My father had passed away seven years ago with His Holiness in his heart and my family in Tibet kept it a secret from me for more than eight months thinking that it would muddle my study in school. I stipulated myself to pass over it even though I had already heard the truth. I had resolved to kill myself because I would never see my father again in rest of my life but fortunately or unfortunately, I had managed to stay alive and I still remember how I had tried to jump from the window to the ground floor.
It’s an epic game I had ever tried to play with my life and an experience when I think of it now. It was my father who had crumbled my whole attention on His Holiness the Dalai Lama when I was in Kham, eastern part of Tibet and one of the three provinces. In his wooden case, there was a photograph of His Holiness and none of us were allowed to take it out without his words. We would see it only two times in a year and it would only happen on the first and second day of the Losar, Tibetan New Year.
He would make sure that our hands were clean washed and negative emotions were out of the mind for a moment. Once he had carefully performed it and he would place it back with a white scarf. I was very young at that time and so many questions were left unanswered in my mind till I saw His Holiness in 2007. To my surprise, none of my Chinese teachers had ever instigated anything related to His Holiness and that strangeness gradually fabricated one of the biggest confusions and puzzlements in the core of my heart till I reached in India.
It’s on 15th July in 2007, I have seen His Holiness in person for the first time and we were sitting in his temple. it was exactly a few steps away from his throne and I have impotent to keep my eyes rolling at him closely but I have perceived that he was quite different to the photograph that my father had kept with him. I didn’t know what had happened to me because I couldn’t control my tears flooding over my face like the rest of the newcomers sitting in the temple. In Tibet , I thought His Holiness might have been a good friend to my father but I had a strange feeling that there was something not right.
On the very first day, I saw a lot of people pairing faiths to His Holiness and it made me realize that my father had unconsciously feigned his whole life through such a way that nobody could ever be understood what was happening in his mind. I would have suggested to my father that His Holiness has more friends than you had ever imagined if he was still alive and the reflection point of his unmoved faith in His Holiness had driven me an another load of aloofness towards my late father after seeing His Holiness with my own eyes and with the heavy memory of my late father and his deeply rooted-faith within himself.
Even so in 2012, I was in a Tibetan Children Village School and it’s two years before taking the CBS Exam by The Central Board of Secondary Education, a national level board of education for public and private schools in India. In a massive gathering, we joyfully celebrated an award ceremony for His Holiness receiving the Templeton Prize honored by Templeton Foundation at St.Paul Cathedral, London. His Holiness has become the second Templeton Prize laureate after Mother Teresa had won the first Templeton Prize in 1973 and both of them are Nobel laureates as well. It’s often described as one of the most prestigious awards in religion costing more than $1.6million. But he had immediately donated all the money for orphans in India and poor people in Africa and that somehow moved me a lot.
Subsequently, I started entering into a new chapter and a different picture of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and got an idea of His Holiness as a global peace icon. I conveyed to my father in mind that His Holiness is neither like a good friend I had simply assumed and nor as I had deluded in my mind for many years in Tibet. By the same token in 2016 and it’s after two years of myself being out of secondary school. The author of the book,Defining India Through Their Eyes, Sonia Singh had set up an interview with His Holiness through NDTV on 7th April 2016 in New Delhi.
I kicked off my Shakespeare classes and chose the interview instead. I was driven by some powerful words of lightning from a man of peace commonly known as “ A Simple Buddhist Monk”and “ A Laughing Monk”. From then on, I have gradually become more realistic knowing the unrevealed secrets of my late father and the delusional mind I had ever experienced.
By fall of 2018, I read one of the most popular works ,Beyond Religion by His Holiness and I have received great positive impacts and lessons being incredibly important in day to day life of the 21st century. It’s again in August 2019 and I had the privilege to attend the Global Youth Peace Program initially organized by the Regional Alliance for Fostering Youth in partnership with the Ministry of Youth and Community Empowerment in Male,Maldives.
There were more than thirty five international delegates and I was the only Tibetan Refugee Youth representing Tibet which most of them had no idea of where and what it’s geographical change matters to the rest of the world. It’s a beautiful tourist place and none of them welcome any other religion than their designated religion Islam but the people I had conversations with, they knew His Holiness and the country Tibet. If some are thinking of visiting I have found everything is affordable for a few weeks in Maldives, a top searching country with beautiful beaches and oceans.
On the last day it’s a cultural night and we had good interactions with new faces from different parts of the world. Except some countries like Australia, India, America and Bangladesh but a few delegates from Philippines, Singapore and Iraq. They had no idea about Tibet till I threw out the name”Dalai Lama” and then I have encountered a situation where I certainly realized that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is a world face of peace and compassion for the entire world. It also happened the same in Taylor University of Malaysia where I attended the conference just for two days.
With the experiences I had gone through, the books I had read, the people I had met over the last few decades, I have drawn a conclusion to my late father” Dear father, you are a such amazing man knowing everything about His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama whom you had never seen in person like I had and your faith from a place in Tibet where not allowing a photograph of His Holiness by China.
After fifteen years later, I have achieved millions of affirmations and reasons to the reason why you had kept us in a deluded world and why you had been so respectful and so faithful to a photograph of His Holiness that we also had not dared to take it granted.
Dear father, this year we are celebrating the 85th Birthday of His Holiness and I’m a few hours away from his residential palace which you had probably never seen in your whole life. There are millions and millions of followers and among them. There are very popular personalities like Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, George Walker Bush, an American Politician and the 43rd President of the United States and also Richard Tiffany Gere, one of the most popular American actors. On this 85th Birthday of His Holiness all of them are wishing “Happy 85th Birthday”to His Holiness.
In the near-most, I want to say thank you, dear father for your mountainous faith which has brought me closer to His Holiness and now I am also ready to follow your footsteps like you had passed away with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in your heart and I would never shatter your faith and respect to His Holiness. With your face in my heart, now I’m wishing His Holiness” Happy 85th Birthday, May You live long and healthy, Your Holiness”.
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