Banasura Sagar Dam

Southwestern Karnataka is also home to the largest Tibetan settlement in India outside the Himalayan belt. Both recent refugees from Tibet and those born elsewhere, live here in a landscape and climate that is a far cry from Tibet but, as one monk pointed out, with one crucial consolation: they live without fear and practice their faith in freedom. With the cross-border migration of thousands of monks in recent decades, India also seems to have emerged as the destination for higher Tibetan Buddhist studies. But unlike most Tibetan settlements in the Indian Himalayas, the monasteries here appear to be larger and more opulent (more ostentatious at any rate). The shiny Namdroling monastery even has gigantic gold-plated statues of Tibetan deities which, in contrast with its own teaching, must provoke awkward questions in the mind of many a visitor.