Hey friends,
So I am sitting in Majnu Ta Kila, the Tibetan refugee settlement in Delhi, India. We arrived from Kathmandu yesterday afternoon and we're heading to Dharamsala by overnight sleeper bus tonight. It's been quite a journey, these past few weeks...
Tibet is a crazy, hard, scary, beautiful, repressive, incredible, complicated place. The entire issue of Tibet is more complicated than I ever imagined. What is development? Is development good or bad? Is Tibetan culture better preserved in Tibet or in exile? What is culture? What is Tibetan culture? Everyone agrees that Tibetan is better preserved in Tibet than exile. There is almost no english in Lhasa, and all signs by law have to have Tibetan on them in addition to Chinese. The Chinese is always bigger, however.
When we first arrived in Lhasa many of us commented that it didn't really seem as bad as Tibetan exiles would have you believe. I eventually saw how wrong we were... What we came to realize after spending time in Tibet was that what we were seeing was the surface, the superficial Tibetan culture that is being preserved. The repression exists just as strongly today as it did ten years ago. Only now it is more subtle, an underlying tension that keeps everyone on edge. Tibetans are allowed to wear traditional clothing, eat Tibetan food, and practice a very limited form of Tibetan Buddhism. But even such simple things as circumambulating important sites--while allowed in general--is restricted on important dates. Just before we arrived ten monks at Drepung monastery were arrested for attempting to celebrate HHDL's recieving of the congressional gold medal by whitewashing his former residence. They were beatan, and the monastery was surrounded by the People's Liberation Army. Our group was not allowed to go there. Because of the gold medal a Chinese flag had been posted on top of the Potala palace, usually there is only one on the square in front. More Tibetans had been arrested before we arrived for chanting slogans at a karaoke bar.
Tibet is a hard place. Tibetans and Chinese don't interact, Lhasa is an incredibly segregated city. There is almost no intermarriage. There are police everywhere. Where there aren't uniformed police, there are undercover. Sometimes they are spottable by the way they act, or that they have earpieces. It was very difficult to be in Lhasa by the end, I was very sad.
Sam
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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2 comments:
HEY SAM!
Good to hear from you! Wow, i didn't expect the Tibetan part of your trip to be so distressing. I really thought this would be the highlight of your trip. I am anxious to hear more stories from your time there.
I guess Tibet is not unlike any other place that makes you think life is rosy but underneath the reality shows through.
It will be interesting going back to Dharamsala with this new perspective on Tibetan life and culture.
send me an email!
love mom
Namasté, Sam,
I'm so glad to hear you made it back to India safely! I'm sure being in Tibet for the first time was an incredibly eye-opening experience beyond what you've described here.
Your second paragraph (about issues being way more complicated than one can imagine) exactly sums up how I felt after living in Nepal for a while. We in the developed world like to wave the word "development" around like the holy grail of everything sometimes, but what does it mean? I remember going to a bakery to buy bread made on machines donated by some Japanese governmental NGO. The bread was amazing, but does this really constitute development in a country where the majority of people eat rice twice a day, every day? Just some food for thought (pun intended).
What will you be doing for the next part of your adventure?
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