ABSTRACT

In the life history of any individual, group or larger collectivity, even as exile inevitably endangers, it also creates conditions for empowerment and motivates a search for a ‘true self’. Like any other paradox, the paradox of exile its violent assault on human meaning, its multiple encounters with death, its unending separations, its retrogressive movements as well as its creative possibilities cannot be resolved. As posited by most analytical thinkers, in the uninterrupted flow of life the Self’s presence is to be discerned in an individual’s possibilities of playing, creating, exploring, integrating, un-integrating and reintegrating. The ‘true self’ is an intangible entity that can never completely be understood and whose expressions are more alive in living rather than in conscious deliberation. Like Dina Wardi’s clients, many children of Tibetan refugees too have a need to protect their parents, partake in the suffering of others and also identify with other displaced people.