Programme note for orchestra touring China
The worst thing for any victim is not the pain that one has undergone, but the knowledge that the culprit is still roaming free, and worse if the victim has to stand in silence while the culprit goes about in the crowd with a show of power. To be in a free country and allowing Chinese leaders to go unchallenged, allowing them to carry on their business as if everything is fine back in China and Tibet, is a DUTY not performed. We protest not because we hate Chinese , but because we want to speak to their conscience or their wrongdoing, and tell them we have not forgotten and that we still protest this, and also to tell the world of the injustice we are suffering at the hands of the brute and the bully, thereby seeking their support.
That extract comes from the essay Protest As Celebration Of Difference by Tenzin Tsundue. After graduating from Madras, South India, Tenzin Tsundue crossed the Himalayas on foot and entered Tibet. He wanted to see the situation in his occupied country where more than a million Tibetans have died due to the Chinese occupation, six thousand monasteries have been destroyed, many Tibetans have become political prisoners, and cultural genocide continues unabated. He was arrested by Chinese border police and imprisoned in Lhasa for three months before being deported back to India.
Born to a Tibetan refugee family who laboured on India’s border roads around Manali, North India, during the chaotic era of Tibetan refugee resettlement in the early seventies, Tenzin Tsundue is a writer-activist. He published his first book of poems, Crossing the Border, in 1999 with money begged and borrowed from classmates at Bombay University. The extract above is taken from his second book, Kora, which is already in its eighth edition.
Tenzin Tsundue joined Friends of Tibet (India) in 1999 and campaigns among Indians to win support for Tibet. In January 2002, while Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was addressing Indian business tycoons in Mumbai’s Oberoi Towers, Tsundue scaled scaffolding to the 14th floor to unfurl a Tibetan national flag and a FREE TIBET banner. In April 2005 he repeated a similar one-man protest when Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was visiting Bangalore. Because of these protest actions, Tsundue is often detained and is under police surveillance when Chinese leaders visit India.
Orchestras visiting China so far this year have included the Berlin Philharmonic - a residency no less in Shanghai, the New York Philharmonic, and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Soundtrack for this post is music from Mickey Lemle's film The Last Dalai Lama? Released on Philip Glass' Orange Mountain label, the soundtrack includes Tenzin Choegyal performing Heart Strings. He recorded the track with 150 Tibetan children from the Tibetan Children's Village School for refugee children in Dharamsala, India, and in Pokhara and the Kingdom of Mustang in Nepal. This is music as beautiful and relevant as a Bach Chorale and the spirituals from A Child of Our Time. My thanks go to the excellent The Dogears Bookshop in Margao, South Goa where I stumbled across the beautiful handbound copy of Tenzin Tsundue's Kora.
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