Flying over Ladakh, the landscape appears bleak, brown and empty across a corrugation of immense, lifeless ranges, so it feels as though we’re landing on the moon.
The Chinese army officer sits on an old jerrycan with a wide nasty smile, legs stretched, cigarette in one hand; the Tibetan translator, bespectacled, moves around with a file blabbering something; the Chinese soldiers all grim faces
Twenty years ago, India went through one of the most traumatic experiences of her modern history. Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, had to order the Indian army to assault the Akal Takht occupied by armed Sikh militants in the Golden Temple complex at Amritsar.
Indians excel in sciences. Is not information technology one of the factors behind giving a terrific shine to India's image abroad? Unfortunately, the same probably cannot be said about Indians' mastery of geography and history, at least as far as the media is concerned.
Over the centuries, countless explorers attempted to enter the spiritual heart of Tibet – Lhasa. Most failed, and many even died in their attempt. The lucky few who managed to see the magnificent Potala palace at the top of the world
Watching George Bush getting his wrist slapped by the Pope reminded me of something, but at first I couldn’t place it. What was it about the way he gazed at the ceiling while he was being told off about Iraq?
My old-man friend refuses to believe that the 'Inji' soldiers could inflict such violence on Iraqi prisoners, simply because as a refugee he has been sponsored all his life by an Inji
Two years after Tibet participated as an independent country in an Asian relations Conference held to discuss the role of Asia in the post-war and post-colonial period, the Communist Chinese declared its intention to 'liberate' Tibet.
Western fictionalization of the East makes for a formidable oeuvre, bearing authorships of such diverse genre and generation as Marco Polo, Rudyard Kipling, EM Forster, George Orwell, James Hilton, and now William M Bueller.
Recently, a Tibet supporter, arguing to get her support-group to drop the goal of Tibetan independence from their charter, was reported to have said: “…the whole Tibetan independence issue is a myth. Even the flag has been copied from the Japanese.”
