Vrindavan is a town organised around circumambulation. Pilgrims walk the circuit of the town and the longer circuit of the whole Braj region, stopping at ponds, groves and hills that the tradition maps onto episodes in Krishna's life. The dramatic form called rasa lila, performed by boy actors trained for it, stages those episodes as worship rather than as theatre, and the singing traditions of the temples keep a repertoire of devotional poetry in Braj Bhasha. Holi in the surrounding villages, particularly the exchange between Barsana and Nandgaon, is celebrated with an intensity that draws visitors from across India.
The town also holds a population of widows, women who came or were sent from Bengal and elsewhere to live near Krishna and who have sung in the bhajan ashrams for a small daily allowance of food. Their situation drew public and legal attention in India from around 2012, and government and voluntary programmes have since provided pensions, shelters and medical care, with mixed results. It is a devotional practice and a social problem at once, and it is honest to say both.
Since the 1970s Vrindavan has also been an international place. The Krishna-Balaram temple, opened in 1975 by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, holds the memorial of its founder Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and receives foreign devotees in numbers, so a sixteenth century recovery of a sacred landscape now has a global congregation attached to it.