By the next morning the Dalai Lama’s usual security detail had caught up with him. “Your holiness, please do not go off again on your own,” said Rajinder Nair, on assignment from India’s Defense Intelligence Agency, who was standing at the bottom of the guesthouse stairs when the Dalai Lama came down for breakfast. “If anything happened to you, it would also be very embarrassing to my nation, since you are here as a long-term guest.”
“Very sorry,” the DL said. “I was very well protected by my new bodyguard, Sonam Dolma. He even had a gun, though I surmise he is not as skilled with it as you are. But let us trust we will not need it in the future,” he said, handing over the pistol.
“Where are you going, your Holiness,” the agent asked.
“I’m going to breakfast now,” he said, “and then to meet with some representatives of the press. And after that I’m not completely sure, though I imagine the road will run through Delhi. My colleague here, Mr. Lopsak Tuleng, has been in charge of planning my itinerary so far.”
The DL left the two Tibetans and four Indians staring at each other, and went into the inn’s small dining room for breakfast: tsampa flour porridge, tea, bread, jam. As he was finishing, an aide ushered in the first journalists to reach Mandi: a Times of India entertainment reporter who had been profiling the parents of a Bollywood actress who’d grown up nearby, and a vlogger from Vice who’d been researching bhang for a feature on the 8 best marijuana highs on earth.
“Sir, I believe you know many top A-listers, such as Mr. Pierce Brosnan and also Sharon Stone. Will they be walking with you?” the Indian reporter asked.
“I actually have not had a chance to talk with anyone about my walk until now,” he said.
“It’s okay if I record this?” the young Vice reporter asked, fiddling with a balky iPhone.
“Of course,” said the DL. “You know I was once in an Apple commercial?” “You were?” the reporter said, with new appreciation. “That’s cool. Did you meet Steve Jobs?”
“The ads were not so popular when Apple wanted to sell in China,” said the DL with a smile. “So, no.”
“Is there anything you want to say?” the reporter asked, setting the iPhone on a tiny tripod and hitting record.
“Ah,” said the Dalai Lama, squaring himself and taking a moment to think. “I am a simple Buddhist monk, one of seven billion people on the planet. I am walking home to Tibet this year after many years away. I am not sure the Chinese will welcome me, even though I have stepped aside from politics. I am most concerned with the ecology of Tibet now—it is the roof of the world. As I walk I will carry the Chinese flag with me, to show the Chinese people we are not enemies. Maybe with Buddhism we even have something to offer the Chinese people, who are now rich in many other ways. Maybe not. Maybe people will want to come walk with me, but they should know it is going to be a little boring, and it will take a long time, and we haven’t figured out food or shelter. Also, road traffic in India can be hazardous to pedestrians. If you can’t come, it would be fine also to walk a little bit wherever you are. But please carry a flag like this,” he said, waving the red-and-yellow standard.
Within the hour that short video was up on Vice, and within three hours it had begun to spread across Facebook and Twitter. By the next day it was the fourth most popular item on Youtube, behind a video of a kitten in a bowl of spaghetti, a video of a Chihuahua curled up asleep with a Saint Bernard, and a video of a Norwegian girl posting a new top score on Grand Theft Auto: Mars Rover.
“Why is this so popular?” Tony asked his seminar, clicking off the screen where he’d been showing the DL’s short statement. “It has no pro-duction values. It’s a guy in robes talking into an iPhone. So why?”
“Because he’s the Dalai Lama?” asked Chandrika
“Sure, he’s famous. Professor Kinnison told me at breakfast he’s seventh on the list of most-admired people on earth, though well behind Bill Gates,” Tony said. “But he talks all the time. Why this? I mean, he’s asking people to come walk across India for no apparent reason.”
“Because it’s hard,” said Cass. “Because it’s a quest and he’s an underdog, one small guy going up against something huge. He’s Bilbo Baggins.”
“He looks more like Gandalf,” said Ramon de la Cruz, and Cass flushed as the class giggled.
“I’m pretty sure Cass is right,” said Tony. “All the time I watch people planning campaigns make the same mistake. They ask as little as possible of people. ‘All you need to do is click here,’ ‘Just give us $3.’ When I was your age, there was a popular book called ’50 Simple Ways to Save the Planet.’ It was popular, because we’re a consumer culture, and that’s how consumers think. But it wasn’t popular for that long, because deep down people know that if the planet needs saving, or history needs overturning, or whatever—it almost certainly won’t be easy. Art is about asking hard things of people—it’s about asking them to bring their best self to the surface for a while, so they can see or hear or feel. And movement building is about art.”
“But it’s just shaky video,” Aina said.
“Sure, any one of you could do something ten times slicker with an hour on Pro Tools,” Tony said. “And it’s good to be able to do things with polish. But remember that in a world where everything is polished, grit is actually going to stand out. There’s a good deal to be said for homemade. Look, I could be completely wrong. We’ll know if and when people start arriving to walk with him. But I’m guessing the key thing is what Cass said. This guy is on a quest. He understands the archetypes. He understands what myths looks like. He gets small and large. He’s an artist.”
The same tape was up on a flat screen in the main boardroom of the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. The building was a block and a half east of the Forbidden City, and the room should have offered a broad view over the palace walls, but the smog was thick enough that even the building next door was indistinct—though it was noon no-one could have pointed to the sun in the sky. In any event, the nine men and women in the room were concentrated on the looping Youtube feed.
“Yes, they missed their best shot,” one man was saying. “We don’t know what went wrong, Director Liu—our guy heard six gunshots, but no commotion. Maybe his guy missed.”
“Our guy has been taken care of—there’s nothing to tie us to the attempt?” the man at the head of the table asked. He had a broad forehead, a wide face, and still his wire-rimmed glasses were too big, a leftover style like the wide-bottomed necktie he wore. He looked owlish, old, especially compared to the rest of the people arrayed around the table, who checked their smartphones from minute to minute.
“He’s been taken care of,” one of them said. “And the guy who actually pulled the trigger didn’t know anything about us—from what we can tell he seems to have joined the splittist’s entourage. No idea what that’s about. And the trouble is, that entourage is big now. There are a dozen reporters all the time, there’s Indian security, there are monks. And ordinary people are starting to arrive, to walk with him.”
“We could still do it,” a middle-aged woman said. “We have drones that can take out moving cars, and these guys are just walking.”
“We could do it, Colonel Wang, though that is not our decision. But perhaps, just speaking as people who deal with perception, someone would suspect us if a missile from a drone took out a man we’ve been calling an enemy for decades? And perhaps killing a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a missile might have repercussions for our image? And perhaps the Indians would not like us carrying out bombing missions on their territory?”
“And perhaps coddling a saboteur of the friendly relations between manifold ethnicities is a mistake,” she said, looking down into her phone.
“Your position is noted, and I’m sure you will share it with others in any event,” said the director evenly, looking directly at her till she met his eyes for a sullen moment. “In any event,” he continued, “our job is to figure out how to handle this mess. As usual we’ve got two problems, outside and inside. Zhang, how is the foreign press dealing with this so far?”
“So far, mostly just human interest story. The New York Times guy reads his statement to say he’s given up on political change and just wants to go home. Tom Friedman has a column too, about how it’s the Asian century and maybe China should be graceful in victory, and how if you stand on the walls of the Potala Palace outside the DL’s childhood bedroom you can now count 14 KFCs in Lhasa, which means serious strife is ended. European newspapers are pretty much the same. All in all, not so bad. He’s a curiosity from another age, sweet old man, that kind of thing. On the Economist blog the headline is, ‘It’s Been Swell, Dalai.’”
“Not so bad.”
“Not so bad, director. Except what worries me a little bit is the social. Facebook, people still sharing the video. Youtube, it dropped to seventh now behind a bunch more cat videos, but partly because our data team is playing with the algorithm some. Also, there’s a remix, to a song with the title ‘Walk With Me’ from a Canadian singer called Neil Young. It’s pretty good.”
“Canadian?” said the director. “That’s not so bad.”
“Well, he lives in America,” said Zhang. “Anyway #WalkWithMe isn’t quite trending, but it’s close. And there are some other celebrities. Any current star would know better than to get involved, or the studio would tell them. China’s the number two movie market, number one by 2022. But there are some older people, not making big movies any more. Not so famous now, but maybe not scared either.”
“Also, there’s the thing with the flag, which I don’t get,” said the young man sitting next to him.
“I don’t get it either,” said the director, slumping forward. “What about the internal situation.”
“No worries there—the firewall is tight enough that not much is going to leak in to China even if gets really big in the rest of the world,” said a woman in a bright quilted jacket at the end of the table. “Hong Kong, maybe, but we’ve pretty much cracked down on all that. My thought is, just to be safe, we flood Weibo and RenRen with the anti-Dalai line.”
“Not flood, I don’t think Mrs. Chang,” said the director. “Trickle. Don’t make it too obvious.”
“The best news is, the DL is old and he has no real idea about the news cycle,” Zhang said. “He said he’s going to walk for a year, but in a day or two something else will have happened and people will have moved on. A year doesn’t even really exist in Internet time. If we wait him out—I mean, walking for a year.”
“Point noted,” said the director. “Although it’s worth remembering there
is a Long March in our own history. But yes, a long time ago. Before ‘social.’”
Two men and a woman sat in an office at the State Department, watching CNN—out the window, a winter downpour continued for the second day, and a crawl across the bottom of the screen warned of minor flooding along the Potomac.
“We haven’t heard much from the Dalai Lama for years,” a man on the screen was saying—the chyron beneath his chin showed him to be a professor of international relations from Princeton.
“We haven’t heard much from Richard Gere for years either,” a jovial anchor cut in. “But he’s said on Twitter that he’s headed for India to walk with the Dalai Lama. Do you think this march of his could amount to anything?”
“I think it’s freaking brilliant,” said one of the men in the State Department office, switching off the television with a remote. He got up, pacing. “Or at least necessary. The DL finally figured out the old way wasn’t going to work any more. I mean, the U.S. government can’t help him—China owns half the freaking national debt. No more state dinners for him. The last time the DL came to Washington the best we could do was a seat for him near the front of the National freaking Prayer Breakfast with 3,000 Baptists, and even that sent China over the edge. By the next time he visits, the president will be meeting him at Shake Shack for some fries.”
“What does Beijing say?” the woman asked.
“The embassy was over at the Foreign Ministry this morning, apparently, and they got less flak than they’d expected,” said the other man. “They’re not happy that Americans are going to be flying in to walk with the DL, but they know we can’t stop them. They’ll lean on the Indians too, but I doubt that will go well. Anyway, the embassy analysis is, the Chinese want it to blow over. Less attention the better, that sort of thing.”
“Let’s hope,” she said. “Because it’s bad news for us too if it really gets going.” “You really think that?” the first man said, halting his pacing at one end of the room. “China’s been running the table on us—building islands just to claim more of the south China sea, clamping down on Hong Kong. This could give them fits.”
“You know the U.S. position: Tibet is part of China,” she said. “And you know the real U.S. position, which is we need the Chinese for a hundred other things, like climate change and North Korea and not pancaking the global economy. And you know that if this did get going the left wing and the right wing both would be all over it. Richard Gere we can live with; we do not want it getting bigger.”
“I doubt the Dalai Lama wants us helping anyway,” said the second man. “When he says he’s given up on politics, I think he means he’s given up on people like us being much use. He’s got another kind of power in mind.”
Within 24 hours, the first thumb drive had made it up the Arniko Highway from Kathmandu and across the across the Friendship Bridge at Kodari. The trucker who had it in his pocket handed it to a monk at a tea stand along the busy road, and from there the video spread through the monasteries of Tibet. Agents planted in several of them reported to Beijing that monks had begun sewing Chinese flags, cutting up saffron robes for the stars.
At Darshen, in the shadow of the great cliffs, an 82-year-old man began the parikrama, the ritual circumambulation of Mt. Kailas. Like others scattered down the trail before him, he was wearing a leather apron, and what looked like wooden sandals on his hands. He would fall on his chest in the rocky trail, slide his hands along the rough ground, and reach his fingertips out in front to mark his progress in the dust. And then he’d slowly clamber to his feet, walk to the line, and begin again, a pilgrimage that would take three weeks. At each prostration he picked up the small Chinese flag on a tripod beside him, and shuffled it forward, setting it carefully on the uneven ground so it wouldn’t fall.