It's noon on Tuesday, and I'm taking a quick blogging break before I need to prepare to teach my English class at 2pm.

As always in Mcleodganj and in India generally, so much happens in a day or two! For one thing, on Saturday, India, which had won the semi-final game against Pakistan, went on to win the cricket World Cup after besting Sri Lanka in what must have been a very exciting final game. I didn't watch the game, but it was fun to see the streets so quiet and empty. A short story in the Times of India yesterday reported that many Pakistani cricket fans were expressing pleasure that their "next door brother" had won, and their sense that the best team had won. Maybe sports really can help to bring peace between these two countries.

Saturday evening, I had dinner with a new American friend who had just returned from a short trip to Kashmir. S was recently widowed and is nearing 70, but once you meet her, it's soon clear that she has no intention to retire from life. She'd never done anything like visit India, much less Kashmir, where there are security concerns, but she decided to join a friend on this trip, and she's having a ball. Kashmir was generally cold and rainy, and she and her travel companion nearly froze in their otherwise lovely houseboat on the storied Lake Dal by Srinagar. And no one, anywhere, was able to accept her credit card, which she'd assumed she'd be able to use everywhere as she does in the States. But nevertheless, it was clear that they'd had a very good trip, and that she'd be showing her photos and telling her stories back home in Pennsylvania for a long time to come.

She also had learned, and passed along to me, that a puja (blessing ceremony) had begun in the main Temple, for the purpose of blessing the medicinal herbs that have been collected and that soon will be used to make this year's supply of Tibetan medicine. I went over to the Temple on Sunday afternoon to watch the puja. Inside the main upper chamber of the Temple, long lines of monks chanted, rang bells, clashed cymbals, and blew huge Tibetan horns, in order to bless the big stack of burlap bags of herbs towering over them. This puja continues for days, I'm told. Imagine if we in the West had this relationship to the medicines we use to cure people? It's hard to imagine a process that's further to the other end of the spectrum than the highly commercialized drug manufacturing and delivery processes of the US.

Whenever I visit this upper part of the Temple--which I do at least once a week--I like to circumambulate it on a designated walking path, and I did some circumambulations once I'd watched the puja for a while. It's always a very peaceful, centering thing to do, and there are long rows of big prayer wheels to turn as I walk. I'm never alone, either in walking or in turning the prayer wheels, and the wheels are rarely still. There are always Tibetans, many of whom appear to be older refugees, and always lots of visiting Indians as well as Westerners. A group of young Punjabis from a town near Amritsar asked to take my picture with them. I was happy to oblige, and told them how impressed I had been by our visit to Amritsar and the Golden Temple. Farther along, I encountered a young Tibetan father and his young son, who was just learning to walk, and who was sporting tiny sneakers that squeaked like ducks as he tottered along the walkway. His father and I grinned at each other with delight as we watched him.

Meanwhile, outside the Temple gates, a small crowd had gathered, in part because news had gotten around that His Holiness was about to arrive, on his way back from a meeting in Delhi. The crowd by the gates included a large group of local students fasting for the day in honor of a young Tibetan monk who had immolated himself in Lhasa several weeks ago to protest China's restrictions on Tibetans (many of us were fasting along with them, in solidarity; it was probably a bad day for Mcleodganj's restaurants). At a booth opposite the students, I made a donation and signed a related petition to the Chinese government. I suppose that none of us who stopped by the booth are going to hold our breaths waiting for changes in Tibet, but then, large political changes usually happen in small steps. Think of the decades of patient work it took Mr. Gandhi and his colleagues to win India's freedom!

The crowd included mostly Tibetans, along with Indians and Westerners. It was an attractive group: so many people, young and old, many already with palms pressed together in prayer. Love and devotion beamed from many faces. A moment or two later, we could hear a police siren in Temple Road below us, then a police vehicle drove past us into the Temple gates, and then, as I'd already learned to expect, in the passenger seat of the second car was His Holiness, glimpsed just for a moment or two before his car passed through the gates and out of view. I walked back up the road, reflecting on his heavy responsibilities, and how he must know very well how many people rely on him. There will never be such a thing as a quiet retirement for him.