Totally wrong, Ashwini. Try reading some history yourself.

I thought that was a bufalo?

Who says the Vatican can’t change to meet globalization’s new demands?

Though I wonder whether the importance of “religion” will survive the rapid onslaught of modernization and individualism.

Depends on the religion…

M. Nam

The good news is that the Chinese gov’t will almost certainly fall in our lifetimes, and probably sooner rather than later–the number of protests already occurring throughout the country is stunning. The bad news is that what replaces it won’t necessarily be better–there’s no guarantee that things will go the way of Taiwan. . . .

I totally agree with this – it is extrememly condescending to judge a person by his/her ability to speak English!

I am a DBD and when I first landed in the mid-west US, I was surprised by the number of “the whaaat?”s I heard and also children saying (not so subtly) that I (and my friends) spoke in a “weird” manner. I’ll admit here that having studied in a school where the medium of instruction, I had this same attitude towards students from other schools (outside the city, mostly) where the medium of instruction was not English and where the children were not very fluent in it. After getting the condescending treatment here, I dropped my own feeling of superiority just because I thought I could speak better English!

(Later, when I joined work, I have had numerous laughs when seeing emails that had “Your welcome” or “…this work is not to be done in this manor…”).

It’s not merely a question of religion…it’s an issue of identity…and I think more than religion it’s their cultural identity that the Tibetans are fighting to preserve. Of course much of that identity may be expressed or formulated through their version(s) of Buddhism.