Last week when Kanyag Tsering (pictured) opened his email he could barely believe what he was seeing. In the starkest, reddest and most gory detail were a series of photographs showing Tibetan protesters who had apparently been killed by Chinese soldiers or police.
Tsering, a Buddhist monk who escaped from Tibet when he was a boy, said he was shocked by the images he had been sent but knew he had to get them to the outside world. "I cannot explain the feelings I had when I saw these photographs," he told me last week at the Kirti Jeypa Datsang Monastery in Dharmsala. "I was very upset that my brothers and sisters are being treated like animals."
Within hours, the images Tsering was sent by a friend inside Tibet
had been downloaded and turned into shocking posters that were pasted
on the walls around Dharmsala and held aloft by marchers as they made
their way through the streets. Indeed, it was difficult to walk a
couple of paces around MacLeod Ganj, as the upper part of Dharmsala is
known, without confronting the images.
The monks, continuing a tradition that dates back centuries, see nothing strange about using digital cameras and the interest to pursue their cause and get their message out to the world . "This is the 21st Century," said the monastery's secretary, Jigmay. "His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has said we have to follow as the world is changing. That is the philosophy."
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