I greatly admire His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and to watch him being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by U.S. president George W. Bush some days ago was a moment of intense pride for me.
While His Holiness is of course not unfamiliar with the United States as are many of its inhabitants who are familiar about him as his followers, I am sure a number of people gathered at the ceremony would have found it so quaint to see a child-like monk bereft of the finesse that many of the medal’s past recipients may have displayed at earlier ceremonies. I sat through the whole ceremony switching between the live coverage of the BBC and CNN and listening to their commentaries as well. The speaker of the congress Nancy Pelosi said that she had met His Holiness in 1987 and I could perceive from the way she looked, smiled and folded her hands in an Asian manner of respect towards him, that he had made a deep impression on her mind.
It was visible that the Dalai Lama commanded immense respect and reverence even though most of whom were gathered there, including the president and his wife, were Christians. But then His Holiness epitomises many concepts of thought and living, such as non-violence and peace, that are not bound to any particular religion but which have a universal applicability. The television channels were commenting on how the U.S. congress' decision to award the medal to His Holiness had met with the ire of China but they had gone ahead heedlessly and projected that it was a recognition to a messenger of peace and not a separatist as the Chinese government thought him to be.
As I closely watched the ceremony and heard the commentaries and the speech of the dignitaries, I concluded that the U.S. was not simply recognising an influential messenger of peace and non-violence but was making a very clever political move regardless of what one of its biggest trade partners thought. Ridiculed over the years by a large part of the world for its double-standards and a shamelessly interfering foreign policy and now for an administration which was terribly criticised for its invasion of Iraq, recognising His Holiness would send a message to the world that the U.S. government was not one which adhered to violence, as it did in its intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, but had the humaneness to recognise peace and non-violence by bestowing one of its biggest civilian awards to a leader who believed and followed those precepts not just in his thinking but his everyday life.
