Tibetans and their supporters worldwide have taken to the streets in record numbers lately to protest human rights abuses in China and the 58-year-old Chinese occupation of Tibet. Over the years, a lot of things have stood between Beijing’s dictatorial rule and Tibet’s freedom — but you’d never guess the most formidable barrier: The Dalai Lama himself.
Ajay Singh is a writer, former tea planter and chicken farmer who began his career in journalism at the New Delhi bureau of the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1988. Since then, he has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, Time Inc.’s Hong Kong-based newsweekly Asiaweek, and India’s leading newsweekly India Today. Singh is also the author of “Give ’Em Hell, Hari,” a postcolonial East-West comedy that was Waterstone Book of the Month in Britain in March 1996 and on the bestseller lists in Hong Kong, Ireland and Scotland.
Belief Above All
Long before Europe’s enlightenment and centuries before Gautama Buddha renounced his princely life and set out to solve the riddle of human suffering, a band of ascetics in India offered hope and redemption to the masses. The best of them have always been highly reclusive and their contribution to mystical practices have, in the words of British missionary John Copley Winslow, brought to “a West grown dry and thirsty in the deserts of barren materialism the refreshing streams of a living faith in God and in the supremacy of spiritual values.” Ajay Singh spent a month in the Himalayas trying to meet ascetics rumoured to be 200 years old and capable of levitating.
