The Paris Review's Spring edition has an interview with Tashi Passang, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, by William Dalyrmple. While the content is mainly what appear's in a chapter called The Monk's Tale in his recent book, Nine Lives, it does not replicate the book exactly, choosing instead to present the story in a question and answer format. Passang had, like many other monks, taken up arms when his country was invaded by China.

What I didn’t know was that the monastery was full of informers. As soon as the Chinese heard that I had taken my gun and gone to the hills, they came to my family’s house and began beating my mother, asking her where I was. They were cruel. They beat her feet, and dragged her by her hair so that she was left almost bald. They tied her to a stake outside our house, stripped her, and threw cold water over her. They left her there overnight so that the water froze to her and she nearly died of exposure.
They came back every day, each time devising new ways to torture her so that she would tell them where I had gone. But I was in the mountains, and it was more than a month before I came to hear of what had happened to her.

INTERVIEWER
How did you actually end up fighting?

PASSANG
I heard about what had happened to my mother. My uncle, the monk, found me in the mountains and told me that she had been tortured. He asked me to surrender my gun in order to save my mother. Of course I did so immediately. The uncle took the gun to the Chinese and they finally left her alone. But then I met up with some of my brethren who were also hiding in the hills, and we decided to walk to Lhasa so we could warn the monks there of what was happening.
We walked for eight months. At first we traveled only at night, but after a while, when we began to near Lhasa, we felt more secure and walked during the day too. There were many checkpoints, but there were lots of other pilgrims and monks on the roads. We told everyone we met that we were pilgrims heading to Lhasa for the Monlam ceremony, when the Dalai Lama gives daily addresses for two weeks.

[..]

PASSANG
On the evening of March 15, 1959, I was one of twenty-five monks who were told we would have the chance to meet His Holiness. We assumed we were going to join the crowds gathering at Norbulingka. I was excited since I thought I might get to hear His Holiness give one of his public teachings. But we didn’t stop at Norbulingka. Instead we continued straight into the darkness. We crossed the wide Tsangpo River in a small boat, and for the next two days we walked and walked, through empty plains, with only hard balls of tsampa to eat. The monks who were leading us refused to tell us where we were going or what we were doing, and since we were all very junior monks we had no option but to obey.
We finally stopped to rest at the village of Chi Thu Shae, a three-day walk from Lhasa. After two hours a party of Khampa horsemen turned up. Among them, to our amazement, was His Holiness, with a rifle strapped to his back.

At the beginning of the month, I was invited to TEDx Mumbai. TEDx is a sort of franchise of the famous TED conference, based on the same "Ideas Worth Spreading" central theme, but not curated by TED. Local organisers can apply for permission to hold a TEDx show of their own, with certain conditions.

For a great report on the event, I'd recommned reading Amit Varma's India Uncut live-blogging post, here. I sat next to him for most of the day, and I can tell you that there's a reason why he's such a popular blogger. While seemingly looking only at his screen, he captured the essence of each presentation and still had his readers getting their updates within minutes of what was happening on stage.

For my money, the two best talks were in the third session (after a fabulous lunch courtesy Blue Frog, the hosts), both of a quality that would easily bring down the house at a TED event: the amazing Ganesh Devy on how language evolves and dies; and the equally awesome Dhanashree Pandit-Rai on Indian Classical music. Both got applause while they were speaking, and standing ovations when they concluded, so it's not just my opinion.

Here they are. Enjoy!

If you've been playing around on the Web for a bit, chances are someone's sent you one of those Hitler parody videos on YouTube. The clip features Hitler's last days, and the scene is set in his bunker, where he rants about something one of his aides tells him. The film it is taken from is the German film Der Untergang (Downfall), and the dialogue is, naturally, in that language. Wags have found that simply adding subtitles in English (and other languages) that, er, don't quite reflect the original dialogue can result in some rather funny moments.

Well, the sad news is that its producers, Constantin Film, seem to have suddenly woken up to the phenomenon, and has begun insisting they be taken down. Google has complied. This despite its director is  quite flattered by all the attention. It will take some time, of course, to find them all, so quickly go search YouTube for them before they all vanish. And in the meantime, do read this 2008 piece in the New York Times on the meme.

In the original scene, Hitler is told that his reign of power is over; he then deafens himself to reality, eloquently savages everyone who cost him his dreams, vows revenge and finally resigns himself to private grief. The homemade spoofs plug into this transformation just about any hubristic entity that might come undone: the subtitles speak to the plight of governments, soccer teams, football teams, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Adam Sandler.

The meme of the parodies — the cultural kernel of them, the part that’s contagious and transmissible — has proved surprisingly hardy, almost unnervingly so. It seems that late-life Hitler can be made to speak for almost anyone in the midst of a crisis.

Fire up YouTube. There you can see the Hitler figure erupt in frustration over his Xbox. He flips out because his friends aren’t going to Burning Man. And, recently, he loses it because Sarah Palin isn’t working out as a running mate. Something in the spectacle of an autocrat falling to pieces evidently has widespread appeal.

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the link between exercise and weight loss, and why some of us don't lose weight despite working out a lot. Among the findings, bad news for women:

In physiological terms, the results “are consistent with the paradigm that mechanisms to maintain body fat are more effective in women,” Braun and his colleagues wrote. In practical terms, the results are scientific proof that life is unfair. Female bodies, inspired almost certainly “by a biological need to maintain energy stores for reproduction,” Braun says, fight hard to hold on to every ounce of fat. Exercise for many women (and for some men) increases the desire to eat.

The late JD Salinger, arguably literature's most famous recluse, refused to publish any more books after 1963. One publisher did manage to get him to agree to bring out Hapworth 16, 1924, a novella that was only published in The New Yorker. Unfortunately, that book never saw the light of day. Here's why, in the words of that publisher, Roger Lathbury, in New York.

Hapworth is Salinger’s great mystical not-quite-lost work. It takes the form of a digressive 26,000-word letter sent home from summer camp by the breathtakingly precocious 7-year-old Seymour Glass. The novella took up more than 50 pages of The New Yorker in the issue of June 19, 1965; I was 18 then, and I still have my copy. It’s the last writing that Salinger released to the world, apart from court documents blocking assaults on his privacy, and it never appeared again.

I had the idea that Salinger might find my company attractive for its smallness. (Orchises is based in Alexandria, Virginia, and at the time had about 50 titles in print, mostly poetry and reprints of classics.) I had addressed my pitch to “J. D. Salinger, Cornish, NH,” figuring that the post office would know what to do. They did. Two weeks later, a short note arrived, signed “J D S,” and saying that he’d consider my proposal. I was ecstatic, even if I doubted that he’d proceed. And then, silence.

Eight years went by. In 1996, Harold Ober Associates, which represented Salinger, asked for a catalogue and some sample books. It had been so long, I didn’t make any connection, but I now see that I was being vetted. That May, I came home from vacation to find a letter from Phyllis Westberg, Harold Ober’s president. She began, “It might be wiser to sit down before reading the rest of this … ”