His Holiness the Dalai Lama

It was on my 2nd trip to India, in 1971, that I first met the Dalai Lama in his home in McLeod Gang where he has lived in exile since his flight from Tibet. I was so awed by him and his remarkable personality and the gentle force of his words that I stopped taking pictures just to listen, although my journalist wife-to-be Nancy (whom I’d met just a month before in Calcutta) never stopped taking notes for her article for the American press. Ten years later on an anniversary trip back to India, we were fortunate to again be granted a meeting (thanks to Nancy’s article which had been reprinted in the Tibetan Journal). This photo is one of the few I took from that first meeting in 1971. Since those visits with him in India, I’ve several times been in his presence again, in France, in the United States and in India, and even taken other photos of him, but never have had another personal interview with him. He’s a world star now, so naturally much less accessible than he was for two young Western travellers all those years ago!

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