The Captain of a State Hockey Team

This is a picture of my late maternal Grandfather, Surendra Behera (Right most in a striped blazer) from his Utkal university days when he played Hockey for the Orissa state team in 1949. At the time, he was 24 years old and studying Law, after graduating in Arts from Ravenshaw College (he did not complete his law degree). The people in the photograph were from different colleges under Utkal University.

The families that fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama

The man in the photograph above is my grandfather Faizullah Baba. Standing left is my grand father’s eldest son, my uncle, Abdullah, age 7, and on the right is Abdullah’s cousin Majid.

During the Tibetan Uprising in 1959, fearing for his life, the Dalai Lama and his advisers fled Tibet with the help of the CIA and were given asylum by the Indian Government. While the world press published stories of strain in Indo-China relationships, very few threw light on the families that followed the Dalai Lama and fled from Tibet to India in the subsequent months.