"Namkha Jhida, Bird-chaser" by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong

I am posting a translation. I actually translated this a while ago, in May, for an informal Tibetan writers’ gathering that was hosted at Latse Library, but didn’t get to put it up before. The piece itself is an old piece about an episode in his childhood, by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong, but it’s hilarious and vividly written. Dhondup Tashi Rekjong is editor of Tibet Web Digest and Karkhung, a new site that translates pieces from English and Chinese into Tibetan. He is former editor of Khabdha, the most popular Tibetan language blog in exile.

NAMKHA JHIDA, BIRD-CHASER by Dhondup Tashi Rekjong

Namkha Jhida was my friend, my childhood friend. When I was young, every time I went home for my summer holidays, I would go bird-chasing with Namkha Jhida. It has now been more than ten years since I last saw Namkha Jhida but these childhood memories are still fresh in my mind. Namkha Jhida's real name is Namkha Tsering, and family and friends used to call him Namkha. The people in our village called him Namkha Jhida, Bird-chaser, because he loved chasing birds.

The village kids also loved chasing birds. During summer holidays I would go home to the village with my father, and most of my summer vacation would be spent chasing birds. I would spend all day with Namkha Jhida chasing after birds, and some days we wouldn't catch even a single bird. Sometimes running after the birds, we would leave footprints all over other people's fields. When the owners saw this, they would tell our parents, and we would get a beating from our parents. In those days, we would get a beating like that every one or two days.

If, we caught many baby birds in a day, we would divide the baby birds amongst ourselves. Namkha Jhida was always our leader. During our bird chasing expeditions, everyone listened to his orders. After we had caught the birds, he would pick the best baby bird. After that, we would take our picks. Carrying a baby bird in our hands, we would go back home. Before reaching home, we would hide the bird somewhere near the house, sometimes under a hedge bush. The next morning, usually the bird would be dead. I think now that when we were young, we earned a lot of bad karma.

One day, we went with Namkha Jhida to chase birds. Namkha Jhida carried a long rope in his hands. We came to a small cliff:  we knew that there was a bird’s nest up there. But we had never found it. That day, Namkha Jhida said, "Today we will empty this nest." We all agreed. But we couldn't decide on who was going to climb the cliff. We talked about it. But no one volunteered to climb the cliff. We all looked at Namkha Jhida. We all wanted him to climb the cliff. Finally, Namkha Jhida said he would climb the cliff.

We went to the top of the cliff. We tied the rope around Namkha Jhida's waist. There were six of us. Three of us held the end of the rope. Very slowly, we lowered Namkha Jhida down the face of the cliff. Two kids went to the bottom of the cliff. If Namkha Jhida were to fall, these two would catch him. Three of us held on tightly to the end of the rope. The two friends at the bottom of the cliff yelled out, "Lower the rope a bit more." So we slowly lowered a bit more rope. They said, "Lower the rope a little bit more, he is almost at the nest." Again, we let out some more rope from our hands. We yelled out, "Is that okay? Is he at the nest?" "Lower the rope a little more," they said. "Oh, I got it, I got it," Namkha Jhidha started yelling. All of a sudden, the rope slipped out from the hands of the kid at the end. Namkha Jihda's body began pulling at my friend and me.

The two of us screamed, "Namkha fell" and let the rope slip from our hands. Our friends at the bottom of the cliff cried out. We ran to the bottom. We were all very frightened. Namkha cried out, "Shit, shit, shit" while rubbing his butt. He said to my other friend, "You were the one who let go of the rope." My friend said, "No it wasn't me, it was him." We started quarreling about who had let go of the rope. Our quarrel grew. It grew and then turned into a fight.

Namkha Jhida became incensed and said, "Shit, why are you fighting? From tomorrow, don’t follow me anymore. No more baby birds for any of you. As your punishment for today, each of you has to catch and bring me two baby birds." We stopped our quarreling and fighting. Then, without any baby birds in our hands, we silently went back home.

Originally published on Khabdha.com in March 2010.

http://www.khabdha.org/?p=7000#more-7000

YAK HORNS LAUNCHES

Sunday, July 15^th, saw the launch of my friend Bhuchung D Sonam’s new book Yak Horns: Notes on Contemporary Tibetan Writing, Music, Film & Politics at Jimmy’s Italian Kitchen in the center of McLeod Ganj. There was a reading also, and a few days before the launch, I got a call from Bhuchung and Tsundue inviting me to read, which I was tremendously joyful about. It was going to be BDS, Tsundue, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and me—It was a luminous triangle and I didn’t really fit but BDS shoved me in, and I was excited and grateful.

The day of, I was on Facebook and saw a poster for the event—nicely designed with the beautiful book jacket and wait, what’s this—reading and discussion? Whaa? I called BDS and Tsundue in a consuming panic and they were both so casual and calm about it: “It’s a completely informal discussion, nothing to worry about, it’s just talking” and I was thinking, yeah nothing to worry about for you guys because you are constantly on stage and giving interviews and used to talking and thinking on cue but I have to know what I am thinking about beforehand because I don’t know what I am thinking until I am thinking it, privately, not publicly!

But the event, moderated by Dechen Pemba of High Peaks Pure Earth, actually went really well—the organization, seemingly on the fly, fell into place seamlessly (there was even a poppy seed cake to welcome Yak Horns into the world). The sound needed a bit of tweaking in the beginning, but that was eventually fixed. And there was a full house crowd, attesting to Bhuchung’s popularity in this town and possibly also the fact that there’s a ready population of the young and the restless in Dharamsala, supplemented by the seeking tourist, always on the lookout for a new gathering, a new restaurant, a new contact, a new angle, a new relationship.

Photo: Kunsang Kelden                                                                           Bhuchung D Sonam at far right

Bhuchung explained that he called the book Yak Horns because when he was growing up in Tibet (and what does that feel like, starting a sentence with those words-when I was growing up in Tibet…) parents gave their kids cut-off yak horns to suck on as “jibdo”, so a yak horn is something that is a very familiar and intimate reminder of home. He said he wrote this collection for two reasons: to provide the Tibetan voice which is often missing or muted, compared to the other non-Tibetan voices pronouncing judgement; and to have a bridge between the community at home and in the diaspora.

I have been picking at the book but haven’t yet had the time to really sit down with it, but it has got a gorgeous cover and just looks beautiful, and I was hooked with the opening piece “Exile is a Lonely Pen”, an essay on exile and writing.. The book is primarily a collection of criticism-- criticism being the one really important thing that’s been almost entirely lacking in our modern literature. Has anything been created until it’s been reviewed? So the talented Bhuchung D Sonam is doing Tibetans a great service, and as a friend as well as a fan, it’s great to see BDS the critic as well as BDS the writer get official between the covers.

DELHI

This was years and years and years ago. I am not sure where we were going-probably either Kathmandu to visit my mother’s relatives or to Varanasi for a Kalachakra teaching. I have a vivid memory of coming out of a station in Delhi and then all of us, my parents and brother and me, piling onto a horse cart with all our luggage, our bags and tea thermoses and even a rather large and unwieldy travelling kumbali (blanket). It was probably not my first time in a horse buggy, but for some reason that ride stayed with me—the startled eyes focused by blinkers, the clip clop of the horse’s shoes striking the curving paved road as we came out of an underpass, the whip lash across heaving shoulders even though the poor animal was straining with all his strength.

The horse buggies are nowhere to be seen now. These days the transportation of choice is the metro, a silent sparkling thing that puts the screeching boxcars of the New York subway to shame. The authorities are serious about keeping the metro safe, secure and spit-free; there are metal detectors, men with rifles and signs everywhere that anyone caught spitting has to pay a Rs. 200 fine. Although honestly, something I have long thought more noxious than spitting? Ball scratching. Where’s the fine for that? Here’s a sign I would like to see: No private scratching in public!

So anyway, Delhi. Delhi Delhi Delhi. I have passed through Delhi many times over the years, most recently two years ago, but I haven’t really ever seen Delhi. I do the obligatory trip to Connaught Place and Janpath and otherwise stay tucked away in the narrow gullys and stacked hotels in the Tibetan colony (kaloni!) of Majnukatilla on the outskirts of the city. If I go out at all, I am always anxious that my bag or my wallet is going to be lifted. Cities have a way of putting you on the defensive. Delhi, too large and sprawling and hot, always defeats me. But this time actually I managed to see a couple of other places that were new, to me at any rate.

First I hung out in a Khan Market café for a couple of hours with a friend from school. Called the Café Turtle, a coffee shop on top of a bookstore, the place could have been any coffee shop in Cambridge. Either Cambridge. The café was green and lime yellow, with small round marble-topped tables and photographs of Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gilliespie and B.B. King on the wall. Our hangout included lots of laptop time, a special bookstore purchase, haircuts and lunch. After this, before returning home, I thought I should go to India Gate because it was shamefully nearby and I had never yet been.

India Gate was kind of magnificent. It’s very tall, quite simple and quite imposing. Designed by British architect Edwin Lutyens, it is a memorial to India’s war dead. It’s always such a sad thing looking at memorials, essentially graves. I have never seen the Vietnam War Memorial in real life but even just looking at photos of that memorial brings a lump to my throat. Maya Lin knew what she was about. Lutyens had names of the fallen soldiers inscribed all over the massive marble facades of the Gate. Most of the names were too high up but from what I could read, I saw a lot of Singhs and Khans.

Here’s the inscription on the gate:

To the dead of the Indian armies who fell and are honored in France and Flanders Mesopotamia and Persia East Africa Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are here recorded and who fell in India on the North West Frontier and during the Third Afghan War

I thought of all of our dead, who never had a chance to be honored. Or even acknowledged.

Then I walked along the Rajpath from India Gate to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President’s House, also designed by Lutyens. (Right before India’s independence.) The long straight road with a walkway of red earth and a green lawn on each side reminded me a lot of the mall in Washington (although not so much all the corn cobs and the ice cream sticks littering the grass).

The Rashtrapati Bhavan, when I got there (in what definitely felt longer than the 15 minutes that the ice cream vendor claimed), was still disappointingly far in the distance behind iron gates. I got a good look at its garden though, with two hedge carved elephants that I thought at first were misshapen camels or dinosaurs.

Between India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan, a small funny thing happened. As I didn’t have my camera with me, I let myself be corralled by one of the boys trying to sell tourists photos of them with their fingertips holding the top of India Gate. I want a photo of just the Gate, without me, I said. Rs. 30. Then I had to wait while the boy went off to print the photo from a printer conveniently located under a tree some 15 feet away. Who knows how the cables worked.

When the kid came back, he suggested that I go sit in the park with him. I guess it was an obligatory pick-up on his part as a) I was female b) I was a tourist and c) I was alone. Since there were swarms and swarms of people all around us, and he was as short as me and looked about 16, I humored him.

We walked to the park and sat down. I wanted to hear his story, but first things first.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“20,” he said. “How old are you?”

“28,” I said. “I am your older sister (didi).”

His eyes went wide and shifty. Then he pointed to the sun, hanging perfectly high in the sky, and said, “If you want to see Rashtrapati Bhavan, you better go before it gets too dark.”

The Things I Carried

From New York to Delhi and Dharamsala, by other people for other people. (Nothing to do with Vietnam!)

-3 envelopes variously filled with cash amounting to $5000 (already delivered, fyi, for any interested parties and no longer to be found on my person or in my luggage but you might try Ladakh Bud Vihara!)

-A big plastic bottle of multivitamins and packets of chicken bullion cubes (which cubes, why yes, can also be found in India)

-A pair of snow boots with T-shirts stuffed in the shoes (from my friend for his mother who lives in Dharamsala where it does not snow)

-1 envelope of $200, Proactive facewash and Uniqlo shirts and socks

-1 iPhone boxed with a $100 taped to the side (the iPhone not being gift enough)

I am obviously not listing the things which my mother sent for relatives and the stuff that I brought for people and the stuff I brought for myself.

You know how it is. Tibetans have lived for a long time in India or in Nepal, where the postal system used to be unreliable, and the only sure way to get something to someone was to send it through someone. And now the post is reliable but Tibetans still prefer to send parcels through personal courier –which happens to be any friend of a friend of a friend—rather than the post. What do we have against the post? Are we bad at packing parcels? Is the gift more special when carried by a person from the community? Is it laziness, economizing and habit?

For my mom, the US postal system barely exists except as a conduit for bills. She has an inherent distrust of the postal system, and willfully ignores it. I tell her my friend sent me something from DC and she says, with who? Worst offender that she is, she once sent my aunt in Kathmandu a sack of apples through some guy who was going to Nepal. A sack of apples from India to Nepal! Sure Kullu Manali apples are famous. But! It’s probably her postal karma that I am now paying for.

Apologia

Erm... I have not been updating Yuthok Lane, and apologize to my friend(s) haphazardly following this blog. I started this blog while I was working—as a reason, an excuse or a prompter for writing really. But after I started my MFA in September I had so much reading and writing for school that I no longer kept up my non-school writings and allowed my blog to fall by the wayside. Which was regretful. And embarrassing. In fact throughout these past many months, I kept intending to disrupt this hiatus and put up a post, and now that summer is upon me, I will do it! As there will soon be time and also travelling!

The Great Debaters

(at Asia Society)

A random piece I wrote a while ago reflecting on Geshe Thupten Jinpa’s and Daniel Purdue’s talk at Asia Society on the Tibetan Debate Tradition. It’s incomplete but as it’s just languishing on my laptop, I figured it’s better to just put it up as it is.

On April 29, 2011, Geshe Thupten Jinpa, official interpreter for His Holiness and the founder and president of Institute of Tibetan Classics in Montreal, and Daniel Purdue, the author of Debate in Tibetan Buddhism, gave a talk on the Tibetan debate tradition at Asia Society. It was fascinating and my friends and I just sat thrilled through the whole talk. I just didn’t know much about this tradition at all, except that it’s a Socratic system where you try to arrive at the truth through reasoning and that the person on the ground, answering to his opponent’s questions, only has a choice of four answers. And it seemed particularly poor not to know much about the debate tradition, because it is the primary mode of critical inquiry in the primary institutions of learning in Tibet – the monasteries.

So apparently the Tibetan debate tradition came from the Indian. In fact, it was really just constructed by one man, Charpa Choje, in the 12^th century at Sangpu Monastery, who took Dharmakirti’s Pramanavartika and extracted and adapted the form of debate, including the very specific debating language.

And I don’t know because the speakers didn’t directly speak about this, but it seemed to me like since then there really hasn’t been many upgrades to this form and it has sort of carried on, this very structured, arcane language, without many changes which is one big reason that I certainly can’t understand any debate that goes on in a debating courtyard. Another of course is that a lot of the debating is done by Kham and Amdo monks whose unfamiliar accent is coupled with the specific debate language, and they might as well be speaking Esperanto.

Actually seeing Thupten Jinpa with Daniel Purdue (after the talks and before the Q&A, they staged a display of debate in English!), that was the first that I have ever been able to see the process, and I was awed and amazed because it is really $%##&(*@ awesome! It was like the Socratic dialogues, which usually start with Socrates picking a poor guy, asking a simple harmless question, asking a follow-up question to his answer, probing deeper into his answer and gradually just taking this guy apart in the most reasonable, mild and brilliant display of intelligence - well that was what Thupten Jinpa’s debate with Daniel Purdue was like.

They decided for Thupten Jinpa to take the challenger’s position and so he asked Daniel Purdue if compassion and justice were the same. DP said, no, not necessarily and it went on from there. I wish I remembered the specific twists and turns and counter turns in the argument but my memory fails.

It was like chess, but with words instead of chess pieces, so that much more challenging. Imagine if Gary Kasparov had to announce his moves instead of actually making them, where they can be tracked, on the chess board. It’s the ultimate mental exercise.

It was just wonderful. And I was seeing this debate conducted in English, not in the home tongue of the Tibetan debate, Tibetan, in which the arguments would flow that much smoother, being assisted by built-in linguistic props and tools. A fierce debate in Tibetan must be that much more intimidating and awe-inspiring.

* An info sheet prepared by Daniel Purdue on Tibetan debate can be found here http://asiasociety.org/countries/traditions/tibetan-buddhist-debate?order=ASC

Tibetan Fish Curry: My Take on Groupon's Tibet Ad

I saw the Groupon Tibet ad online the night of the Superbowl, Sunday night a couple of weeks ago. The thirty second ad started with a shot of the Potala and went:

“Mountainous Tibet, one of the most beautiful places in the world.

This is Timothy Hutton. The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture is in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And since two hundred of us bought at groupon.com, we are getting thirty dollars worth of Tibetan food for just thirteen dollars at Himalayan restaurant in Chicago.”

What a weird, strange ad, I thought. Tibetans don’t eat fish curry, and that Himalayan restaurant looks Indian, and that supposedly Tibetan guy looks Nepalese or Sikkimese and also constipated.

So I was bemused and I was confused because I thought, “This cannot be the Superbowl ad.” The ad didn’t look like a $3 million dollar ad. The ad looked, frankly, a bit cheap. And I don’t cheap in the sense of “This belittles the Tibet issue” because I don’t think it did that but cheap in the sense of “This can’t have cost anything to make”. Why would you pay so much to sell something that doesn’t look very expensive? 

But I was not offended and I was not outraged. If anything, I was just a little bit excited that a Groupon ad featured Tibet. And a little bit awed that Groupon didn’t sugarcoat the opening lines to suit the Chinese palate: “The people of Tibet are in trouble; their very culture is in jeopardy.”

In Tibet circles, this is a big deal. It’s huge. A company had the conscience and courage to say something where even governments sit silent for fear of offending China.

But the next morning and the following days, I saw the media (social, political, commercial) tearing the ad to shreds. These were some of the headlines that came out:

Groupon-Tibet: Clever Ad or Crass Commercialism? from CNN

Groupon’s Gaffe from Chicago Tribune

When Edgy Goes Overboard from Politics Daily

Groupon Offends With Tibet-Themed Superbowl Ad from Forbes

The avalanche of criticism to the Groupon Tibet ad can be boiled down to this: that Groupon was turning the suffering of the Tibetan people into a way of making a buck, that they were “insensitive” to the “real crisis” in Tibet.

The show of support, the moral outrage on behalf of the Tibetan people and the Tibetan issue, was overwhelming, humbling and inspiring. I have no doubt that for so many people, it was an issue of principle. They must have felt like they were standing up for Tibetans.

But was the outrage really necessary? After all, Groupon’s heart was in the right place and they were not only acknowledging that Tibetans have a problem, but also offering people a way to help by donating to an NGO that helps Tibetans.

I wondered if the fact that Groupon was a more manageable and less vengeful target than the Chinese Communist Party had anything to do with the enthusiasm of the outrage; if Tibet supporters were unconsciously heartened and relieved to have a more human target than the totalitarian Cyborg machine that is the CCP.

I noticed that my fellow Tibetans’ reaction was quite different from the reaction of non-Tibetans. Far from being upset or insulted, they were just happy that a Superbowl ad mentioned Tibet. They were a bit confused about the slightly schizophrenic nature of the ad, and thought it could have been done better, but overall they were happy with the ad.

And they were all surprised at the reaction of the news media. They all wondered what the big deal was. Look at China’s reaction, they said. The Chinese government and Chinese people were terribly upset that Groupon had said Tibetans were in trouble. If something upsets China this much, doesn’t it mean that Groupon has done something right for Tibetans?

But should we be happy about a thing just because China is unhappy about it? And no matter how ironic the Groupon ad was, for a second there didn’t it look as if the suffering of the Tibetan people was made the springboard for selling coupons for fish curry? Is our outrage threshold too low? Should we take a page from the Chinese book and cry bloody murder every time we spy a paper cut as a way to stave off future injury?

These were all valid questions I was asking myself. But ultimately, I think my fellow Tibetans were right. For us, it’s an issue of survival above all else. We don’t really have the luxury of getting offended at any supporters, not least an organization that has taken our message to a hundred million people.