`Rangzen'

Yesterday at MG Road, Bangalore, the Tibetans were sitting with lit candles, together for freedom...the Tibetan word is `rangzen'....and it felt like they as a community were alone, asking for what was theirs, and for nobody else was it immediate, something that would move them to realign their choices. Maybe because we were handed down our freedom in 47.
Now Tibet is like this politically and economically weak nation(the idea of it for some of us) that can't help itself in the face of the big economic power China is. Niether is their representative Dalai Lama asking for complete autonomy...there's such a conflict here....that of philosophy and a political will, for it's people. But in Dalai Lama's case, it's going to be nothing but `middle path', a force that doesn't have takers even among his own people becuase it has got them nothing till now.
The totally conflicting narratives that emerge from Dharamshala and China, and no direct reporting from Tibet (thanks to China) leaves you questioning which side is right, what is true and what the history was.But then again what if we `did' know what was true, the internationall community is still calling it China's internal affair and respecting it's sovereignity. What would any of us do if we were sufficiently convinced that China is a coloniser. Till then, one can only hope and pray and wait for tomorrow's news and track down developments and have opinions.
The latest I heard was China's statement that the Nobel Peace Prize winning Lama has hijacked the Olympics to negotiate freedom, that he and his clique(also read terrorists) have planned this `bloodbath' where the leader himself says he'll quit if violence is pursued any more. And there I was at some five star hotel foyer the other day disputing what my brother said, "history is biased, it's someone's version of what transpired."

My guitar plays for `Rangzen' though.