A holiday with His Holiness – part 2

We can't wait to get through the TIPA gate

“My students tell me they aren’t coming to class tomorrow because His Holiness is opening the new TIPA building,” Cathy discloses over mushroom pizza at the Om Hotel café.

It’s a scoop. We can’t miss this. The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) is just up the road from Kailwood Guest House, where Cathy – who is teaching pre-intermediate English to a disparate group of Tibetans, Bhutanese and a Lao monk with an inappropriate nickname – and Leonie and I are staying in McLeod Ganj.

The next morning I race back up the hill from depositing a bag of malas to be blessed at the main temple [see part 1], and Leonie and I step off the bottom of the Kailwood stairs into a swift river of people heading up the road to TIPA.

“Do you think they know too?” jokes Leonie as we are swept up by the well-dressed crowd, striding with purpose up the hill. 


We pass new strings of prayer flags that have been hung up overnight; small square burners are sending incense and juniper smoke up into the sun light that pours through the deodar branches.

Plastic flowers bloom by the roadside; an old lady with a joyful face holds a bunch in one hand and the snow lion flag of Free Tibet in the other. 

The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) was founded by the 14th Dalai Lama as soon as he settled in McLeod Ganj in August 1959; it was established to preserve Tibetan artistic heritage, especially opera, dance, and music––and also to comfort the Tibetan refugees and remind them of home.

This year the 60^th anniversary was marked by renovating the original performance theatre which resembled a daggy school hall with no sight lines, a clumpy wooden floor and steel tube benches with original vinyl seats.

The crowd waits for HHDL

The votive smoke haze curls around the new TIPA gateway as we go through security.
The Institute is a huge quad framed by low cream classroom buildings. Today it is festooned with maypole garlands of prayer flags against the blue sky.

Inside the square we settle in at the top of cream-painted concrete bleachers in the shade of a colonnade. The air is cool in October, but we want to be out of the burning sun because even though HHDL is due at 9, we know “Dhasa time” and reckon we are in for a wait.

The next 90 minutes is pageantry and people-watching. We wave to people we know in the crowd on the level in front of us; nervous opera dance students practice dance steps and trip over dogs; French charity worker Isabelle invites us on an excursion.

A tall, striking, raven-haired woman in a violet chuba, high heels, fluttering eyelashes and large manicured hands sashays across the square, owning the space like a Himalayan Kardashian, acknowledging the greetings of the crowd. She’s a star in this community. Not only is she a well-known transgender identity, she was also the first Tibetan to appear in the Indian version of “Big Brother”.

Opera dancers hurry to take their places under the maypole flags, the crowd surges forward to the restraining rope. The HHDL cavalcade (if three cars, one of them HHDL’s old XL7 Suzuki, count as a cavalcade) sweeps into the square. 

The students’ welcome moment has come – with tremendous energy and a surge of drumming, whining trumpets, whirling jumps and traditional opera dance moves. HHDL, frail and invisible to most of us, steps out with help from the car and under his red umbrella heads straight to greet the crowd.

Watch a few seconds of the display

Then his huddle of minders wheels and bears him off into the new building with the VIPs and donors. That’s my teacher. I feel a couple of tears on my cheek as I clutch my white silk offering scarf.

We wait. The old lady at our feet shares rounds of Tibetan bread from her Disney princess backpack with us. A well-spoken Tibetan matron gives me an impassioned (and informed) lecture about the threat of Chinese incursion into western democracies and economies. Her parents fled Tibet alongside HHDL in 1959, moving to Nepal, where she was born, then onto India. Tibet is her homeland, but she can never visit, has never been in contact with her remaining kin.

“I still have relatives there who don’t know I’ve been born,” she tells me.

I watch an elderly nun in a maroon bucket hat turn in her seat to talk to a young mother and fretting baby behind her. She hands the baby her brass prayer wheel and turns back to talk to her companions. The baby is captivated.

Watching from the balcony

After an hour, officials start to rush in and out of the door. The “cavalcade” does some complicated turns to create more space in the quad. A crowd of older people forms a half circle in the space and begin to sing. They are the original alumni from the founding years of TIPA, many now in their seventies. HHDL sits on the verandah overlooking their performance, the officials chat in his ear as he drinks tea from a mug. But increasingly joy and enthusiasm fill his face as he listens to the songs; and he stands to watch more closely, leaning on the balustrade to drink in their voices, to accept their grateful offering of the music.

After HHDL leaves in his Suzuki, I leave with the crowd. Later that day, I retrieve our little holy items from the temple office later; they have been blessed, as requested; I feel blessed too.