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FAU dean waits 45 years to see Dalai Lama

Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel,4 March,2010

 When the Dalai Lama of Tibet opened his speech by talking about Buddhism and India at his Florida Atlantic University stop, Manju Pendakur knew his face might have inspired the subject.

FAU's dean of arts and letters is from the Indian state of Karnataka. In 1959, when he was a child, he said the government gave the exiled monks free land to build their institutions of learning.

"They didn't have any ashrams or monasteries," he said after the talk on the Boca Raton campus Feb. 24.

He remembers so vividly the image of the monks, wending their way through his village. Could it really be possible that right before him was their spiritual leader, his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama?

"I've been waiting 45 years to meet him. You read about people…, but it's no comparison to sitting in front of him," Pendakur said, still looking a little stunned.

What goes around, comes around.

That's exactly how FAU psychology major Brooke Grossfeld felt after the 90-minute speech before an audience of 2,800 in the school's indoor arena.

What seemed at first like a somewhat rambling stream of consciousness very clearly had a point: For world peace to come about, people need to work on "first their internal, then external compassion," for their fellow man…and even cats. But not insects, especially mosquitoes, the Dalai Lama noted in a flash of his legendary humor.

"To build long-lasting peace, we need internal and then external disarmament," he said to answer the question: Do you believe world peace is possible?

He does.

"His presence was amazing, and his concepts are so interrelated," said Grossfeld, who was wearing her grandmother's white scarf that she was so hoping he would bless.

She approached his entourage, as did a few other devotees wearing a white scarf, but the Dalai Lama was whisked out of the arena too fast to stop.

At the last minute, Grossfeld got a ticket for his talk the day before at Nova Southeastern University, where he spoke on a similar topic, she said, in a T-shirt with a peace sign.

Karma was working for Bruce Lano of upstate New York as well. He was already in town, staying with a friend in Boca Raton. He was sitting at the speech with three other people from the American Yoga Foundation.

"I've never been so close to him before. I'm so excited," he said.

"This is on Barb's bucket list," said Ashley Lodeesen, an FAU senior, with her parents and their friend Barb Welch.

A few of the faithful gathered in back of the arena afterward to watch the Dalai Lama's motorcade push off, a stretch limo led by patrol cars with flashing lights and followed by a motorcycle escort. He wasn't there watching, but it was hard not to think of Manju Pendakur's boyhood caravan in Karnataka.
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