seeking to bring Krishna consciousness beyond India to the rest of the world.

This movement emerged in the 1970s, alongside the hippie movement, when the youth of the world was seeking alternatives to material and mechanistic ways of life offered by capitalism and communism. Unlike the hippie movements which focused on casual drugs and tantric sex, however, this was more puritanical, based on vegetarianism and controlled sensuality, with a high sense of grace and aesthetics based on the concept of 'Madhurya-ras' or the joyful honey-sweet emotion that is evoked by realising Krishna consciousness.

This movement is inspired by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who merged the bheda-abeda (dual-nondual) form of Vedanta with Krishna-Radha bhakti, 500 years ago in Bengal. His Gaudiya Vaishnav Parampara (Bengal school of devotion to Vishnu) popularised ecstatic public processions involving singing, chanting and dancing. This was reframed, redefined and popularised by Swami Prabhupada in the 20th century for the international audience.