At 14 months, Osel Hita Torres was chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a recently departed lama, and became Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche. He spent most of his life in the Tibetan exile city of Dharamsala, isolated from corrupting influences and venerated as a living god. But then
he escaped, turning his back on the holy life. He is now studying film in Madrid and has denounced the Buddhist order which elevated him to guru status:
Yesterday he bemoaned the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. Movies were also forbidden – except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. "I never felt like that boy," he said.
At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin.
By 18, he had never seen couples kiss. His first disco experience was a shock. "I was amazed to watch everyone dance. What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box full of smoke?"
The article is short on detail about why his parents handed their infant son over to the Dalai Lama and his monks; were they just the usual bovine hippies with heads full of mystical mush, or did the Dalai Lama cult compensate them monetarily for their contribution? In any case, it sounds like child abuse to me.
It is politically incorrect these days to buck the CIA propoganda and point out that before the Chinese liberated them, Tibetans were serfs to the corrupt and self-serving monks who kept them in a technological, social and economic limbo.