Not so Beauty in Exile

The world seems to have lost its appetite on Tibet. The hypes and rhymes on the Himalayan ‘nation’ are becoming thin, a quite disappointing development. There can be several factors to this not-so-generous treatment meted out by the world to Tibet but if the heart rending cries of the Dalai Lama’s men, women and children are not qualified entrants to the humane side of the world then we must be passing through a critical phase—our society must be transforming into a mechanical one. Unable to bear any longer the squeezing grip of China the Dalai Lama fled Tibet on March 31, 1959. The plights of the Tibetans are more to do with the mental aspect than the physical one. The strictness of the Chinese dealing has made life very hard for the Tibetans. To access to Tibet by foreign journalists is a near impossible thing, thanks to the tight-control. Even if you are inside Tibet you will be seeing what the Chinese authority wants you to see.Nostalgic stories have become the common ‘menu’ of the evening fire-place talks for the Tibetans today. This mood is best reflected by the Dalai Lama in his book. “When I look back to the time when Tibet was still a free country, I realize that those were the best years of my life…although there is clearly no use indulging in feelings of nostalgia, still I cannot help feeling sad whenever I think of the past. It reminds me of the terrible suffering of my people. The old Tibet was perfect. Yet at the same time, it is true to say that our way of life was worth preserving that is now lost forever.” (Extract from the Dalai Lama’s autobiography—Freedom in Exile). Today, Tibetans are experiencing “a sense of being lost and disconnected” from the “Tibetan culture and values” even if they are in their own homeland. For those Tibetans in India and elsewhere the situation is even bitter. This fact is fittingly revealed in an American documentary feature film called Miss Tibet, Beauty in Exile. According to Norah Shapiro, director of the documentary film, “It is a coming of age story of a young girl, who through an unlikely opportunity of a beauty pageant finds her cultural identity and cultural awakening that she has been struggling with while growing up as an immigrant in the United States. Initially, it was a sort of learning for me to understand the Tibetan struggle and about the community that was in exile. I was also intrigued by the seeming paradox, of having a Tibetan pageant that seemed so contradictory to my sense of Tibetan culture and values.”