A Goodbye to the Junior Rooftop of the World

To impregnate an idea of these people, I always return to my favorite and very vidid memory in Dharamsala: At the end of a string of performances at a celebration for the Dalai Lama's Nobel anniversary, I was sitting with my camera, waiting for the crowds to clear, when I received a slap on the back. Thinking it was Danny, I turned around, only to receive a sharper slap on my cheek. Not quite painful, but not quite pleasant, my grimace turned to a smile when I saw the culprit. The 80-something-year old woman giggled herself into delight, a completely toothless yet beaming smile spread across her face as she looked back at me and hobbled away on a cane, two long dark braids laid neatly against her back, interwoven with the typical red ribbon. So random, so telling, so comforting and quite funny. I still don't understand why, but it was something joyous. I relish it still.

Rooftop of the world is what they call Tibet, the highest country on the globe. Had I known how fully I would fall in love with Tibetans, maybe our journey would have been there instead of India. I never expected when coming to this country to spend so much time in non-Tibet Tibet, otherwise known as Dharamsala, India, home of the Tibetan government-in-exile and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. McLeod Ganj specifically is the small Himalayan town where more than half the demographic is Tibetan, and we found ourselves inexplicably unable to pull ourselves away for nearly 7 weeks, even throughout some days of extreme boredom.

Some differences were tangible, others were harder to identify. Being against a breath-taking landscape helps the sense of sanity, and the ruralness brings about a sense of calm. Now being back in "the rest" of India, I of course appreciate more what I was already very aware of appreciating then. The people, the culture, the spacial layout of a very real energy...it all shifts enormously in Dharamsala. Social conduct seems, from a western perspective, quite simply sane. Personal space is not a foreign notion. People understand "no, thanks." But much more unique is simply the beaming happiness and curiosity that radiates from Tibetans. It's contagious and invigorating. Every conversation with a Tibetan, whether layperson or monk or nun (which constitutes a huge part of the population) left me with a sense of awe and gratitude for the experience. And while this is not impossible throughout the "other" India, most conversations here tend more to veer toward the feeling of bashing your head against an impenetrable wall of concrete. Which smells like a urinal. Even in any given situation with a vast language barrier, I was able to communicate easier with Tibetans with sign and body language and facial expressions than some fluent English-Indian conversations I've had, where the barrier is not language, but something harder to understand: social norms, cultural differences, and truth, which is so often disguised and buried in Indian culture.

I'm not sure what it is that makes the divide between Tibetans and Indians so great...upon first arrival to India, I thought it was just the mindset of a westerner that clashes so horribly here. Yet a couple hundred miles north and even further east, pocketed in one of the most stunning landscapes in the world, is Tibet, brimming with a people and culture that defies what I thought might be "geographical thinking" differences. Religion of course could play a role. The simplicity and truth of Buddhism could be considered more straight-forward to follow than Hinduism's hundreds of meanderings, though both are extremely complex. Or it could be the unity and sense of empowerment that so obviously comes from the Dalai Lama, who gives the people something to live and fight for (at least those outside of Tibet; stories of Tibetans in Tibet facing depression and losing hope under China are common). But whatever the reason, the many dozens of Tibetans I had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with, both escaped (some very recent) and Indian-born, and getting to know some quite comfortably, just move through life like glowing orbs of joy and smiles, humility and generosity.

We were fortunate enough to stay in Dharamsala long enough to get more than a few glimpses and hear the teachings of the Dalai Lama, who arrived one week before we left. While the lectures were largely over our heads in complexity and Buddhist understanding, I was able to follow pieces when I really focused myself (with my FM-radio translation in my ear). The atmosphere alone, however, was worth the stay. To see His Holiness in his own space, his adopted homeland, leaves a mark on your memory. During the lectures, we placed ourselves strategically in the midst of hundreds of monks, with a good view of the beaming face of the head honcho. I would have had to be made of wood not to feel the reverence of the people surrounding us, and it was not difficult to be swept up in the motion of their chanting. It served, at the end of our time in Dharamsala, as the culmination of understanding. Though we're infinitely far from being anything close to experts, it's something amazing to have everything you've learned throughout the past month click into place with such ease. As early as the Dalai Lama's arrival- the mere act of bowing from the passenger seat of the car, following the temple's driveway to his residence- it all fell together in a way that no second-hand explanation could convey to us. While every Tibetan resident lined to street to wait for him, with streams of smoke weaving up through the crowd from burning incense, I understood the enormity of the symbiotic relationship I was witnessing, and how they are utterly inseparable, Tibetan people and His Holiness. They're quite simply a powerful circle and they keep the other going in the face of what many people call the cultural genocide China is conducting.

Simply summed up, I will leave India (in 1 month now) with the unexpected pleasure of visiting this place. It is not Tibet in all its essence- it is something different in its location and its freedom, and Tibet I hope to experience sometime in the future- but it is unique gift to the world. I expect to continue to miss it until I return someday.



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