This is the other piece I wrote for Contact Magazine while in India. It is a short profile of one of the most interesting men I've ever met. This man turned down an opportunity in his youth to study medicine in the U.S., instead choosing to join meager guerilla efforts to force the Chinese army out of Tibet. While the Dalai Lama, and thus the majority of Tibetans who follow him, champions a "Middle Way" policy in which Tibet remains part of China but is a fully functional autonomous region (free to elect their own representatives for deciding on local issues), Lhasang Tsering insists that the world is suffering as long as Tibet is occupied by China:
Lhasang Tsering runs one of the most successful bookshops in Mcleod Ganj. Yet, when he speaks, he keeps one eye trained in the direction of Tibet. An outspoken critic of the Tibetan government-in-exile's Middle Way policy, Tsering uses poetry to express the pain he feels for his homeland and its people, and his unwavering belief that Tibet must be a free, independent nation.
"What you call poems, I call my pain in words," he says. Those words reflect the pain of a lost home, a thwarted freedom struggle, and a feeling that no one is doing enough. On the wall behind his desk at The Bookworm is a plaque declaring, "The world without Tibet is not complete."
Another poster behind him reads, "I have something to live for. I have freedom to fight for." No, Tsering doesn't participate in demonstrations, marches, or hunger strikes. But he sits ready to fight if he is asked. "When freedom was a goal, I led the demonstrations. Now, I'm not interested in taking part in rituals," he says.
Tsering, the former president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, left government service because he disagreed with official policies. He sold his watch, a nice pair of shoes he received as a gift, and most of his clothing in order to purchase books for his first small store. "Books were the only things I knew and loved," he explains. Well-versed in what it takes to run a successful business, he says a business-oriented attitude is one of the flaws in the current negotiations with China.
"The matter of independence for Tibet is not like a game, or a business. Unlike this bookshop, which is a business where I try to make money, and I change something if I'm not, the Tibet issue should not be about winning and losing. In my humble view, winning and losing are important, but they are second to right and wrong. Always."
As he speaks he keeps his eyes on Tibet. It may be on the other side of the mountain, but he knows exactly which way home is.
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In the exiled Tibetan community, where I spent most of my winter vacation, March 10th is National Uprising Day - a day when Tibetans execute hunger strikes, protests, and rallies to keep the cause of equality in Tibet alive. I wrote the following story for a local publication in Dharamsala before we left.
Because the piece was written for Tibetans, it doesn't delve into a lot of the history necessary to fully understand the day. You may remember (although, to be honest, I certainly didn't) that there were massive uprisings in Tibet in 2008, when many Tibetans were killed or imprisoned. If you were alive in 1959, you might remember the scandal surrounding the teen-aged Dalai Lama's covert escape from Tibet into India in March of that month.
As long as the Chinese government continues to oppress traditional Tibetan culture, which is fundamentally different from Han Chinese culture, the Tibetan community will observe March 10 as a day of mourning the oppression and impending loss of their culture. This is the little bit that I learned about the day from being in Dharamsala (Originally published in Contact Magazine, March 2010 Issue):
For the exiled Tibetan community, National Uprising Day isn't about going hungry, picketing the Chinese embassy, or shouting slogans in the streets of Dharamsala. While all of these things will happen on 10 March, the day remains truly focused on the plight of the majority of Tibetans who remain in Tibet.
"Our brothers and sisters have suffered for speaking their minds and exercising their basic human rights. They have to pay a high price for basic freedoms," says Tashi Choephel, a researcher at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy. This year marks the two-year anniversary of the March 2008 uprising in Tibet, which was the largest and most widespread since the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959.
For those in exile, the events of March 2008 sent a powerful message that Tibetans continue to believe in and to fight for their rights in the region. "The sense of identity for exiled Tibetans became stronger [after the uprising]. There was unity among the exiled community like never before," Choephel says. He finds the continued resistance encouraging, and believes the issue will be solved in time. "I would tell Tibetans inside Tibet not to give up hope, because there is a light at the end of the tunnel. They're an example to Tibetan people outside Tibet to continue to fight for the cause."
According to TCHRD's 2009 Annual Report on the Human Rights Situation in Tibet, fast track courts in 2009 issued the death penalty to five Tibetans for their participation in the spring 2008 protests. The governmental organization states that torture is endemic in Chinese-administered prisons and detention centers. Several cases of torture and inhuman treatment have been reported since the protests, when the TCHRD estimates that around 6,500 Tibetans were arrested.
China refuses to admit international regulatory bodies to inspect its prisons. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was denied access to Tibet after March 2008, and the International committee of the Red Cross, which is mandated to visit detention facilities and check on the wellbeing of prisoners worldwide, isn't allowed in, either. A joint statement by six United Nations Special Procedures mandate holders calling for an increased flow of information in and out of Tibet continues to be ignored.
Although the Chinese authorities deny the use of extreme force upon Tibetan demonstrators, the reality is that they continue to oppress both the religious and lay communities who protest peacefully. "Earlier, activists and political prisoners were mostly monks and nuns, but in 2008 a large number of civilians were arrested, sentenced, even given the death sentence for peaceful protests," says Choephel.
Always focused on the reality of the situation inside Tibet, those in exile will use 10 March as a day to advance the Tibetan cause and to send a message to their countrymen who remain oppressed. "As Tibetans outside Tibet, we have a moral responsibility to speak out, because we have the facilities to reach the world with our message. We need to let the Tibetans inside Tibet know that we still have a desire to go back," says Sonam Dorjee, Dharamsala regional president of the Tibetan Youth Congress.
The 40-year-old TYC, the largest and most active exiled Tibetan NGO, will facilitate protests in March not as a ritual of habit, but as a promise to their fellow Tibetans who continue to resist. "The issue is still alive because of the Tibetans inside Tibet. The Chinese failed to invade the hearts of the Tibetan people. Even though they know they're in danger, they speak out," Dorjee says.
Dorjee, who hasn't missed a 10 March protest since he was 10 years old, when he sneaked onto a bus with his father to attend a march, experienced the most memorable moment of his life when the Dalai Lama greeted him during a 10 March hunger strike in Mcleod Ganj. Although these experiences are personally gratifying, he reiterates the importance for exiles of remembering those inside Tibet when they protest. His father is missing half of a thumb, shot off by a Chinese border guard when he fled to Tibet. "To me, this has always been a reminder that we have a responsibility to the people inside Tibet to remember their struggles," Dorjee says.
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It was no accident that we went straight to Mcleod Ganj and stayed put for five weeks. Transportation in India is more terrifying by far than its Chinese counterpart. And that's saying something. The day we traveled to Agra, we received a crash course in all the things we'd missed out on thus far. The inside of our sleeper car on the train looked a lot like my dad's old grey van—it even had huge, dusty fans attached to the ceiling, maybe 6 inches from our bunks, so I was able to share with Jason the story of how my sisters and I always got our hair caught in the van's rotating fans on long road trips. Throughout the 6-hour trip, children hopped on to try to sell things, or to sing songs for money.
In Agra, we had to negotiate with rickshaw after rickshaw to get to the bus station. Then, successfully not getting ripped off too badly, realizing we weren't at the correct station, we had to negotiate all over again. Some guy tried to push an offer to drive us there in his private car for nearly $80, to which I finally responded, exasperated, "Look, I know you see our white skin and think we're rich, but I honestly do not even have that much money in my wallet right now." We arrived at a bug-infested hotel near the Taj Mahal around 11 p.m., crashed until 5, and then rose to see the Taj before the crowds.
There are gardens to walk through all around the main mausoleum, but I hated to turn my back on the shining mass of marble in the perfect, post-thunderstorm morning light. As the sky turned from purple to crisp, clear blue, I wanted to walk backward away from it to lock it in my memory. I worry that my brain will file this perfect image as something it saw in a book, and the memory of really standing there in awe of the whole thing will fade.
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Lately, I'm quadruple-tasking, studying for the GRE with one hand, scrolling through job listings (dismal) with the other, thinking with one part of my brain about India, while the other portion focuses on July, when, as of now, my life is slated to drop off into the unknown.
When we left Mcleod Ganj—yes, two whole weeks ago, how's this for punctual? Don't tell my potential employers—we hadn't used any form of machinated transportation in nearly five weeks. The seven-hour bus ride was mostly uneventful. We only hit one government truck full of school children.
In Amritsar, a large, dusty city near the Pakistani border, we spent two nights in pilgrims' quarters beside the Golden Temple, the Mecca or Vatican of the Sikh religion. Just about every day since we left I've been trying to think of a way to articulate that experience accurately.
Entering the clamoring temple grounds, the overwhelming din of metal on metal to my right sounded like an exuberant rendition of Stomp. After choosing our "bed," or raised board with one pillow which we were to share in the overcrowded foreigners' section of the free hostel, we took off our shoes (not allowed on the temple's sacred marble walkways), covered our heads (a mandatory sign of respect), and ventured across to find out what the tin clamoring was really all about.
Sikhism is an astoundingly generous faith, born partially out of a movement to do away with Hinduism's caste system. Just as everyone of any station can sleep in the free hostel, everyone who visits the temple is invited to dine in the massive, sacred dining hall that precedes the temple. Rolling up our jeans to keep them out of the sacred mush of dal and curry constantly being mopped off the marble floor, we walked in, washed our hands, received huge metal plates, a spoon, and a bowl for water. Up a set of stairs, the steady but orderly flow of people take seats on the floor in line after line after line.
Volunteers come by one by one: First, chapatti (Indian bread), then ladles full of dal, rice pudding, and some sort of aloo (potato dish) or paneer (cheese curd dish). The food splatters in every direction, especially if you aren't holding your spoon when it gets dumped on. After the initial adjustment to eating food thrown at you from above while you sit bewildered on the floor, I have to say that this is one of the coolest cultural experiences I've had. I say that even though one night the clean-up crew sent food-scrap-spray from the mop over what remained of my food, and an Indian friend we'd met saw me cringe and feign fullness. "It's holy food," he told me with a straight face, "you have to eat it all." And I did.
After cleansing their bare feet, pilgrims walk into the temple. The temple itself is actually rather small, with marble walls and magnificently maintained gold plaiting that reflects in a large mote surrounding it. Visitors walk around the holy pond, pausing at certain sacred monuments, washing themselves in the water and generally being clamorous—a Sikh we met in Mcleod Ganj told us Sikhs are some of the loudest people in the world, and she's right. Over loudspeakers, setting the mood and giving the din an unmistakable air of worship, live Sikh hymns are played from inside the temple.
There are so many small things going on inside the temple grounds. First, people were staring at us. A lot. As usual. More than once, mothers pushed their children in front of me and told them to say "hello" and shake my hand. One guy asked us to take pictures with him… then asked us to email the pictures, ostensibly so he could use them to pretend he knew some Americans when he tried to immigrate, which he then asked us how to do. "I was born in America, sir, I really don't know the process…"
The most fascinating part for me, again aware of the chaste Catholic boxes I put things into, was a portion of the water designated for nearly naked bathing (for men only, of course) in the holy water. All the hair they've ever grown (Sikhs don't cut their hair, shave, or shape their eyebrows. They believe all of your hair was given to you by God and is therefore a gift you should not mess with) remains wrapped up in a turban, while they strip down, hand their clothes to compliant wives or children, and go for a dip with their friends. I found myself wide-eyed during our first walk past. Thereafter, I tried to keep my eyes glued to my bare feet on the marble, afraid of seeing a towel slip as they changed in the open back into dry clothes.
I made friends with three young Sikh girls visiting the temple on their weekend holiday. They befriended me because I sat down, exhausted after all of our traveling followed by trying to sleep on half of a board with half of a pillow—Sikhs must not sleep, because the noise doesn't diminish at all, 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. share the same decibel. Anyway, the girls approached me because I sat in the universal position of misery, knees pulled to chest and my head resting on them. "Are you sad?" was their introduction.
The three cousins were really eager to tell me about the customs that affect their life. The oldest was a little bit younger than me, in her second year studying electronics at university. The younger two were still in high school. They were amazed that I was alone, that my parents weren't worried about me—I tried to explain that they probably were, but there's not much they can do. This conversation quickly landed on the topic of arranged marriages, which all three will probably have, even though the oldest has a boyfriend she isn't telling her parents about.
"It's very frustrating, but our parents just worry about us, and want to make sure we end up with someone who will take care of us," the oldest explained to me. "Well, maybe when you have daughters you can give them more freedom," I suggested hopefully (or dumbly?) "No, we'll probably be worried then, too!" At this comment the youngest shook her head vigorously. Not her. She looks with disdain at her strikingly orange sari when I express how jealous I am of their beautiful clothing. This 14-year-old, like her counterparts all over the world, doesn't like wearing what her parents want her to wear. The spark in her eye says she'd give anything for a pair of tight jeans and a "love marriage," as they qualify them.
(I had serious sari-envy at the temple. It may have been the fact that I was—still—wearing my jeans with increasingly large holes in the side, and a 2006 Drake Relays hoodie that saw its better days… in 2006.)
A series of days have been happening to me for a few weeks now, and I find that today is the last of those in Mcleod Ganj. Whether this emotion has any place in the constitution of a worthy international journalist (probably not), a few weeks of immersion rendered me momentarily unable to process everything going on around me. Struck with the realization that I'll soon be back in the land of the Great Firewall, it seems prudent that I lay down some reflections.
Beggars make me sad about myself, because they make me think about myself at all when clearly they are the ones without hands, or feet, or enough money to buy milk for their babies. Looking at a person who clearly doesn't have the resources to work on her own—who in India wants to hire the old woman with nubs at the end of her arms?—my first instinct is to try to assuage my guilt. Why doesn't the government help her? Why doesn't that guy who looks richer than me help her? Etc, etc. Obviously, the problem of poverty and inadequate resources for the handicapped in developing countries runs deeper than my self-involved blogging, so I won't attempt to dissect it here. It just sucks. I should do something about it. You should do something about it.
On a related note, I made a concerted effort to give my money to businesses run by those who looked just a few days away from asking for the cash without anything to offer in return. I know you've seen the commercials, but the equivalent of $60 in the hands of a displaced man struggling to sell jewelry off of a table constructed over a sewer really can render him speechless. then again, as Jason reminds me, I don't know where/how those jewels were mined. Everyone's life would be so much easier if everyone was so much kinder.
The Tibetan situation is frustrating, as any Tibetan will readily explain to you. Jason & I both scored private audiences with members of the Tibetan government-in-exile as part of our research for stories we wrote for Lha's monthly magazine. They're running a legit establishment up here in India's Himalayan foothills. They're keeping a close eye (as close as possible) on the fate of their countrymen and women in Tibet. Yet they're working 9-5, as one dissenter and fabulously bearded man told me, on what is, for many Tibetans, a life or death issue. The Dalai Lama will die, and this government with no bargaining chips on the global playing field (except this one: "Hey guys, torture hurts. Like, a lot. Especially electrocution. Please help.") will have its hands full trying to harness the pain of millions of Tibetans, to remind them that nonviolence is golden.
"Don't worry about it too much," Tashi told me in one of our conversation classes. The other day as we climbed a couple hours past the mountain snowline, he reiterated his first lesson to me, the day after we arrived here. Our enemy is our own anger. Your body is a guesthouse, a convenient vessel for you to do as much good as you can while you're here, not for you to use worrying about material things, including illusory homelands. Still, it's difficult to return to China, where admittedly my biggest physical hurdle will be finding a functional proxy to access Facebook, knowing seventy percent of imprisoned Tibetans are monks and nuns put in jail for protesting peacefully and requesting basic rights.
I acquired food poisoning pretty early on, but I've been eating right through it. It became kind-of a game, really, to see if I could eat enough to make input greater than output through sheer volume. Last week I broke down and went to a Tibetan doctor, who prescribed herbal pills that taste like dirt, which I have to chew (chew! three dirt pills!) at every meal. Not knowing exactly what made me sick, I wouldn't take back a single potentially infested meal. Indian food is magical. The presence of properly cooked western food, also magical.
February 14 marked the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year (coincidentally the same day as China's this year, though not always). Jason's student invited us to spend the holiday with his family—wife, brother, and three kids sleeping and eating in one room, with an attached kitchen and bathroom—an experience that involved basically sitting still and stuffing our faces with biscuits, candy, fruit, momos (Tibetan dumplings) and more tea than one should consume in a year, for about six hours straight. Felt just like an American holiday. As a thank-you, his student wrote us each a card (this guy just learned the ABC's four weeks ago) and his son drew me a picture of the entire family, which beats any photograph. I had to send the card, along with many other Tibetan gifts and souvenirs, home to my parents, because I can't bring any of it back into China.
We've met a pile of the most outgoing, kindhearted people one could hope to meet in the world. People from every corner (often from multiple corners at once), here to concentrate on their own work, meditate, help the refugee community or the local community, find themselves, nurture discarded puppies, practice yoga, learn about organic, small-scale farming, be of knowledge and be of use. I hope our paths chance to cross again, but often that's not the case. We all just take our cultural enrichment and run, better for the conversation, gallons of chai, and unexpected company.
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As I’ve mentioned, there is a wide array of Westerners living in or visiting Dharamsala, drawn by altruism, pilgrimage, tourism, or the pursuit of some downright wholesome hash. Some of them are strikingly normal. Like Courtney, an Australian girl we met at lunch yesterday who accompanied us to a nearby waterfall (watertrickle.) and regaled us with stories of her solo travels throughout India. Or Milton, a retired English teacher from Arkansas who Jason assists with the advanced English class at Lha.
Others are a bit quirky or, at the very least, fun to look at. They’ve assimilated bits of Indian and Tibetan dress into their daily ensemble in the most curious of ways—dhotti pants, furry moccasins, “Free Tibet” scarf and a blanket/shawl wrapped around them expertly. My favorite one of these was a whole family of tourists, Mom, Dad, Daughter #1 and Daughter #2. Mom and both Daughters seemed to acquire a new, matching article each day, so that they were wearing Jamaican-inspired, Indian-made red, yellow and green jackets the first day we saw them, covering them with elaborately embroidered yak-leather vests the next day, and finally, after the Long Life Puja at the temple last weekend, ceremonial white scarves draped over it all.
After seeing these ensembles parading around for more than two weeks now, I didn’t think anything would surprise me. Then I saw The Most Beautiful Woman I Have Ever Seen (Really, Ever. In My Entire Life.)
An English woman, in her late sixties, perhaps, with brown and grey dreadlocks not much younger than her. Not just any dreadlocks, but dreads tied together on the top of her head, Pebbles-style, with a huge, floppy pink bow. Select dreads were wound with that really silky fabric that sometimes covers the cuddliest of stuffed animals, in a variety of colors. Her jacket incorporated green, purple, blue, and orange (heavy on the orange) in an 80’s-type design with those bizarre z’s and paint speckles all over it. The orange parts specifically had an amateurish sponge-painted look to them. Underneath, a fuchsia sweater, jeans, and pink Crocs that almost matched the sweater. She tied it together with an oversized wristwatch and a pile of hemp and beaded bracelets. I managed to note this much through sideways glances at a restaurant, and when I chanced one full-on stare I noticed there also seemed to be pieces of tinsel—the Christmas tree kind—wound into a few of her dreads, as well.
So this former HP consultant turned nun from Minnesota put this little, adorable black puppy into my lap, then led us down the street to purchase shampoo, milk, and bowls before we even knew what happened. Only when little Tashi was unleashed in our guestroom and promptly peed under the bed did I realize what we had done.
“I feel like a teenager who wanted a baby because they’re cute,” I remarked as he began to gnaw on Jason’s shoestring (which he later politely regurgitated at Jason’s feet). Parenting 101 became even more real when Jason began to bathe him and ended up so drenched and soapy that he might as well have bathed himself in the process. Tashi is a common Tibetan first name, and also part of their everyday greeting. Yes, this is a little bit like naming your child “Hello,” except Tashi means “good luck” or “auspiciousness,” and they love all things auspicious. So, our little guy was lucky to be in from the cold and the fat, greedy street dogs, and was named accordingly.
Tashi fit comfortably in my arms, and there were very few places I couldn’t take him—his primary activity in public was sleeping on my lap, charming everyone with his grunts and wiggles. At the guesthouse, though, the world was his playground. He made sincere efforts to remove Jason’s digits, ears, and nose with his sharp little teeth, and was equally determined to poop in the most inaccessible places under the bed. We often took him up on the roof to play, play here meaning to eat every piece of fuzz, dirt, or paint chip he could sniff out. He took quickly to me as his mother, and the instant he became tired he would seek out my lap and collapse into it, unconscious before his head hit the thigh.
Although we were in love with him from the moment the stranger deposited him in my lap, it was evident that we could not accommodate him in our one tiny room—let alone afford the $150 per flight, plus veterinary bills, to bring our wayward pet home with us. He charmed his way into the hearts of all of our ex-pat friends over the course of the next few days. Everyone “Would love to take him but…” and “Don’t get rid of him just yet, I might know someone who…” Westerners are infamous in these parts for our soft spot for dogs, and I knew that, despite everyone’s best efforts, they were unlikely to find locals who wanted to take care of a needy, 6- or 8-week-old puppy.
After three days of newspaper covered floors and 60-minute sleeping cycles all night long, we made the difficult decision to just take him to the only animal charity in town, which nurses puppies until they look big enough to compete with the other dogs and then releases them into the streets. I consoled myself with the idea that we could at least visit him there and maybe help take care of the other dogs. On our way, we stopped for lunch at a rooftop Indian restaurant, where Tashi got his own plate of fried eggs, what I thought might be his last substantial meal.
Somehow, his ravenous gobbling tugged at the heartstrings of the restaurant’s well-dressed owner, who said he had been looking for a nice male puppy—he could only find females, and he didn’t want to deal with more pups down the line. The fact that Tashi comfortably peed right next to our table and then went and pooped in the corner didn’t dissuade him at all, and as we paid our bill Tashi gleefully followed him behind the counter and began sniffing out his new digs.
Sunday night’s clueless new parent emotions gave way Wednesday night to pangs of empty nest syndrome, as Jason and I sat on the bed missing his whine to join us and chew our fingers/hair/clothes/blankets to shreds. Our human friend Tashi, a monk with a soft spot for all animals who can’t understand why Westerners don’t take home pigs and cows so readily, questioned our actions but hinted that perhaps we racked up some good karma for finding the puppy a safe home.
