Little Lhasa: Reflections on Exiled Tibet

Once, when I was in Dharamsala, I found myself in an internet cafe owned by the Namgyal Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, located only a few minutes walk from the Theckchen Choling Monastery. Perched precariously on a ridge, surrounded by the breathtaking Dhauladhar Range, Namgyal Internet Cafe is perhaps the most pleasant place in the world to surf the World Wide Web: brilliant snow-capped peaks towering behind you and a cool fresh breeze that blows in from the valley beyond. In a room next door, separated from the internet cafe by a glass pane, I saw Buddhist monks solemnly taking computer lessons. In the cafe itself, newcomers from Tibet were browsing webzines in Chinese to keep abreast of the developments within their homeland. The lady manager of the cafe was helping an elderly Tibetan lady read an email message from a son based in Cleveland, Ohio. A young Tibetan graduate was checking websites of American universities, one of which she would soon attend as one among a dozen Tibetan Fulbright scholars. As I opened my mailbox and read my mails, it was hard not to think of the days when it took so long for postal letters to arrive.

When on assignment in Taipei, I frequently chatted with my sister on Yahoo. On one such occasion, she suddenly disappeared for about five minutes. When she returned to the chat, she told me that she had gone out to catch a quick glimpse of the Dalai Lama who was returning from an overseas trip.

Such is the astonishing wonder of technology that it often enables one to participate in other people’s experiences in real-time. You can follow the developments and experience the events from afar, on your laptop, regardless of the distance. By connecting me from my office in downtown Taipei to an internet cafe on a hillside in Dharamsala, modern technology has rendered the very meaning of distance obsolete. Irrespective of the location, anyone armed with a broadband connection could virtually reside in an alternative universe of one’s choice.