The Riddle of the Yak Butter Tea

We're 40% of the way towards our fundraising budget at Kickstarter, which is pretty awesome. Please think about helping us be more awesome by being closer to said budget.

In other awesome news, I solved a riddle.

Two years ago, I was in Dharamsala taking a tour of a monastery that's part of the TNP system, and talking about how yak was kosher and therefore I could drink yak butter tea. To which my guide said, "There is no such thing as yak butter tea. Yaks don't produce milk that butters."

And I thought, "Well, this has to be true; she's an abbess, she must know what she's talking about," and I took it on faith. But when I repeated this story to just about anyone, they said, "No, that is real yak butter in the tea. What else do you think it is?" (Unless you order in in America, in which case it is just butter from the grocery store)

This frustrated me for a long time, until I happened to be reading a Tibetan photography book with an introduction by a monk, who went into a side note about yaks. It seems that the word "yak" actually means "male yak" while the word "dri" means "female yak." There's a gender signifier that hasn't made it into English. Since the stuff that comes out of yaks, which are all male, doesn't butter, there is no such thing as "yak butter tea." It's "dri butter tea," though you will look weird if you order that in English. But apparently Tibetans find Western people making this mistake and consistently referring to it as yak butter tea hilarious but for the most part are uninterested in letting us in on the joke.

And I can't blame them, because as far as jokes on stupid white tourists go, it's a pretty good one.

Kickstarter Project

For those unfamiliar with the site, Kickstarter is a program where people can donate money to creative projects and receive prizes. Their donation is only collected if the project meets its initial goal and can be completed, so you're not throwing money at people who are not going to produce anything.

My program is called The World That Was: A Living History Project, and is my attempt to record the oral histories of people who lived in independent, pre-1950 Tibet. I've wanted to do something meaningful for the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamsala for a few years, and this was inspired by Jewish organizations like the Shoah Institute and the research projects at Yad Vashem. Anyway, I explain that all in the video. The program asks for regular updates during my stay in India, and those will be posted here, along with pictures and video as I'm bringing a camera and a computer this time.

Also, if you're interested in purchasing a fairly high-quality Tibetan thangka, $300 is probably what you'd spend in America doing it (maybe a bit less with considerations for size and quality), whereas if you donate to the program you'll get one AND help out what I hope is a good cause, since thangkas are cheaper over there and I happen to know a bunch of artists and where to buy them.

Update for 2011

G-d Willing I will be in India working with the Tibetan refugee community in February 2012. Stay tuned for more information.