A tweet on my timeline last week by an expatriate Indian,who goes by the twitter handle @filter_c said: “idu namma desha (this is our country). A Tibetan’s response to me in Bylakuppe, Karnataka, when I asked him how he knew Kannada.”

And yet this Tibetan is probably living in fear after the recent attack on a fellow Tibetan in Karnataka and the exodus of people of North East origin from Southern and Western India back to their homes. Tibetans are often mistaken for people of North East origin because of similarity in their facial features.