Thursday, June 29, 2006 Tibetan Village

Had class, but I guess our class is advanced. That’s weird, considering I don’t study or do any homework and don’t know how to properly structure a sentence, read Hindi script, or recall yesterday’s vocab words. After class I went and ate some lunch, which were puris that were glistening with heart-clogging ghee. That gave me a huge food coma…and when I’m 55, will contribute to my heart attack/triple bypass surgery. Sarah York called me, the first American to call so far (pretty awesome, wifey). Mariel, Alix, Kim, and I walked downtown to the bazaar and caught a taxi to a nearby village called ‘Happy Valley’, which is a Tibetan community established after Chinese people usurped Tibet, kicking out and displacing the most peaceful, harmless people on the planet. Oh Chinese...It was weird; I didn’t see any adults out. The kids were all playing around after getting out of school. There were lots of kids in Western uniforms coming from the large blue school to the candy store, playfield, or home. The Dalai Lama established the school in order to teach the future generations of Tibetans in exile how to return to China to form an independent state. The Tibetans looked more like Asians, than Indians (and by 'Asian' I mean Chinky). The women wore the traditional vested dresses with wool apron, almost what you’d see in the Andes. The signs were all in Tibetan (a more lively and jagged script than Hindi), as well as in Hindi and English. These features provide accurate endorsement of the conception that India is in no way a homogeneous society, but rather a ‘thali’ of different cultures, religions, peoples, ideas, towns, and geography. We passed through a colorful shrine gate that led to the Buddhist temple on the top of a mountain with a view of the green, lush foothills with the rain clouds rolling in. The pathway was indicated with barbed wire and ropes, with colorful cloths inscribed with prayer chants tied on, catching the wind. Then we took a taxi back in the monsoon downpour. Slippery flooding roads, crazy drivers, and 500-foot cliffs are always a perfect combo. We had a meeting with Robert Goldman, the study center director, who just arrived from Delhi. He is an old Jewish man (who wants us to refer to him as Bob-ji) whose expertise is Sanskrit…a 3,000-year-old, dead language.