Sikkim anecdotes..

I was telling my cousin Ajay that I probably couldn't come to Lake Tsongmo with him and my parents because as a foreigner (U.S. passport holder, that is), I needed to have another foreigner with me to go - some funny Sikkim and Indian government rule. We were conjecturing why this might be and I told him what a friend of mine had relayed to me. She'd visited Sikkim a few years ago and had told me that their guide had told them that cannibalism was still alive in remote areas of Sikkim, which is one of the reasons for various funny rules and permits that they had. I told him that the government probably didn't care if a few Indians were consumed here and there, there being so many of them, but the foreigners needed to be safe and hence travel at least in pairs. He thought that was very funny. (The real reason for this particular restriction is that Tsongmo is a sensitive military base (almost at the Chinese border) and foreigners have been known to wander off on their own (the average foreigner being much more adventerous than the average Indian) and get lost in the past, during times of day when the area is closed to tourists).

Just before our day trip to the Pemyangtse monastery, I mentioned Guru Rinpoche to Ajay and he said 'O'h - now I see what that Havells ad means'. Apparently there was a TV advertisement in India for a Havells light bulb in which all these people keep prostrating before this young oriental boy who has a halo of light surrounding his head, chanting 'Rinpoooooche, Rinpooooche..'. The boy, wondering what everyone is up to, gets up and joins the crowd to do the same. Only when he does that do they see that the halo wasn't some divine light, but the light from a Havells bulb positioned far behind the boy's head. I thought that was cute.

Incidentally, Ajay came first in all of Maharashtra in the state high school board exams a couple of years ago, in spite of the fact that he has 20% of normal vision, and is now in the final year of his degree studying economics and statistics at Xaviers in Bombay. He's contemplating going to the London School of Economics next. Even though we were all sent the newspaper clippings and so on at the time, one forgets about these things. We shouldn't though, we should let it be an inspiration.