Yangzom, 30
Her warm smile is a pleasant change from the cold breeze outside. Dr Yangzom, 30, is generous both with her time and advice when it comes to her patients. But then, playing the perfect healer is what she had always dreamed of while growing up in McLeodganj, the town her grandfather, a guerrilla leader in Tibet, had adopted in 1959.
“I always wanted to work in a field where I could serve my people,” she smiles, telling you about her early years at Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi followed by a three-year stint at a private hospital in the national capital. Fast-paced and exciting, Delhi was full of friends and possibilities but Yangzom missed the sights and smells of home. So one day, she packed up her bags and moved back to the tiny hill town to work in a government hospital at half the salary she got in Delhi.
Two years on, this stylish doctor with a fetish for sappy Korean movies, has no regrets. “Money can’t buy you job satisfaction or the sense of belonging that comes from working for your own people,” she explains. “No matter where I go, my identity is paramount, so why should I run away from it by moving away in distance,” she argues. It’s this identity that has been making her march with the protesters in the past few days. “That’s the least I can do,” she shrugs, calling the present stir yet another chapter in the “Tibetan freedom struggle”. Her grandfather Jamyang Choephel, a much-feared guerrilla leader in Tibet, was part of this movement. “I grew up listening to his stories about Tibet,” she says. Even though she has now graduated to self-help gurus like Robin Sharma and glossies such as Cosmopolitan, her grandpa’s tales continue to inspire. Ask her if she thinks free Tibet is a possibility and she says, “Complete freedom is like asking for the sun and the moon, but we can make a go at autonomy. That I think is possible.”

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