Opinion: My first encounter with ‘Modern Tibet’ – Part II
By Vijay Kranti
(Part of the ‘My journey through the Tibetan mindscape’ series)
It may sound funny if I say that my journeys through Chinese occupied Tibet have made me an admirer of Chinese communist masters of Tibet at least in one way. In their true Han style of delivering shocks of unexpected kind, Beijing rulers of Tibet have opened Tibet to the international tourists who have, so far, known Tibet either through the towering personality of Dalai Lama – who has become China’s Achilles heel, or the supporters of Tibetan freedom movement which is being run by hundreds of Tibet Support Groups all over the world. There are others also who came to know of Tibet through the ‘Shangri-la’ kind of western literature. It must go to the credit of communist leaders of China that they have been able to successfully exploit their own ‘popular’ negative image on Tibet for selling Tibet to the world tourists.