Think Tibet

Interview with Aravinda Anantharaman A few posts back we had a review about Lama Mani Books. We sent a few queries to Aravinda Anantharaman, the author of the Lama Mani books and she was kind enough to reply back with detailed answers for them. 1. Tell us a little about yourself. Aravinda: I’ve always liked reading and I suppose writing was never too far behind. One of my early jobs was as writer for an online magazine on Bangalore. 2. In the Lama Mani books, it is mentioned that your interaction with the Tibetans in exile started during a interview with some people selling sweaters. Can you let us know more about this. Aravinda: As part of a feature series, we had planned to cover various communities here and I picked the Tibetans, call it karma. I had vague and assorted bits of information about them when I went to the pavement near the railway station to chat with the sweater sellers. One of the sweater sellers was Dorjee. He was in his mid-sixties then, in early ’99. He was also ...

Author speak Amrita Gupta talks to Aravinda Anantharaman about her children’s stories that describe lives in exile. How did the stories come about? Everybody in exile has a story. I first met the Tibetan sweater sellers when I was working for an online publication in 1999, and have kept in touch ever since. It seemed unreal to me: on the one hand these people lugging woollens and on the other, them being engaged in guerrilla warfare. Karnataka was the first state to give them asylum (in 1960), but nobody here knows much about these people even after ‘Free Tibet’ activism became a cool movement. There are five full-fledged settlements with schools and medical centres, but we just know there’s a Golden Temple to be gawked at on the way to Coorg. Is there a specific audience for these stories? The books are meant for everyone. But the primary audience we are trying to reach out to are the Tibetan kids. These are their stories. The distance [to their culture] is growing; many of these chil...

Lama Mani Books October 28, 2009 Lama Mani Books One of the most memorable moments when we visited Bylakuppe, a large Tibetan Settlement in Karnataka, was watching a group of young Tibetans kids playing cricket. The visit to Bylakuppe helped me realise about these wonderful group of people living far away from their home, trying to strike a delicate balance of preserving their own culture amidst an alien environment. Aravinda Anantharaman, a member of the group called ThinkTibet (a platform that helps in contributing to the Tibetan community in exile) and a few other volunteers chose the avenue of publishing children’s books to enlighten and give us a glimpse of the life of these people living in various settlements spread across India. As part of this initiative, two very interesting books have been published. They include – ‘Dolma visits the City’ and ‘Dorje’s Holiday at the Gyenso Khang’. These books are written by Aravinda and illustrated by Chime Tashi. These books are published u...