resounding dharamsala

[resoundingdharamsala]

Excerpt from "Music in Exile: Chökyi Tethong"

Excerpt from a short radio documentary on Chökyi Tethong, a musician in Dharamsala, India. The trials of exile do not deter her from singing, but rather compel her to sing more.

The full piece can be found here.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Music in Exile: Chökyi Tethong

Draft of a short radio documentary on Chökyi Tethong, a musician in Dharamsala, India. The trials of exile do not deter her from singing, but rather compel her to sing more.

An excerpt of the piece can be found here.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Moments of Song in Exile

“We don’t play modern music as much as before. Not since 2008,” Lharik says.

  For an ordinary person, this may not sound dramatic, but Lharik is a senior student at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamsala, India. For the past 18 years he has trained in music, opera, dance, and drama with the express purpose of preserving and passing on Tibetan culture in exile. He is referring to the widespread oppression of the Tibetan people following Beijing's 2008 Olympics.

  “Why not?” I ask him. “Have your teachers made you stop playing?”

  Again, he only speaks collectively, not personally. “We wouldn’t want to play now. If we played joyful songs—songs about love, drinking songs—that would be disrespectful. We have to stand with our brothers and sisters suffering in Tibet.”

  He shrugs to indicate humility, as if his opinion were irrelevant. But this is the most he has said in the past hour.

  We are sitting in the storage room at TIPA and playing with the Institute’s drum set. Dusty instruments and dated electronics sit here cramped and unused. The monsoon has not been kind to the equipment. The drums sound dank. The cymbals echo against the room’s concrete walls.

  We walk outside to TIPA’s main courtyard. Everything is wet. A lone basketball hoop next to the performance hall drips rainwater on our heads. Puddles have gathered on the warped outdoor stage. For now the monsoon has paused, enough for me to walk home. The air feels fresh. We kick at some fallen leaves while we make plans to meet again next week.

Dharamsala during monsoon

  Elsewhere in Dharamsala, the story is largely the same. The town's musical tone has shifted since 2008. On another day, as we sit for tea to escape the rain, a monk friend of mine named Choklang mentions that music used to be performed publicly much more often, but it has slowed since the Beijing Games.

  In an ethnography from the mid-90’s, Echoes from Dharamsala, Kiela Diehl describes the refugee town's music scene. Street buskers were once more common. During the new year’s celebration, groups of older women would do a circle-dance in the middle of the town square. Now in 2013, public music making is on the decline. Or, at the very least, it has moved away from the town square.

  I ask Choklang whether one might point to the passage of time or a lack of resources. If steadily fewer people are fleeing Tibet for India, eventually exile culture will lose certain traditions. With resources lacking, exile governments and organizations are forced to distill what they deem culturally essential. Anything nonessential is lost, if not intentionally forgotten.

  My monk friend, however, shakes his head at this idea. No, he says, musicians don’t perform in public anymore because we are mourning. We have no occasion to sing.

  And he has a point. The protests of 2008 saw some of the harshest incidents of brutality against Tibetans in recent memory. These incidents have been captured on mobile devices and have made their way past censors to exile communities in India and into documentary films abroad. Tibetan refugees have seen their brothers and sisters at home endure horrible acts of suppression and violence.

  And, since 2009, deprived of religious freedoms and other basic human rights, over 120 Tibetans have set themselves aflame. In Dharamsala, these acts are seen as a plea for the international community to recognize Tibet’s suffering and take effective action.

  Anyone would be demoralized at this. What is so striking is the collective decision in Dharamsala to give up certain types of music. In public space, music has been replaced with displays of mourning—candlelight vigils, marches, and protest actions—with every new report of self-immolation from Tibet.

  And mourning has its own music. A shrill megaphone cuts through the morning air with news of another fiery death. After sunset, you hear mourners’ steady footfalls and solemn chanting, invoking a commitment to do no violence to the enemy. By nightfall, they gather in the Dalai Lama’s main temple, where speeches are broadcast over a tinny PA system and the crowd sings the national anthem in unison.

  A demonstration.

Lharik, my friend at the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts, tells me that music is only encouraged if it raises awareness of the Tibetan cause. There is, however, a place where performance and consciousness-raising are blurred. Where activism becomes entertainment. This is in the context of the tourist economy.

  One day, Lharik is slated to perform with the other senior students for a group of 50 Vietnamese tourists. The travel group is visiting Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama teach at the Main Temple, and they have requested a private music performance as a kind of cultural diversion from their religious activities.

  I have already seen a performance the previous month for a different group of Vietnamese pilgrims on a different occasion of Dalai Lama teachings, so I ask Lharik which song-and-dance number they are performing. Will I recognize any of the music?

  “Actually, we are doing the same songs,” he confesses. “Nothing has changed. It will be quite boring for you.”

  When I ask why they do not change the program and learn new songs, he simply shrugs his shoulders. The Artistic Director sets the program. "We have hundreds of songs memorized, but we have to play the same seven songs. It is quite boring for us too.”

  He then tells me that they will embark on a one-month performance tour across India, playing the same seven songs in the same order, in the same fashion, wearing the same costumes. No deviation.

  This speaks powerfully to the changing role of music performance among Tibetan refugees since 2008. The very best musicians are trained at TIPA and made into human archives of cultural knowledge, yet their desires as living artists are a distant second to their first function of raising awareness of the Tibetan cause. Heritage has been frozen for the entertainment of affluent foreigners, and few performances are reserved for Tibetans. Music has become, in certain contexts, a form of propaganda.

  But all of this is only true insofar as the individual residents of Dharamsala allow it. Yes, there is tremendous demand from outsiders for the parts of Tibetan culture that embody an idyllic “Shangri-La.” Yes, parts of Dharamsala’s local economy depend on this myth. Yes, communal mourning makes opportunities for joyful music scarce, while musical propaganda continues.

  Despite all this, I see reason for hope. Proactive musicians and organizers find ways to create joyful music. And the longer I looked, the more musical spontaneity I witnessed. And although TIPA can be a stultifying force, the organization plays another crucial role as a public space for independent musicians.

    One cold October evening, I follow a group of young Tibetans ambling up the forested road to TIPA, whose warped outdoor stage has been donated for a concert of local musicians. The monsoon is over, and cold nights have settled into the foothills. Luckily, a few women sell hot, salty tea, which I sip for warmth as I set up my camera in the back corner of the courtyard.

  One of the musicians, a metal singer with a penchant for design, has created an enormous poster as a backdrop for the evening. It shows a map of Tibet in flames with the evening’s performers striking poses of prayer on the lower border.

  Poster for TIPA Concert

As the crowd fills out, I find myself no longer nestled alone in the back corner but instead surrounded by a group of rowdy boys dressed up in leather jackets. They buy bottles of Pepsi from the refreshments stand and pour it into cups with some kind of moonshine. It smells homemade.

  Their conversations leak into my recording, but I am not bothered. One of the boys even gives me his cup of tea. Having high quality sound does not seem to matter. These performances are different from the tourist shows. They are not fully rehearsed. No one is interested in debating the quality of any particular song or singer. This show is not about aesthetics. Nor is it about preserving Tibetan music and culture. Instead, it is about the little details that make up this moment, and the moments that make a community:

  The show starts an hour late. People come and go. A din of conversation, cheering, and laughter persists through every performance and interlude. The refreshments stand is completely makeshift: two fold out tables to the left of the audiences, thermoses full of tea, extension cords powering electric steamers filled with dumplings, and handwritten signs showing prices in three languages. There are not enough chairs for everyone, but this does not mean some people stand and some sit. Instead, everyone both stands and sits. Someone will take a seat then immediately offer it to someone else. How can you sit while your fellow concertgoers stand next to you? One of the inebriated boys nearby gives me yet another cup of tea, thoughtfully left unspiked. I did not have to ask. I did not even shiver. I am simply outside in the cold wearing a woefully thin sweater. Anyone can see it. I make friends easily and instantly with everyone around me. One of my new friends staggers onstage in the middle of a song, poses behind a singer, and performs what he believes is an erotic dance. People are annoyed, but no one takes him offstage for several minutes. Finally, after the night has yawned on and many people have left, all of the program’s performers get up and play together.

The event is not a perfect escape—some people sell merchandise; there are moments of communal mourning; and there is rhetoric of cultural preservation—but the escape is good enough.

  Standing here on a wet afternoon, Lharik first told me—“If we played joyful songs … it would be disrespectful. We should stand with our brothers and sisters suffering in Tibet.”

Yet here in the same courtyard the monsoon has passed, and at least one group of musicians has made a case for moments of joy and moments of song. In these brief moments, you can feel the community’s heartbeat.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Doll exhibit at TIPA, September 9, 2012. It's a small world, after all?

[resoundingdharamsala]

Performing on the roof of Mount View Hotel on April 14, 2013

[resoundingdharamsala]

Music and Politics on "White Wednesday"

Dharamsala, May 10, 2013

  After studying various types of Tibetan folk music for several months, I have finally started performing around Dharamsala, the north Indian capital of Tibet-in-exile, with my teacher Tsewang Chondhen. He’s a short old man, very knowledgeable and well known around Dharamsala, and I would be just another tall American with glasses if I weren’t singing in Tibetan. Needless to say, when we’re performing together we draw stares, and not necessarily for the quality of the music. I get performing experience out of it, but most of all it gives me an excuse to see what life is like when you’re gigging as an ordinary, veteran Tibetan musician. In a place like this, music is inescapably political.

  Last week I stopped by Black Tent Café for “Lhakar” night, which happens every Wednesday. My plan was to perform 2-3 songs with Chondhen after he finished playing the Mount View Hotel next door. He walked over, 20 minutes late, and I found him and brought him upstairs. His big dranyen (Tibetan lute), his miniature dranyen, a messenger bag stuffed with music, and a music stand were hanging from his shoulders. I had my own dranyen and a backpack stuffed with two cameras, a tripod, and my music.

  The balcony acted as a green room for the performers to warm up, drink soda, and smoke cigarettes. When we got there, it was nearly full, so Chondhen gave me the last chair and squatted on the ground. He had an old plastic Coke bottle filled with cheap Indian whisky. It gave off a nauseating, syrupy smell that blended with the ashy fog of "Flake" cigarettes. It was immediately clear that we didn't fit in among the rest of the musicians crammed onto the balcony. I was ten years younger than the other performers, and Chondhen was 20 years older. Ignoring this, we went ahead and picked out a song. It took us several minutes to tune our instruments with the noise of the traffic and tourists and music from the street overwhelming us.

      Lhakar means "White Wednesday" in Tibetan. It's a new movement promoted by Tibetan NGOs that calls for exiles to spend Wednesdays speaking, eating, and dressing Tibetan. Participating cultivates pride in one’s culture, but it's also a way to assert an identity that is culturally distinct from Han Chinese, geographically distinct from Mainland China, and politically distinct from the Chinese Communist Party. In exile, people take part, and nothing happens. But now that awareness of Lhakar has spread into Tibet itself, there have been major problems. Authorities use it as an excuse to arrest people simply for being Tibetan on a Wednesday. Now the same NGOs that created Lhakar have been debating its usefulness and considering whether they should abandon or defend it.

  At Black Tent Cafe, however, all these opinions about Lhakar are notably absent. White Wednesday is simply a way for the cafe to drum up business in a town where nightlife looks otherwise monotonous and bleak. Instead of looking forward to musky, zombie-drunk tourists from Delhi grinding on you from nine until past midnight, you can come here to Black Tent where the atmosphere is friendlier and much less sweaty. You can relax here. Considering that the café’s two owners are from Australia and Amdo (eastern Tibet), it makes sense that the target audience would be Western tourists and all of Dharamsala’s young Amdowas (people from Amdo). They're a small, loveable clique, sometimes known disparagingly about town as the suitors of the Westerners who pass through on dharma highs. They’re sometimes called khyipu, or “dog hair,” because they stick to everything. In any case, they make for a good time. Many of my good friends here are young men from Amdo. They're the perfect people to have around when you just want to sing songs. And that's what Lhakar night at Black Tent Cafe is all about. It's blanched and distilled into cups of sweet fruit tea and sing-alongs.

      When Chondhen and I took the "stage" (a cleared-out corner of the room), we played a beer drinking song called "Nawalingka-la," which Chondhen translates for me as “Everyday Happy Person.” It's upbeat, fun, and fast, sometimes too fast for me. Unfortunately Chondhen had started drinking well before our drinking song, so he made many mistakes and it was hard to keep in sync with his singing. We stumbled through the song and I helped him stumble offstage to decent applause.

  Back in the "green room," we were squatting on the cramped balcony with instruments, a music stand, glasses of soda, a bottle of whisky, and several other musicians around us. Chondhen insisted that an Amdowa musician demonstrate a particular song called “Uncle Pema” on Chondhen's miniature dranyen. As the compliant musician tried to play and I tried to record, my eager teacher talked through the whole song, explaining things to me in broken English and whispering instructions into the Amdowa's ear. Both of us tried to be polite. I didn't understand what he was saying, and at that point I wasn't interested. Finally fed up, the Amdowa stopped playing and looked at my teacher.

  "This dranyen is so small. It's useless," he said. Then he went back inside. The people on the other end of the balcony looked over.

  Chondhen translated the word for "useless" for me and then told me how useful his miniature instrument actually was. You can take it on airplanes. You can carry it on the bus. It's actually quite useful. It's perfect. He stood up to make his point and knocked over his music stand and I grabbed his shoulder to keep him steady. He brushed off my hand.

  "OK, bye. I am going," he said. He muttered to himself about the Amdowa, folded up his creaky music stand, and walked through the stage in the middle of another musician's performance. I called to him and said I would see him tomorrow.

    The evening continued with everyone in good spirits. The Amdowas were passing around a white scarf to decide which of them would sing a song next, but really everyone sang along to every song. I sat in the corner videotaping the scene, but I couldn't join in the fun. I couldn't help but think about Chondhen. He had become upset so quickly. It only took one comment from a younger musician and he was gone, inconsolable. There are few people I know who have more musical knowledge and experience than he has, and it didn't seem right to me that he had wanted to leave so soon, that he had felt disrespected.

  Conversations about Tibetan music often focus on cultural preservation in the midst of competition from Chinese interests and propaganda, and rightfully so. As I sat in Black Tent Café wondering about my teacher, I strangely found myself thinking about something I had read months earlier written by Jamyang Norbu, a political writer who moonlighted as an ethnomusicologist in the 1980s:

  "Most important of all, Chinese Communist influence in the thinking of [Tibetan] government officials [in exile] regarding the role of the performing arts must be rooted out. The official tendency to regard music, theatre, and dance as mediums for self-glorification and propaganda, and a generally handy device to entertain visiting foreign firemen, is most upsetting and quite contrary to the true spirit of performing culture in old Tibet."

  This passage has always stuck with me, but after seeing Chondhen leave in a huff from Lhakar night I began to see how Norbu’s cautionary argument only captures half of the threat. The role of Tibetan music is changing in India just as it is in Tibet, but here the threat comes less from propaganda and more from competition on the uncensored market. Here, people want something more immediate and gratifying. They want Bollywood film music. Or they want to bliss out while watching strapping Tibetan men sing folk songs. They might want excitement, and they might want inner peace; but most of all they want it with just a side of authenticity. The hybridity of the younger generation’s music is light-hearted, but the senior generation’s music resounds with all the overtones of old Tibet’s richness and depth, and so carries an inescapable sense of loss. Chondhen left the café after a passing remark about his instrument, but mostly, I think, he had felt unwanted. His music cannot find a context here.

      The next time we met, it was as if the whole night had been forgotten. We were at my apartment. He stomped the dirt off his boots and came inside. His mood was so upbeat that it felt wrong to ask him why he had left so quickly from the café. He had brought a new instrument to teach me. It looked unlike anything I had played before. A cold wind was blowing outside, so I made some hot tea for us.

  When you pick up a new instrument, at first it can be painful. You can’t stay in tune. You can’t hold it properly. Your fingers, new to these strings, go numb after half an hour. The music sounds terrible, but all you can do is trust that some day the instrument will sing. So we sat down and got to work.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Thoughts on "So Many Socks," a play

On April 9, a play happened in McLeod Ganj. It was based on the poetry of Tenzin Tsundue and staged by an acting company from Mumbai. Officially:

Wait. I called it a play, but, "So Many Socks is not really a play. It is more an experiment." This is according to the playbill.

TCV Day School's playground served as the house. They had set up chairs in a round and the circle-stage was delineated by props, household items, socks, musical instruments, and audio equipment. Childlike mobiles suspended from wires gave the space a ceiling. The whole set-up was a clever way to repurpose one of the town's commonly used spaces, just as the play -- its style, its actors, and its audience -- was a novel occurrence for McLeod Ganj. 

More about the audience, because it seems important: pretentious-looking Western and Indian drama-types and tourists mixed with local boarding school students, most of my youngish Tibetan friends, and the few homegrown, public intellectuals from Dharamsala. Whether it was the poster, the people behind it, or the artistic novelty, something about So Many Socks had captured the attention of nearly every group around. An Indian politician even came to watch, though I didn't notice anyone from the Tibetan exile government. Something they all had in common was, of course, Smartphones, which nobody remembered to turn off before the play began.

This hybridity and this novelty were appropriate. A group of Mumbai actors embodied Tibetans in an English-language play, and that was OK. It was, after all, based on Tenzin Tsundue's work, and he too is something of an oddity in the exile community. He was educated in Mumbai, and his poetry does strike the ear as rather Indian. That is,  modern, fragmented, nothing to do with the syllabic conventions of Tibetan poetry. Yet his work is dedicated to Tibetan independence.

So, yes, this was an odd play in an odd setting, but it was obvious that something so odd should happen in McLeod Ganj.

As for what actually happened in the play, I couldn't say. It was more circular than linear, and it made more suggestions than definitions, more gestures than declarations. Time was unclear, and it didn't matter. In fact, it served the play well, because it was more important to communicate a feeling of displacement than a particular narrative about a particular family. Again from the playbill: "[T]his is not a story of Tibetan issues. It is a story of human issues, the choices we make and how they could affect our loved ones."

Too often, the issue of Tibetan independence is romanticized and therefore made foreign. Something to talk about over coffee, but not really our problem. The strongest point of So Many Socks was that it avoided this. The intergenerational conflicts, the cultural confusion, and the anger depicted in the play may feature in the lives of exiled Tibetans, but the play did not allow its audience to box these themes into a concept of "Tibetan issues." Instead, it made the emotional content of the play -- and of Kora -- pertinent to everyone's lives. It may have confused vagueness for universality, I'm not really sure, but overall I was satisfied and so were my friends.

The play's final scene ended with the cast singing "We Shall Overcome" in Tibetan, a tune easily recognized in this context as an anthem for Tibetan freedom. As they turned to walk off stage, the audience stopped caring about being quiet. Most people sang or hummed along. When someone starts singing an anthem, they're inviting you to create something communally. It doesn't matter how self-conscious you are or whether you're good at singing, and it definitely doesn't matter that they're from Mumbai and they're singing a little bit clumsily in Tibetan. 

You sing with them anyway. Something more than you is happening.

[resoundingdharamsala]

All you can do when the odds are stacked against you is to hang on to your goal like grim death, and keep on fighting regardless of all the attractive comfortable alternatives that well intentioned but essentially anaemic souls, try to make you accept in the name of good sense, peace and understanding.

Jamyang Norbu, on continuing to demand independence for Tibet. "Return of the Referendum," Shadow Tibet: Selected Writings 1989 to 2004, New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2004, 251.

[resoundingdharamsala]

She is not a Buddhist; nor is she an initiate of Tantra. Instead, she is, as she put it, "a seeker looking for the common good in all religions." Her perspective is central to the syncretic nature of the global New Age movement so prevalent today, and echoes the sentiments of the many Western pilgrims who continually travel to Dharamsala, the hub of Tibetan culture in exile, in the hopes of absorbing fragments of Buddhist wisdom to add to their eclectic store of personal knowledge about New Age spirituality. Sitting in the pubs and restaurants of this picturesque Himalayan hamlet, the ethnographer often overhears Westerners engaged in metaphysical conversations liberally drawing not only on Tibetan philosophy but also on G. I. Gurdjieff, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Satya Sai Baba, and a host of other teachers who have successfully attracted the attention of Western audiences.

Frank J. Korom, “The Role of Tibet in the New Age Movement,” in Imagining Tibet (2001), eds. Dodin and Räther, 168.

[resoundingdharamsala]

...in nearly all works of imagination about Tibet, the country and people come across merely as the mise en scène for the personal drama of white people.

Jamyang Norbu, "Behind the Lost Horizon: Demystifying Tibet," in Imagining Tibet (2001), eds. Dodin and Räther, 374.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Here's the view from the street just above my apartment. Last week, the sunset rose, and a man stood on the sun.

[resoundingdharamsala]

To date, more than 50 people have self-immolated in Tibet. Earlier, I posted about a concert of modern Tibetan music held in tribute to these victims. Here's another moment of musical remembrance for those same self-immolators. Performers from TIPA (those standing in blue and grey) carried the tune for the rest of the crowd, a mixture of students from Tibetan Children's Village, locals, and a few foreigners here and there.

I don't know the song. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Visit Original Link

On September 1, I went with my fellow fellowship friends Patrick and Christina to a concert at TIPA (Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts). The show featured several modern Tibetan musicians singing karaoke-style atop backing tracks that they had recorded previously. A poster with each of the 50+ self-immolator's faces backdropped the stage, and upstage, below the poster, was a table of butter lamps-- one for each victim. Unfortunately, I couldn't take a clear image of the stage, but I did get one of the absolutely packed concert hall:

Since this was my first concert, I was thrilled to see so many young Tibetans in the audience (as well as a couple of Tibetan government representatives, one of whom gave a brief introduction). The turnout was all the more impressive considering that the concert was organized within a matter of days. Up until this concert, I hadn't seen much music performed publicly, so it was something of a relief to see in the audience that modern Tibetan music does resonate with a large enough group of Dharamsalans to fill a concert hall.

Here's a photo of one of the many promotional posters that were to be found around McLeod Ganj, which gives, I think, a sense of the tone of the concert as well as its audience.

Most of the music, genre-wise, felt like subdued lounge music. It sounded as if a lot of the instrumentals-the drums, the bass, the synth-strings--were produced using pre-packaged patches on a single keyboard. The singers, however, were fantastic. One of the best entertainers of the evening, as well as the most unique musician stylistically speaking, was Tamding, the "first ever Tibetan heavy metal singer," as he is often advertised around town. When he came onstage, the crowd came alive. He performed "Pawo pamo jeldren (Memories of martyrs)" from his very recently released album, Open Road. I've posted a two-minute clip of his performance above.

Although I have been on the lookout for locally made hip hop, I was not expecting metal. I hope to talk with Tamding, as well as some of his fans, about his music. The rest of his new album, by the way, is excellent.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Why?

Having lived three weeks in Dharamsala, I've gone nowhere without my copy of Keila Diehl's Echoes from Dharamsala (UC Press, 2002). As a couple of my friends remarked, it's been my Bible. And, having finished my second reading, I think that it's time, finally, for me to start writing. Hence, this blog.

I first read Diehl's ethnography on Dharamsala's music scene last summer, and it inspired me to pursue ethnomusicology in greater depth than ever before. Rather than jumping straight into graduate school, I liked the idea of first experiencing the practice of ethnomusicology, starting out with a bit of ignorance, and learning by mistakes, embarrassments, and failures. Luckily, the Fulbright Program was willing to indulge me. I feel endlessly grateful toward everyone at USIEF and Fulbright, not to mention the numerous generous souls who have helped me stateside from Amherst College.

Here's a brief, particularly inspiring passage from Diehl's conclusion:

I chose the theme of echoes to link the idea of cyclicity to this study's focus on music. Various genres of music echo off one another in the daily lives of Tibetan refugees, as do ideas, habits, and languages. These reverberations are not faithful to their sources, however, with each projection shaping and being shaped by its echo. (266)

And, a little later:

I hope that this book has underscored the importance of the performing arts, and music especially, as a crucial site where official and personal, old and new, representations of Tibetan culture meet and where different notions of "Tibetan-ness" are being confronted and imagined." (267)

So, after reflecting on Diehl's "echoes," I wondered how her metaphor might be extended into new media that, since her fieldwork in the mid-nineties, have become increasingly accessible to amateurs like me. This blog, in addition to being a journal of my personal travels in India, will be an experiment toward this end. My dream is to map the sounds of Dharamsala using as many modes of representation as possible, and then to arrange and rearrange them here, online, to render this town's incredible unity and diversity. How might Dharamsala resonate when re-sounded into cyberspace?

And finally, why? To be brief: most media outlets are growing increasingly neglectful of Tibet's ongoing self-immolation crisis. Given this, it is necessary that we attend to the lives of Tibetans both in Tibet (where I cannot go) and in exile. I hope that, by re-sounding Dharamsala, I can help a broader audience to hear the human realities of exile and diaspora, and thereby, however tangentially, promote mutual understanding and peace among the cultures that pass through here.

Disclaimer: Listen! There's nothing official about this site. The views that I express here are my own. Not Fulbright's, not the Department of State's.

[resoundingdharamsala]

Of course, after only a brief orientation in Delhi last month, it couldn't be long before I saw Alexa and Sarah again, my two fellow Amherst-Fulbrighters in India.  These images come from my week in Mussoorie, a photogenic hill station in Uttarakhand. The mountains here collapse into one another, always revealing and obscuring new views of Dehradun's sprawl in the valley below. They're massive, but they're still just foothills, merely anticipating the Himalayan giants to the north.

During our week there, we often talked about transportation and our schedules for the day. Would it be better to walk 40 minutes to Hindi class or take a quick taxi? Walking takes energy, but a taxi takes money. As it turned out, those same steep, winding roads that we dreaded offered the best chances to start a meandering conversation, to get lost in thoughts, or to turn a corner and be struck suddenly by the parting fog and the long, long view. Without these curves in the road, Mussoorie would be nothing special.