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Dalai Lama is world’s conscience-keeper: Mayank Chhaya

The Tibetans have several names for him — ‘Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Compassionate, Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom’, ‘The Wishfulfilling Gem’ or just ‘The Presence’.

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WASHINGTON, DC: The Tibetans have several names for him — ‘Holy Lord, Gentle Glory, Compassionate, Defender of the Faith, Ocean of Wisdom’, ‘The Wishfulfilling Gem’ or just ‘The Presence’. The rest of the world describes him in the way it sees him – a Nobel laureate, the head of state of a government-in-exile, a monk, an exotic man from an exotic land or even a mystic. Who, then, is the real Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama?
 
Next month, a 46-year-old Chicago-based Indian journalist’s book will attempt to answer that question. Mayank Chhaya’s authorised biography of the exiled Tibetan leader titled Dalai Lama — Man, Mystic, Monk will be in bookstores around the world.
 
“Here was this exotic man the world had come to know about,” says Chhaya of his first interaction with the Dalai Lama in 1997, “but there was no biography of his that would make him accessible to the uninitiated reader. I wanted to know the man behind the persona.” Chhaya, then the New Delhi bureau chief of the New York-based news weekly India Abroad and news service India Abroad News Service (now Indo-Asian News Service), had gone to McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh for an interview with the Tibetan leader, who has been living there along with nearly 1 lakh refugees since 1959 when he fled Tibet, nine years after the Chinese invasion.
 
Several writers had expressed their interest in writing an authorised biography, Chhaya says, and so when he asked his secretariat, they showed some polite interest.
 
Chhaya forgot about it, but a few weeks later, the secretariat responded to his formal request to give him the go-ahead. “They later mentioned that they were granting me the authorisation considering my professional credentials and my passionate interest in the subject,” Chhaya says.
 
What followed was two years of extensive interviewing. “We talked just about everything — from the Tibetan problem to his Nobel Prize to his views on celibacy and sexuality,” says Chhaya.
 
“The Dalai Lama approaches all subjects with a great deal of equanimity. He answered all questions with refreshing openness and completely free from dogma. He discussed sexuality in response to my questions and explained how early in his life he had to overcome it as an ordained monk.”
 
Beyond the interviewing, Chhaya followed the Dalai Lama’s lectures whenever he could, even after he shifted to the US in 1999 as the editor of a local newspaper in California. “His stature has only grown,” Chhaya says. “If earlier there were hundreds attending his lectures, now, you have to book a stadium. Around 10,000 people attend some of his lectures. He has now emerged as the world’s conscience-keeper.”
 
Perhaps the greatest aspect of the Dalai Lama’s personality, Chhaya says, is his ability to reach out to everyone.
 
“What is most striking about him is his sense of familiarity in any surrounding and his ability to reach out to anyone without any intermediary. If I had to describe him in one sentence, I would say he is deceptively profound with a charming sense of humour.”
 
More than anything, Chhaya wanted to discover the man behind the image. “He has a quiet and a subtle determination,” he says about the Dalai Lama’s struggle for an autonomous Tibetan region, something he has been fighting for more than four decades.
 
“You’d think of him as a charming, avuncular philosopher you can open up to. But he knows he has to persist, there is just no other way to regain all that they lost.”
 
Chhaya also discovered the other side of the Dalai Lama, which the world rarely, if ever, go to see — his fascination with technology. “If he were not the Dalai Lama,” says Chhaya, “he would have been an inventive engineer. He has a childlike inquisitiveness about him.”
 
What Chhaya was impressed by most during his several meetings was that certain something that separates the Dalai Lama from the rest of the world. “Call it charisma, call it a glow, but the man stands out. One can see why people are so taken up with him.”
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