Bob Dylan sang, 'You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows'. Well I thought otherwise, at a time when political winds seemed to be blowing hot and fast in our community. Unfortunately but understandably soon every Tenzin Tenzin with a facebook/phayul account started to look like a wind vane to me. Then I thought maybe that's not how it works after all. Maybe you choose your direction first and then find a suitable wind. And to avoid pointless name-callings, I may well declare this - I started out as bit of an optimist leaning towards LS but now I am more a pessimist leaning towards TNT. There was a brief TW period in between but that is rather irrelevant.
That LS was not the right man for the job became increasingly clear as I started to take a more serious interest in the matter. On the other hand, it was hard to remain ignorant of TNT’s impressive list of accomplishments for long. His talks too, without ‘the sound and the fury’ of LS’s, sounded more sincere and reassuring (to borrow a friend’s description). At the same time what did I make of the several allegations against him, such as of corruption? Now as a rule, whenever I hear of an allegation against someone holding an office, my first reaction is to suspect there must be some truth behind it. Maybe this is because we live in India where corruption is an all too familiar reality and also maybe because our own small community is not lacking in people guilty of such practices and yet walking among us with their heads held high (‘go ghyey-ghyey cheney drowa’). But alas, unlike our hosts, we don’t have a truly functioning judiciary and such cases are hardly settled. Their credibility never go beyond that of rumours and back room talks. So to come back to TNT, I must say that though he seems a decent enough man, I am prepared to suspend my judgment and hold on to some reservations regarding this point. This is also what I would like to see from some of us. We maybe genuinely appalled by the thought of LS becoming the next Kalon Tripa but this should not send us rushing, convinced and relieved at last, into the other two camps. At a time when our exile community is resounding with unprecedented debate and rhetoric, political and otherwise, it maybe hard to stay neutral and unaffected for long but need we dive headlong into the sea? In other words, can we support a particular candidate and yet maintain a certain level of skepticism and doubt? I don’t think it is necessary in a democracy to take sides and vehemently support one and oppose the other. More so in our own somewhat small community and for the people of our age. Our elders may take their incorrigible tendencies to grave but it should not be too difficult for us.
Also I wonder how much of all this may just be the consequences of LS setting our sluggish democracy into motion. I mean how many of us were this vocal and active a year or two ago? Our enthusiasm is recent but our ambiguities seem to have deeper roots.
I think I can safely say that there is hardly anyone among the younger generation who has a detailed knowledge of early exile politics. We may have read our (abridged) Shakappa in school and Tsering Shakya on our own but the fact that our 50 plus years of exile has not found one single chronicler must not be lost to us. Jamyang Norbu does write about it in his articles sometimes but they tend to be anecdotal, the kind that whets the appetite rather than satiating it. So although we could boast of not suffering from the prejudices of our elders, our ignorance in certain matters should be apparent to us. The least we can do is to acknowledge it.
This may not sit well with some but the Kalon Tripa election does indeed in the end seem like a case of going for the lesser evil. And if the worst comes to past, I just hope that some of us won’t be caught too far away from home base, that we may not find it too difficult to put up our hands rather than live in denial. Come Sunday, I do hope TNT turns out the winner but at the risk of sounding irreverent dare I say I can somewhat understand how Socrates must have felt when approached by Crito with a proposal of escaping from the prison. That the wise old Athenian chose to drink hemlock instead is more reflective of the tragedy of the situation than poor appraisal on his part.
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