From the Dalai Lama, with peace
By Chanchal Sarkar

ONE of the unpleasant bits of news that I read recently in The Tribune was that several offices of the Dalai Lama’s establishment in Dharamsala and, in fact, even a second residence for the Dalai Lama, will be set up near Faridabad in Haryana. The reason given is the tension between the Tibetans in Dharamsala and local people, particularly young people. I find this distasteful because the Dalai Lama’s presence is a boon and bounty for India. His love and respect for India is plain. He is a transparent man and at a recent meeting in Delhi University I was quite charmed by his presence and what he had to say. In a follow up story I read that the Chief Minister of Himachal has assured the Dalai Lama of every help and support. The Dalai Lama, too, has denied the report.

His personality is such that it touches all who have gone to meet or hear him. He has not a shred of pride or arrogance, only abundant goodwill which somehow transmits itself to every member of the audience. When he laughs, as he does often, it is the laugh of a happy child. His presence makes everyone near him happy.

In Buddhism there is no God. This comes through in what the Dalai Lama says. He talks about warmth of heart, loving-kindness, compassion — not about God. For him it seems not to matter at all to which religion one belongs. All move to the same rhythms, to the same goal. It certainly made me feel good to hear him. He is no intellectual but he has grasped the crux of religion by his own sadhana. He says the same things as Swami Vivekananda but in language easy for the ordinary person to understand.

Learning of my encounter with the Dalai Lama my friend the distinguished lawyer, Fali Nariman, has sent me something that he had written about the Dalai Lama after a meeting last year at a time when six Tibetans were on hunger strike unto death in New Delhi protesting against cultural genocide in Tibet. His impressions were very like mine. He spoke of the Dalai Lama’s "Benign benevolence and his childlike humility". "Not clever or worldly", is how he described the Dalai Lama but "frank compassionate and wise ... someone who is able to probe the essential human spirit and unravel its secret in words easy for all to understand". I feel that all who come into touch with him will feel the glow.

Agra doesn’t deserve the Taj...

Agra today doesn’t deserve the Taj, the Itmad-ud-daulah or the Fatehpur Sikri. The Jamuna is bone-dry. Barring a few areas like the Civil Lines, the town is a crowded mess. The traffic is heavy and the air dense. The Taj may be beautiful but the one-time capital of India is not.

High praise to the British who knew how to build. I went to visit the Agra Mental Hospital which the British had set up in 1859 and given it 173 acres of grounds. The Hospital is solely under the government and sometime someone in the Lucknow Secretariat, politician or bureaucrat, will surely think of parcelling off some of the Hospital land and build residential colonies on it at a vast profit. The directing staff of the Hospital will not be able to resist the move and MPs and MLAs will, of course, be in on the deal.

That will be a sad day because the British idea was that the Hospital could be a self sustaining community with enough agricultural land to provide food, spread out buildings for special kind of patients, homes for the staff and so on. The atmosphere, it was hoped, would be such as to help the sick recover.

This has not happened. For the 436 patients there are 7 doctors, not a good ratio. There is a large staff partly because of the spread out nature of the wards but most of them stay outside.

In an era when hospitals have become big business and a room in five-star hospitals can cost around Rs 5000/- a day the Agra Hospital is for the poor. Of the patients only 53 pay and that only Rs 1,000 a month. The rest are treated free. The hospital encourages families to come and stay with the patients. As the Director Dr Sudhir Kumar explained, this helps the patient to get well more quickly and so reduces the number of days in hospital and the pressure on the beds. The problem with government institutions is that they are under the thumb of bureaucrats and there is no room for initiative or imagination.

A stream once ran through the campus but it has for some reason been diverted and choked. I can’t believe that water cannot be made to flow again and the 36 acres that the British laid aside cannot be used to grow grains, vegetables and even flowers.

As a hospital for the poor the Agra Mental Hospital is treated like a step-child. It lacks the very modern equipment necessary for diagnosis and treatment. It has no C.T. Scan, for instance, or even an airconditioned Intensive Care Unit. It seems to be our special gift to allow our assets to waste with bureaucratic arrogance and neglect, especially if something could help the poor.

Human rights

The National Human Rights Commission, people would think, deals with high falutin things in human rights, charters and large-scale violations, streams of displaced refugees and so on.

From someone working in it I found that it deals also with individual cases. If the person handling such cases is kind and tenacious, he or she can give genuine relief.

I learnt of an elderly lady who was neglected and discarded by her only daughter and granddaughter. Living in isolation in Calcutta she couldn’t bear it any more and came to Delhi with all her bags and baggage. The daughter was away, the grand daughter refused to let her into the house, so she went to the nearest Police Station and said she would go no further.

The NHRC was approached and deputed an officer to solve the tangle. He found the lady in a dreadful state — unwashed, with filthy clothes, and disoriented. The policemen in the thana were sharing their food with her.

Then began a detailed operation of persuasion, getting the daughter to Delhi, telling her of the effects when the media got hold of the story and so on. Eventually the officer found an old people’s home to put the old lady in and persuaded the daughter to pay the monthly charges. The Police had helped to open up a savings account for the lady for the considerable sum of money she was carrying. Ironically she had quite a lot of gold ornaments with her which, she said, she would like to gift to her daughter!

Exporting education

In this age of education-export by the developed countries India in probably far behind. Teaching institutions in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States are advertising in our papers and sending out teachers to open shop windows and ‘sell’ the courses. This they are doing not only in India but in many other developing countries; students bring money into the developed countries and also provide employment for people there.

Just recently I got to know of the International Institute of Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences. Situated in Enschede in Holland it runs six courses for diplomas, a professional Masters degree, an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. The subjects are geoinformatics, geoinformatics management, urban planning and land administration, natural resources management, earth resources and environmental geosciences and water resources and environmental management with many specilisations.

The courses seem very attractive, the promotional literature is beautifully turned out but the cost of such education is high by Indian standards. A nine-month course and hostel charges could come to something of the order of Rs 4,25,000. Stiff for us, perhaps not for parents who have an overseas income.