Customer Reviews

Namma: a Tibetan Love Story

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kate is a brave English girl and has a heart to learn, understand to a complete new world, so far away. In Tibet the life is so tough, but you will learn lots things, not the life style or the custom, but the view to our life, to understand the meaning of our life. This is a great book to read.

A wonderful tale. I could not put this book down. I cant wait to hear more of Kate, Tsedups lives.

I found it totally unrealistic. Kate Karko's namma struck me as a cross between Mills and Boons and an adventure travel book.
She married a refugee, a man without papers yet hardly mentions this in her book. She briefly writes 'nothing had prepared me for the pain of living with a refugee' but then quickly moves on to more starry eyed prose. There is no mention of the political situation in Tibet, of the lack of education and basic healthcare in the countryside, of the poverty and squalor. Sure the landscape is beautiful but it is hardly a place where people are fairly treated by their long term invaders and where their basic needs are met.
Her husband must have suffered from serious culture shock on arriving in London yet she mostly talks about him getting a modelling contract and living in a small flat. Most Tibetans I have met do cleaning jobs, wash dishes or chop vegetables in Chinese restaurants. Most live in poky, squalid rooms which they share with many others. Kate is giving the impression that life for a Tibetan in the West is a rags to riches Hollywood tale.
Marrying someone from a totally different culture (a culture which does not believe in monogamy or fidelity within marriage) and living amongst an exile community doesn't get a mention.
I find her story hard to believe, my feeling is that she wrote a highly glossy version of a Dharamsala marriage in order to make money.