Oh God ...

..save me.

Spiti bound

Leaving Shimla from the Rivoli bus stand , August 29th.

Rivoli bus stand , Shimla

Escape from Manju ka Tilla

Once again I sit down in the square in the front of the the two small temples , thinking this is .. well , not great , but it works. Then I put my hands on my knees , and afterwards the pants are not wet , but soaked. Time to get out of the monsoon.

On the night train to Kalka (camera bag under my head, backpack under my knees ) I pick up Kim Robinson's Escape from Kathmandu , a minor guesthouse libarary classic.

A standard theme in boks from Nepal and Tibet is time travel : moving in to another age on a commercial flight. The time travel picks up another dimension when the now in the book also represents another age.

It starts with a ... letter. Gather around my feet little ones , and I'll tell you of a fara away time when we sent pieces of paper to each other. I was there , and I also was in Nepal just before the book was written : a time of innocence when you could point the finger and laugh at the theatrical aspects of the royal power , before the long dirty war between the government and the Maoists.Timewarp has moved Nepal ahead of my home in some respects : there is a lot more software produced in Kathmandu than in Stockholm , and Nepal today has stripped the king of ceremonial powers beyond our constitution : our king can't be brought to court.

At the same time the life along the trail has not changed much since early eighties, and many of Robinson's one-liners survive well , like the one about flying with (formerly Roayal Nepal) Airlines : In Nepal , clouds have rocks in them. It is written at the breaking point of our innocence , at the time when you start to to wonder of the life banana pancake baker , and step in to the kitchen.

This sounds really serious , which is far from the truth . It's a grea romp ,with a supporting cast to match : Jimmy Carter (former american president) , Tsongkhapa ( founder of Gelugpa school of Buddhism ) , pot-smoking Secret Service-men , Ang Rita ( twelwe time successfull climber of Mount Everest) . And of course a Yeti named Buddha ..

--
Nice walk with Sally from Oz in the morning , playing guide , and a nice dinner in the White House with Jamyang , Tsering and little Tenzing , who treated me with a first review of the new Milarepa film. Will pick up a copy in Manju before leaving , hopefully also Angry Monk , the film about Gedun Chopel.

Re-united ...

at last with my backpack , that never left Helsinki.

37 degrees and - obviously - humid on landing , but feels less. Quick shower and drying under the ceiling fan.

Lots of food (shabalay , momos, phing) and lots of languages in the dining room of Wongdhen House : English , Tibetan , Nepali and French to start with.

Thenthuk in the small square outside the temples , this year with awnings. Communal dining area , prayer chantings and kids just running and screaming. No photos taken , people made me feel invited and after that it stayed down . The kids took some photograhs though.

Todays Tibetan word : Tinda ! Look !

Linux and sutras

Everybody loves seeing monks with computers.In a small net cafe in Manju ka Tilla , the Tibetan enclave in Delhi , I regularly met three young guys with shaved heads : two young monks and cyber wallah in charge of the place , with a multi colored mohawk hairdo . The place was cramped , the keyboards more or less worn out ... and hanging down at angle was a large portrait of Dalai Lama , framed with multi colored blinking LED´s.
The titillation of seeing Buddhists monks in this role lies in an assumed transgression : men or women of the cloth should remain isolated from the world of technology.

In The Argumentative Indian Amartya Sen raises an interesting contrasting view to this , high lighting the early Buddhists role as technological ground breakers. Book printing is obviously one of the greatest leaps forward in transmitting knowledge and ideas , and Indian and Chinese Buddhists had a key role in disseminating this technique : in fact the first dated printed book is the Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang. It was the Internet of it´s time : slow but hip , and in no way restricted to religious themes - the Himalayas were crossed in both directions carrying the latest landbreaks in astronomy , medicine and technology.

And in keeping with the Internet analogy , the Diamond Sutra echoed eerily of Linux terminology : "free and for universal distribution" as it says in the prologue .
Buddhists we´re involved the earliest book printing ventures in India , Japan , China and Korea. One could choose to see this as a co-incidental interest in material technology - or as an expression of the underlying social technique : printing became an extension of the public debate that from the beginning was a central feature in Buddhism .

As Sen point out , when Ashoka arranged the first known public debates between different religions (at the same time time as the Catholic church had Giordano Bruno burned at the stake ) , they had a couple of centuries of the great Buddhist councils to lean on.

Sen points out this tradition as a quintessential Indian quality , that explains some of the unique qualities of Indian democracy : the only Asian country I can think of where the Army has remained consistently uninterested in wresting the power from the elected governments . This tradition predates Buddhism , like the one line from the Mahabharata that has gained foothold in many Western minds : I am become death , the destroyer of worlds..

When Robert Oppenheimer (a truly cultured man , who had read the Mahabharata in the original Sanskrit) used these words to describe his anguish in seeing the end result of his work , the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb , he fixed one side of the epic debate between warrior Arjuna , who at first refused doing the unthinkable and Krishna who in the end literally drove him out to the battle. Most in the West seems not to remember that final outcome , but Arjuna´s voice is still a living , working cry resisting the horrors of the war.

In the same way , Sen shows , the Vedas contain a multitude of voices , that gives unexpected firepower to unexpected standpoints : an complete agnostic tradition , women speaking out against male power structures, Brahmins being descibed as con artists..
Even though the Krishnas so to say won in these conflicts , they never made their opponents invisible , and we can pickup their side of the debate to day.

In comparison , much of Christian literature gives about as much depth to their societies inner conflicts as statements from the old Communist party conferences.

Photo from the Asian Classics Input Program , www.asianclassics.org here in the process of transferring woodblock prints to hard drives in the library of Diskit Monastery , NUbra
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Windstruck

.. as I return home in the early morning. Temperature has dropped 15 degrees in a single day , the trees are shaking as if they are trying to uproot themselves and walk away. A welcome relief to last week´s malarial ennui.

And a good day for planning travel. Can´t resist swiping this from Mridula´s blog :

Recharging..

Manali-Leh Highway : Keylong-Sarchu

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Manali-Leh Highway : along Chandra River & up to Keylong

Manali-Leh Highway : over the Rothang La

:description to follow

New, old book

Long wait , in two senses : I looked for this story a long time ago , and gave it up when all I could find was long out of print German editions. Recently I found it in English , on a UK site , ordered it ... and waited three times longer than I´m used to from my Delhi bookshop.

Peter Aufschnaiter had in my mind become a sort of vaguely glimpsed counter image of Heinrich Harrer in Tibet : a man more interested in living his life with Tibetans , than boosting his own self image. ( Dalai Lama´s tutor , my foot ..)

And living, in the intimate sense , with a Tibetan woman which becomes a interesting point as I start in to the book : nothing to be found on this in the biographical notes.

Where did get this notion ? From the film ( where Harrer visits Aufschnaiter and his wife ) , or from Seven Years in Tibet ? More importantly , why do I think I "know" things like this without tagging the source ? Is my world view determined by Hollywood representations ?
Doh , I live in the Western/Northern hemisphere , of course it is to some degree . But not being aware of it is bad news.

Digging in to it : fresh reprint from a publishing house in Bangkok, with a different , lemony smell. I had smallexpectations from this cheaper reprint ... and then I find the back card board pocket for the map of Lhasa . Aaaah... loving attention to details speaking here, and in the drawings . Photographs , with that eerie detached innocence in the onlookers before the media age. A love of nature , and a cultured perspective , with quotes from Milarepa linked to what he sees today/yesterday.

Skövde skit

Synchronicity : as the restaurant car rolls in to Skövde Railway station the cast of Lagaan ( nice clip here )erupts in to the first dance number on the parched Indian earth. At exactly the same time three pale young girls , no bangles but a lot of rivets , safety needles etc. start in to a skit , in a rhytm eerily synchronized to the film.Dry snow and and a creaking ice crust under their feet.

Returning from "equatorial" Sweden and film festival. One opening sequence haunts me : Malalai Joya , a woman from western Afghanistan challenges the warlords in new, forming Parliament : " I speak for the dead and the martyrs , you have blood on your hands and should not be allowed in this assembly, you should be tried as war criminals" . She has bodyguards , lots of them.

tranda

Suddenly..

..everyone speaks Swedish. I go from struggling to understand what people are saying , to struggling to understand what they are doing.

Along the way :
arrriving latish in Delhi. Traffic clogged on the way to Manju ka Tilla. The taxi radio endlessly blaring "control calling". Control orders, pleads, cajoles.. seemingly to no effect. A guy called Prakash as a message waiting ; in the end I also start to get miffed at him.

In Munich , the safety inspector has started to smile even before I come up to the X-ray machine. Passing thru her mahine and hands, the basic unassorted stuff of my trip :
*heavy walking boots
*khataks - offering scarfes
*compass
*guide book and map in a Tibetan silk slip case
*incense
*harddrive
*tsa tsa-amulets

..she can´t hold back her laughter.

Sorry, no way.

not exactly the response I was going for when turning over my passport at the border post in Zhangmu. The group splitted in Lhasa , the tour group visa original was supposed to be at the border... no .
After being shuffled around for an hour , there is response from the agency in Lhasa : "oh , the visa , we left it (hold on to your hats ) in the chai shop" .
The Chinese guards almost smile when we leave.

tashilunpo

Vanishing act

Arrival in Shigatse.I go out for lunch ,and wind upin a small zakhang on the street leadingdown from Tashilunpo monastery. The more or less standard panoramic shot of Lhasa is pointed out to me and I go yes , Kyi Chu , Tsuglhakhang (Jokhang to the westerners) and Sera .. making a quiet inner note to my self : yes that , would be Drapchi,the infamous political prison in between. We find Ganden together .
The daughter in the family sits down and takes my hand , strokes the back ofmy hand and puts her hand next to it: loook...
After a bit of struggling, using the name for the Lhasa river ,I manage to come up with a new phrase : kyipa du ,I am happy.
We watch a VCD (on the TV covered with a khatak) from Lhabrang Monastery in Amdo , with stuning scenery and even more stunning butter statues. Leaving I get ten Yuan change back for my 15 Yuan meal on a twenty.. and small gifts.
Morning kora next day: long line of locals , Khampas and Amdowas walking ,praying, stoking the sang burners, sitting queitly in more or less organised meditation.Walking with camera in my left hand , keeping the right one free for the prayer wheels. At one point one woman turns around with a wordless question as I am taking some photographs.. and turns around to enthusiasm as she gets to see the pictures.
Inside the monastery there is a lotof pictures of the 9th Panchen Lama ( the most popular on the streets is with him sitting on a horse in frontof Tashilunpo, with a white touris bus in the background) some of the 8th... and a bare minimum of the Chinese -installed 10th, always with a conspicous absence ofofferings. Soft resistance.

Off again ...

the jeeps making an endless trail of dust in the early sunlight , meeting the blue smoke from the incense burners and the backlit prayer flags. A couple of klicks from Yamdrok Tso we hit the tarmac again : a surreal feeling of floating. Close to two hours following the circular lake : golden yellow marshes by the rim, an impossibly deep turqoise color and on the other side russet browns , violet .. topped by the white cone of Nechen Kang, around seven thousand meters.
Over Kamba La , the last 5000 + pass.

In Gyantse

...just now , but unable to see my blog from here. Will post more when I know it actually lands somewhere...