I’m leaving tomorrow for India with my family. My older daughter will join the TCV Cultural Camp for a month and my younger daughter will be in the Yongling Day School. I’ll keep you all posted on any interesting development that might come up in our exile capital. In the meantime I have posted an [...]

I read this morning that the last living survivor of the Titanic sinking of 1912, Millvina Dean, who was 9 weeks at the time, had died at age 97. I have some “Titanic” related memories of my own but they only go back a decade and have nothing to do with that great ocean liner.

On November 1st 1728, in a meadow on the banks of the Bamari canal, a short distance south-west of the Potala, seventeen Tibetans were put to death by executioners of the Manchu expeditionary force.

About a year ago I was driving my two girls (Namkha and Namtso) to school, early one morning, when the languid voice of Salman Rushdie drifted over on National Public Radio. He was being interviewed about his novel, Shalimar the Clown, which is set in Kashmir. Rushdie’s grandparents, on his mother’s side, were born and [...]

I think I could not do better than  round off the discussion on “Serf Emancipation Day” with the insightful yet refreshingly matter-of-fact observations of  Elliot Sperling on the subject. Professor Sperling studied under the late Taktser Rimpoche and is now the director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana University’s department of Central Eurasian Studies [...]

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Tsering Shakya’s discerning analysis of China’s new Tibet offensive delves into his own childhood memories of such propaganda rituals in sixties Lhasa. Hence we have an authoritative yet entertaining and personal narrative of China’s colonial vision and policies “that denies Tibetan voice and agency.” Tsering Shakya is research chair in religion and contemporary society in [...]

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This Orwellian commemoration appears to be the opening gun in Communist China’s new multi-pronged attack on the resurgence of Tibetan nationalism. To kick of a discussion on this critical development in China’s Tibet strategy I am posting this insightful statement by Dr. Warren Smith (author of Tibetan Nation and China’s Tibet? ) a leading analyst [...]

Dharamsala, March 13 (ANI): Prime Minister of the Tibetan government in exile, Samdhong Rinpoche, has welcomed Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s offer of holding more talks with envoys for the Dalai Lama. Earlier Wen Jiabao accused Western countries of exploiting the Dalai Lama, who is described as a political exile rather than a religious figure. Samdhong [...]

Three years ago I wrote an article which in large part was a commemoration of this year’s 50th anniversary of the March 10th Uprising. Some might feel I jumped the commemoration gun here, but I have, for a long time now, viewed the Khampa Uprising of 1956 as the opening conflict of the Tibetan revolution that culminated in the Lhasa Uprising of 1959.