a break in meerut
As the bus stopped for a break in Meerut, I bought a copy of The Indian Express newspaper, hoping to see something about the Karmapa. Predictably, as I flipped through the paper, I saw the paper's Sunday features section with a full page about the Karmapa -- an Indian journalist's account of his visit to Sikkim's Rumtek monastery, a seat of the former Karmapa, two decades ago.
"There you go, again," he said, his finger pointing at the pictures. Both of his children, he said, are in Canada, "where the younger generation seem to have more opportunity for personal growth."
Despite the lure of the West -- where an increasing number of Tibetans are now willing to be "twice exiled" -- most Tibetans are at ease in India.
While much is made of India's nuclear adventurism and its religious fundamentalism, its humanitarian gestures often go unreported and unacknowledged.
Unfortunately, however, much publicity is reserved for the pro-Tibet movements in the Western superpowers, which are not only exaggerated but often wrongheaded -- measures aimed to fulfill their own strategic or economic ambitions.
The Tibetan issue and the Dalai Lama has now become another card for the Western superpowers to shuffle when dealing with the Chinese regime or as a price for their trade relations with China. Besides some financial aid and a bountiful of pro-Tibet rhetoric, they continue to ignore the Tibetan reality.
But India, in its own way prosaic way, nevertheless is doing all it can to sustain the Tibetan soul. As befitting a nation which gave birth to Buddhism, India is one of the few countries in the world -- as exemplified in its unconditional reception of the Karmapa last month, and of the Dalai Lama four decades ago -- which still has the guts to put "principles above politics."
proud civilization
As a great country with a proud civilization, India hardly sees the need to let its strategic interests interfere with its own code of conduct, shaped, in no small measure, by its ancient philosophy.
Over the centuries, this elaborate system of thought has helped transform Tibet from a militaristic state to a practitioner's paradise.
Traveling in modern India, one could not help but rejoice in what one sees: China may have succeeded in destroying the Tibetan monasteries and killing the monks and nuns, they have failed to suffocate the Tibetan soul.
It is very much alive and kicking in small-town India.
Tsering Namgyal, a Tibetan writer, is based in Taipei where he is working on his PhD.
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