Rather too spontaneously I muttered, "French seems a good father alright!" And it was with this impression of him that I landed in the middle of the next week to interview him and sure enough while he sat giving this interview, in the background played Tenzin with his younger brother Abraham. And as the interview progressed he came across as candid and immensely forthright, telling me incidents from his life which most would think twice before recounting. Excerpts from the interview with Patrick French:

Maybe yes. In fact, there have been certain changes in India in the last decade, changes in the society and on the political scene, which is throwing up political figures likes Mayawati and Modi. The days of the Congress seem over and the reality is that it’s these figures — Mayawati and Modi — who represent the future. What I find a shame here is that even the most corrupt so-called VVIPS have chamchas hovering all around them, as though in awe of them, and I find this very unfortunate.

Gujarat was a major disaster that was allowed to happen and the response to it was feeble. But here I would also like to point out that one cannot generalise anything on the basis of what took place in Gujarat and I am saying this because for the last few months I have been travelling in Kerala and I didn’t witness any communal tension between Hindus and Muslims.

My involvement with Tibet had started in the early 1980s, when I was about 16. I was provoked by an encounter with the Dalai Lama, whose style and exoticism caught my eye. For the last 20 years I have been interacting with the Tibetan refugees and this book is part memoir, part travel book, part history; it is a quest for the true, as opposed to the mythical, Tibet. I wanted to focus on the people and their plight. In fact, in 1987 whilst I was living in a room at Tsechokling monastery, below McLeodganj,

I met a man who was attached to the monastery but was not a monk and his name was Thubten Ngodup and 11 years later, during a demonstration in New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Ngodup made his choice — by his own free will he ran to a hut where the cleaning fluids of the banners were kept and poured gasoline over his body. With a spark and a roar he burst from the hut and ran into the square, blazing. Ngodup’s death shook me. There was something about its directness and logic that was hard to put away from my mind.

To be fair to India, it has housed these Tibetan refugees numbering over 80,000, and if it had been the UK, they would have sent back. Perhaps, India and Indians have so many other problems to deal with that the refugee problem doesn’t really stand out.

None whatsoever. Perhaps the only problem I faced it was in reaching there, and when I had to travel through Punjab during the days of the agitation for Khalistan. Of course intelligence persons are there but they have never bothered me. But they question the new refugees coming from Tibet and yes, sometimes Chinese spies are spotted there.

Not much is likely to come out of it. Beijing would want a complete surrender by the Dalai Lama and that means give up the idea of a democratic Tibet and that of a Greater Tibet and also the idea of an autonomous and independent Tibet.

They have installed Samdhong Rimpoche as the prime minister of the Tibetans in exile.