With a special foreword by his holiness: The xiv dalai lama Tenzin gyatso.
About The Author
Paola Martani holds the academic title of 'Dottore in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Milano, as well as an MPhil in Linguistics. Since 2014, she has been the course coordinator and lecturer at the talian Embassy Cultural Centre at New Delhi. She is a lecturer in many universities and has alsobeenteaching at Jamia Millia Islamia since 2018. She has five books to her credit:A Student Handbook of Italian Learning Italian through Design A1, A Student Handbook of Italian - Learning Italian through Design A2, Travelling between Fables which has also been translated into Italian, Art and Culture of Italy From the Roman Empire to Present Day and Pocket Book for Students in Italy. In April 2018, she was awarded by the Women Economic Forum for her work and in June 2019, she received the award Young Personality of the Year (below 40 years) by the International Academic and Research Excellence Award. She also writes a bi-monthly column, Culture and Influence', in AsiaOne.
Preface
In 2012, with a big dream, a lot of courage, and a suitcase in hand, I hugged my family goodbye, and left Italy. I boarded a plane, thinking that in two months I would be flying back home. I travelled overnight towards the east. In my long, black skirt I got acquainted with the heat of New Delhi in the few hours of transit, before flying to the north. One hour and thirty minutes later, there I was, in a taxi that sped towards the sky-the blue sky of the high Himalayan mountains. I found myself immersed in shaved heads, red and yellow clothes, and long black braids. The monasteries created a small dream. The air was cool and steeped in mystery. I kept the suitcase in an apartment located just beyond a small forest. There were the monkeys, the cows, and the shock of the impact of something so vastly different. I was 22, and in the first six months of my stay in Dharamsala, I wrote stories I gathered from the lives of the people who gave me accommodation. The two months I thought I would stay became six, and then another six. I was unable to get my fill of the new sounds, the gestures, the mystery and the secrets that were unveiled, little by little, while I was learning to understand a new language. I learned to kneel in temples, to circumambulate around them clockwise; I dressed in a silk chupa, the traditional costume of the Tibetan people, making peace between Italian simplicity and Tibetan embroidery. I started to appreciate turquoise and coral jewellery and to recognize the unobtainable precious dzi stones from the thousands of fakes that can be found on roadside. I taught my taste buds to get used to the different, rural tastes of barley flour, tsampa, and dry yak's cheese-chura. I loved, and I found love, in the simple power of the traditions that have been preserved through time, never changing, despite all the external stimuli that urged them towards 'evolution'. I found a household in those Indian mountains whose members presented themselves as if they were Tibetans in Tibet, a symbol full of hope to maintain their identity and not to let it die. I found family in an adopted brother-in his smile, in his sweetness, in his courage to have grown up alone, a little man in his eighth year; in a younger brother, who had arrived in India at the beginning of his adolescence, who is still fighting today to reconcile his nature with the need to adapt to a world so different from where he grew up; in a man who shared with me a special bond and who, after two years, is always ready to lend a helping hand in times of trouble. I found a family in two children, at the time too small to go to school, who are today almost my match in height and surely wiser than I myself can sometimes be. In two-and-a-half years, I was taught that everything that happens to me has been created by me; that killing even a mosquito is an action that will bring pain; that kindness of the heart is the only weapon that will prevail in any field.
Art (289)
Biography (239)
Buddha (1969)
Children (95)
Deities (48)
Healing (35)
Hinduism (56)
History (544)
Language & Literature (464)
Mahayana (414)
Mythology (91)
Philosophy (457)
Sacred Sites (115)
Tantric Buddhism (90)
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