In a spacious room on the fourth floor of the Gyuto monastery in Sidhbari, a farming village near Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, Ogyen Drodul Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, stands with a grave expression. He is receiving a few people who have sought a private audience with him. Some have come merely to pay their respects and to receive his blessings, others in the hope that he can fix their problems. Two old gentlemen bend to touch his feet, three women have come all the way from Hong Kong—one of them with a “business problem”. There is a reverential hush in the room, broken suddenly by the cry of a little girl accompanying her mother. With an unfortunate sense of timing peculiar to children, she bawls incessantly and is taken out of the room by her crushed mother. The Karmapa finally allows himself a half-amused look before returning to his duties with practised ease.

It’s an ease that has grown in the nine years that he has been living in India and will come in handy if he were to eventually become, as many say he will, the new face of the old Tibetan struggle. In the Tibetan hierarchy, the Karmapa, who is the head of the Kagyu sect and whose role is purely spiritual, is the third most important leader after the Dalai Lama (who heads the Gelugpa sect, the biggest sect), and the Panchen Lama, who went missing in China in 1995, a few days after he was chosen by the Dalai Lama.

... contd.