The Dalai Lama has this thing about beards: he cannot resist playing with them — as senior BJP leader L.K. Advani discovered a few days ago.
The Tibetan spiritual leader tugged the beard of renowned yoga guru, Baba Ramdev, when they greeted each other at a
function which Advani
attended.
“I was amazed to see the Dalai Lama first greet him (Ramdev) as one does normally but without much ado, actually pull his beard quite vigorously,” Advani wrote in his blog. “Swami Ramdevji laughed out aloud and said ‘that is his way, he always does it when he meets me.”
The Dalai Lama was releasing the Encyclopaedia of Hinduism, along with Baba Ramdev and Advani in Haridwar on April 4.
Later, Advani met Victor Chan, a Hong Kong-based writer, who gave him a book on the Dalai Lama he had authored.
In the book, The Wisdom of Forgiveness: Intimate Conversations and Journeys, Chan wrote when the Dalai Lama visited Belfast in Northern Ireland, which for many years was the site of bitter inter-religious war, “he pulled a Protestant minister and a Catholic priest close together with a mischievous glint in his eyes, and tugged their beards.”