Apr 2012

I started thinking this afternoon about how much I’d enjoyed today. And I have some free time because I’ve been pretty productive lately. So, as my chemistry-inclined friends would say,

Excitement + Time → Blog post

A chronology:

- Shower. Always a good start. Really enjoying having a geezer (water heater) in my bathroom at the guesthouse.
- Running a little late to make myself oatmeal or sit down for breakfast, so I stop at Lhamo’s Croissants for yesterday’s half-price chocolate croissants. Have a nice chat with the owner, an Amdo Tibetan, about languages that leaves me 10 minutes late.
- Hop in a taxi. Turns out the driver is Kartar, an old friend of Tara-la’s who was the one we called to get us to Amritsar (he sent two co-workers of his with us but charged reasonably and was very nice). Nice conversation there too.
- Get to Sarah. Complete 25 interviews in the day, which added to the 30 I got yesterday, brings me to 55. My goal is between 40 and 600, so I’m set. And there are still two weeks left! More on my research saga later, but suffice it to say it’s going swimmingly.
- Lunch at Sarah (veg and tofu on rice, but better quality than usual. Or I’ve been away for a while), sit with Kelsang, a really wonderful fellow and a classmate’s roommate. At various points in the day, see and/or interview various other Sarah friends.
- Keep interviewing. This afternoon was a “holiday,” so I was gently kicked out by the administrator who wanted to lock up the office.
- Feeling, well, kicked-out, head over to my roommate’s room with the thought of squeezing in another interview. Get him and his roommate, as well as the three friends he ran out to find for me. First he said, “Have you interviewed an Amdowa yet? I’ll get you an Amdowa [brings an Amdowa]. I know! How about a Himalayan [brings two].” After a while, he came back to say, “I asked my other friends, but they already saw you!” He then refused to let me leave without taking some of the treats the students had all been given at the end of the year, which explains the bottle of Indian cola and unidentifiable citrus fruit sitting on my table.
- Run into Palden (Sarah friend) while running for the bus. Don’t get to chat, but I’ll probably see him again. He was one of the three or so roommates who pretty much integrated into our Emory group and was one of the two who even came with us to Amritsar.
- Ride Indian bus, always an adventure. Meet nice fellow from the village of Sarah and ask him for recommendations for a sweets shop in Lower D. He ends up showing me to his favorite place (bonus! It’s clean!), where I get an impressively large box of things for 30 Rs and my new friend buys me a delicious sweet-milk-with-gloppy-stuff thing without my consent before helping me find the right bus to take to McLeod (harder than it sounds).
- Get to guesthouse to find most of my classmates elsewhere or not yet hungry. Go by myself to the good dhaba (where I ran into shoe-fixing-man Sanju the other day) and end up chatting with an eccentric semi-retired British woman who lives mostly in India and travels around Asia when her visa expires.
- Enjoy Indian sweets I picked up in Lower D (with [some] sharing). In retrospect, feel unusually, perhaps excessively social. Write blog post.
- [Note: I wrote this entry yesterday; today, after our weekly group brunch at Illiterati, the café/bookshop where our friend Amber Jade cooks, a bunch of us walked down to Lower D for lassis at Patrick’s favorite place and more sweets from this “sweet” shop. Yum. As someone said, “It’s like taking a half hour walk to India!” which sums up this area pretty well.]

Can you think of any better way to spend a day?

One of our last field trips was to Norbulingka Institute, the Dalai-Lama sponsored school that serves as a training center for the traditional arts and produces the finest thangka paintings, textiles, metal statues, and woodwork in the Tibetan exile community. We arrived, and it was gorgeous—the architect (the same that designed Tara-la’s house…) made the buildings in the Tibetan style but the gardens in his native Japanese tradition:

This little gem is so Tibetan—a water-powered prayer wheel! A

Our first stop was the most impressive—the appliqué thangkas. Each of these takes an insanely long period of time and is made of hundreds of pieces. They’re really expensive, but with reason.

(That's Maitreya, the Buddha of the coming age.)

Our guide showed us the thread—red silk thread wrapped around a horse hair, which gives them strength. In the non-thangka textile section, they substitute the less-traditional fishing wire instead.

(Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha.)

Wood-carving secion! Our guide was slightly less than perfectly helpful, which means I don’t have much to tell you about this secion. They work in pine and teak.

Crosssing campus…

…we came to their temple, in which everything was designed and built/painted by Norbulingka artists, from the 18-foot Buddha statue to the paintings of all the Dalai Lamas on the walls; the last two, since we have photographs of them, were painted in the hyper-realistic style that is beginning to be developed for this sort of occaions:

Also on display: a traditional-format poem written by one of the director-types. I don't know nearly enough Tibetan to understand it, but apparently one can read it in lots of different directions. Tibetan is so cool--this is something you can only do in a language where lots of the semantics happens on the level of the syllable. Some may also provide bonus points.

On the top floor of the temple is a private room reserved for His Holiness when he visits; Sarah College and lots of other institutions have these too. This one we got to visit though!

And this is the staircase to his private meditation room. Seems kinda steep for someone of his age, though maybe since it’s behind closed doors he can use this to practice flying.

View from the roof: lower Dharamsala is just to the left; McLeod is right behind those hills. You can see this place from the Kora route, which is the most outward-projecting part of town. The green roofs belong to “Lower TCV,” a branch of the TCV school system; this one is unique in that most of its students are fee-paying. (TCV is free for refugee, orphaned, and seriously poor Tibetans; others can go to CTA schools for free or pay for private education at someplace like this.) Even though this is about half an hour from McLeod—totally within bussing distance—it’s still a boarding school, which is what most Tibetan parents prefer. Interesting, no?

The crown jewel of Norbulingka is their thangka section.

We had the fortune to visit while they were working on a massive series of thangkas for all 14 Dalai Lamas, with scenes from their lives in the background. (The central deity or other figure in a thangka must adhere to very strict conventions, though the background is more flexible). The Thangka Master himself showed us around, including the piece he himself was working on—one of the four thangkas of the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Can you can pick out the part where he visited the U.S. Capitol?

Some of the detail on the sketch—the snow lions at the top of the image below are supporting His Holiness’ throne.

In another from that series, His Holiness visits Beijing (upper left), the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya (center) and some Indian dignitaries (lower right). The dark blue feet don’t belong to the Dalai Lama but to one of the deities surrounding him; this image is only the bottom-right corner of this thangka. Each one of those people is about two inches tall.

Steady, steady…

An artist contemplates Manjushri on this coral-colored thangka. Thankgas are usually done one white canvas, though sometimes the color of the deity is used—in the store I saw Green Tara and Medicine Buddha (blue) depictions where the skin of the deity was left as the background color; only the clothes were painted on. Black thangkas are also used, usually for wrathful deities like this one, which might be Yamantaka (a wrathful emanation of Manjushri)…

…but sometimes for peaceful ones, like this Thousand-arm Chenrezig:

Instead of making thangkas factory-style, each artist sticks with one from initial sketch through finishing touches for however many weeks or months it takes.

We ended the day by taking up every unused seat in the studio and trying our hand at copying a sketch of a Buddha’s face. Kinda corny, I know, but actually a lot of fun.

So we started with copying the grid…

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and after two hours and some tips from one of the masters on how to draw the eyes, here’s what I made! Everyone’s were really impressive.

Easter happens in India too! It was the Easter of things people have never done before.

The new things started before Easter itself, with a Passover Seder at a new restaurant owned by some friends of the program. Out of the sixteen of us, three staff, one alum who lives in town, and half a dozen camp followers and associated hangers-on, I’m pretty sure six were actually Jewish. This being India, wheat crackers stood in for matzo and various other substitutions were made throughout the meal that I largely didn’t notice because this was (embarrassingly) my first Passover experience. But it counts, and was quite a bit of fun. I had the fortune to sit next to Amalia Rubin, a program alum who’s been living among Tibetans ever since, working as a translator and remarkably successful Tibetan pop star on both sides of the border, though after some time in Chinese prison has been living in India.

In case you’re in town, the restaurant is called Illiterati, and it’s halfway to Gangkyi. The cook is Belgian and has a secret family waffle recipe, and let’s just say it shows..

Following up my first Passover service, I thought it appropriate to attend my first Easter service as well, which meant going to St. John’s in the Wilderness Church, a relic of British rule about a fifteen minute walk outside of town. Lord Elgin is buried out back.

The service itself seemed fine, though my only basis for comparison was the hyped stories I’d heard of the glories of Easter Vigils in the Catholic Church—so I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by this relatively informal protestant service for an hour or so on a Sunday morning. What an interesting group of people, though! The service was entirely in English (there may have been a separate Hindi service for the other half of the congregation) and the audience was a microcosm of the Dharamsala community: about half Indians, some scattered Tibetans, a handful of East Asian folks, and some lost-looking Westerners. The main sermon was given by a tall, late-twenties, intensely friendly seeming fellow from Denver who spoke in what felt like a US-evangelical-protestant style, while the Indian priest (who spoke good English) only popped up for a short benediction. I noticed the guy from Denver had brought with him two of the young locals who’d tried to convince me to give them money.

I skipped out on the (Indian-food) outdoor lunch to head down to Tara-la’s house for our Easter party! Will and Lindsey had blown out, dyed, and hidden something like sixty eggs and some candy in and around the (gorgeous) garden, of which we found most. It was really fun to watch a few Jews, Tibetans, and a monk hunt on their first Easter Egg Hunt.