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.

A Special Meeting, for some very special people

I watched the DVD of the Special Meeting held in Dharamsala in November 2008. The DVD was of the sixth day, the last day of the meeting (I suppose the seventh was fittingly the day of rest).

Several things struck me:
A. The Resolutions of the Meeting are really very weird. One was that China must admit policy mistakes and another was that China is to be blamed for lack of progress on dialogue. Umm yes. A hundred and ten people got together for this?

B. Samdhong Rinpoche's speech was basically a state of the union address, which got me thinking, do we even have a state of the union address? His Holiness's March 10 speech is obviously the important speech of the year; is there even a Kalon Tripa equivalent? Sure the Kashag always issues a March 10 statement too but that always seemed like an underwhelming speech to me; I can't remember ever listening to a Kashag March 10 statement. Samdhong Rinpoche's speech was actually very good. He addressed a lot of the suggestions made throughout the Special Meeting in his usual way, that is, sarcastic and skewering if you are at the wrong end. (I mean he addressed some suggestions and criticism by saying, you are wrong, and also, don't know enough!) And he talked about what the government had been up to- no debt, yay! So, I am actually a huge fan. Samdhong Rinpoche is obviously one of the brightest intellects in the Tibetan world, and I really like the no-nonsense, no-frills straightforwardness, and also even his slightly-awkward smile. So overall I am awed and admiring of him, and of course also slightly scared to death.

Samdhong Rinpoche made a distinction between the Middle Way policy and the Dialogue process; he said the dialogue process had produced no results but this did not mean that the Middle Way policy had produced no result. It is an important distinction to make, but I wished that he had elaborated on whatever result had been produced by the policy.

C. I think His Holiness was disappointed with the Special Meeting. His Holiness said, at the very beginning of His speech, that He had nothing to say about the meeting. Later during the Q&A, when a reporter asked how policy was going to change because of the meeting, His Holiness answered, "The meeting...I have nothing to say." I did think this might be a strong statement, because the people didn't have much to say at the Meeting, after all.