Photographer-painter Diane Barker is the person who initiated a short festival of films on Tibet along with her photographic exhibition, Free Spirits at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA).

Tibetans, of course. Diane is exhibiting photographs of Tibetan refugees, their struggle for survival and recreating their own culture in India and Nepal. Her lens has captured their zest for life -- "Young Nuns" portraying two cheeky nuns behind a curtain at Kathmandu -- and their despair -- pictures of the Tibetan hunger strikers in Delhi last year. The exhibition is a virtual window to the Tibetan way of life, their spirituality, ceremonies and the 14th Dalai Lama.

Forty-seven-year-old Diane's kinship with Tibetbegan in 1970 when she first met some Tibetans in England. "Years later, I read Dalai Lama's biography, which was so moving that I desperately wanted to meet him." And her prayers were answered in a year's time when she was commissioned to photograph him for the book The World of Dalai Lama.

"I don't seem to grow up when I'm around him. I was so struck by him that I had to lean against a wall to stop trembling. He was the one completely in-charge." There is one picture of Dalai Lama standing on the roof of his palace against the backdrop of the snow mountains, one in meditation at the Dharamsala in India and another in a procession, with Tibetans gathered around him.

Diane accompanied four Tibetan men, who were out taking some census, to five different nomad groups in Ladakh. "They are such incredibly magnificentpeople. Living totally in harmony, completely self-sufficient and maintaining a delicate arrangement with the Ladakh nomads. The landscape was so amazing that I just clicked away."

Diane spends five to six months every year at India and Nepal living among the Tibetan refugees and nomads, adapting their lifestyle and even their attire. "I've suddenly become impatient with people in my country -- how they complain! While Tibetans are so resilient. Despite everything they have gone through, they are still so full of life."

"There is such a vacuum in the West. People are worried only about material things. You realise this only after spending time with people who make spirituality the centre of their life. Initially, I had difficulty adjusting with people back home, now I am learning to be happy. I think the transition has been made."