On April 10th 2023 my wife commented to me re the Dalai Lama getting himself into trouble by having asked a kid to suck his tongue. It struck me as fantastically improbable he would do anything immoral with a child and it was probably just something considered not all that improper in Tibet.
Apparently sticking your tongue out in Tibet is just a polite form of greeting. Here is Brad Pitt encountering it in the film Seven Years in Tibet.
Note his (curiously apposite in THIS context !) remark at 0:25.
But a couple of days later I would read that even there asking a kid to Suck your tongue is not the same thing at all as sticking your tongue out.
The Dalai Lama´s act also made me think of similar gestures which are not the done thing in a particular region, and I recalled an incident from well over a decade before when Richard Gere got flak in India for having publicly kissed a woman with whom he had co-starred in an Indian film.
For kissing like that is considered most improper there.
To my great surprise that issue resurfaced the very next day when on April 11th 2023 I was to spot this -
I had no idea Gere´s faux pas had led to any kind of legal repercussions whatsoever, let alone those which were to become resolved a full sixteen years later.
Gere, a Buddhist, had also campaigned for the rights of the Tibetans and their culture.
re kissing in certain cultures meeting with disapproval, I found myself thinking of the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, which was based on Sir Laurens van der Post´s novel The Seed and the Sower. Jack Celliers, played by David Bowie, stymies the intent of the commander of a Japanese Prisoner of War camp, played by Ryuichi Sakamoto, to behead an RAF prisoner. He thwarts that by kissing him!
This appals the Japanese who have Celliers killed by burying him in the earth until only his head is left exposed.
Ryuichi Sakamoto also composed the music for Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. He died of cancer on March 28th 2023 aged 71, Ryuichi Sakamoto | OPUS - Official UK Trailer (youtube.com) some two weeks before the gesture made by the Dalai Lama. I mentioned his death to my wife who said she had seen him perform twice in Cartagena, in 2009 and 2011. Sakamoto was better known, as indeed was Bowie, as a musician. On one occasion here he played two pianos which were somehow mysteriously linked.
