Beaten, tortured, jailed: Why Tenzin Tsundue can’t stop writing and speaking of a Free Tibet

“When I was born, my mother said, ‘you are a refugee’.

Our tent on the roadside smoked in the snow… “

Tenzin Tshundue, who was born to a Tibetan couple who worked on India’s border roads in Manali in 1975, wrote thus in his poem ‘Refugee’.

Growing up in a tiny rented house far from his Himalayan country, Tenzin first experienced the crisis of identity when he was sent to a nearby school. He felt that he was ‘neither here nor there’. The realisation of a refugee, however, helped. It was from this sense of vacuum that he picked up the alphabets of freedom. Tenzin took a pledge to liberate Tibet, his country, from the Chinese occupation, when he was barely 11 years old.