Article Archive for Year 2008


Mother Pollard was probably the oldest participant in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Apparently no one knew her actual age or her first name, she was just called Mother. After several weeks of walking painfully to …

Where facts are few, experts are many.
— Donald R. Gannon
Among the many half-cocked (and often disastrous) schemes dreamed up during the Cultural Revolution, the institution of “barefoot doctors” (Chin: 赤脚医生 chijiao yisheng; Tib: ཨམ་ཆི་རྐང་རྗེན་མ་ amchi …

After his dramatic escape from Tibet in December 1999, the young Gyalwa Karmapa became an immediate celebrity in the exile community – in a reverential Tibetan sort of way, of course. A group of students …


It was somewhere in an article by George Orwell that I came across the phrase “the solipsism of the sick man”, i.e. the inability of people mired in depression, disease or suffering to see beyond …


Tibetan envoys Lodi Gyari and Kelsang Gyaltsen return to India after unfruitful talk with Chinese Government in May 2008.

The following letter was written by a resident of Lhasa, who wishes to remain anonymous. It gives a personal account of the current situation and the tense atmosphere in the city:
Yesterday it was quite …


Jamyang Norbu says in the introduction to this collection of his essays that his role model is George Orwell. Having read Orwell’s collected essays, and Jamyang Norbu’s, I think that Orwell might well feel proud …


I must ask the reader’s forgiveness for my occasional forays into amateur psychology. I wrote about something like this in a previous article but I want to discuss another kind of recurring nightmare, also known …
Is it time for a ‘Baltic solution’?


The year 2008, for many reasons, is likely to go down in the annals of recent Tibetan history as a watershed year. This was the year when Tibetans in Tibet, 49 years after the takeover …


The press briefing by the envoys of the Dalai Lama given upon their return from their first talks with their Chinese counterparts since the recent unrest and crackdown in Tibet. Filmed for …