About

Thupten Chakrishar

Everything I have worked on for the past two decades — the language tools, the typefaces, the rescued recordings, the children's songs — now lives inside one organization. The Terma Heritage Foundation is the culmination of that work and the place I will keep doing it from — my contribution to Tibetan culture and language for as long as I am able. It is the legacy I intend to leave behind.

It exists because of a team — scholars, artists, engineers, teachers, each expert in something I am not. I could gather the pieces alone. Building something durable enough to outlast me took all of us.

Nothing survives on its own. Someone has to carry it, and carry it in a form the next person can actually pick up.

I started writing code and studying 3D animation in India in 2001. Later I moved to New York to study filmmaking at the New York Film Academy.

In 2012 I co-founded the Himalayan Elders Project. Our elders were aging in a country whose systems were not built with them in mind — no language they could use, no food they recognized, no one to sit with them. It has been more than a decade of work, and it is now the largest organization in North America serving seniors from the Himalayan community.

I have a soft corner for the elders that I do not apologize for. They are the ones who carried us out, who kept the language alive in exile when there was every reason to let it go, who built schools and monasteries out of nothing. Everything I am preserving now, they preserved first — under far harder conditions, with far less. Serving them is not charity. It is the smallest possible repayment.

Culture and language preservation is the work I care about most. A language does not disappear all at once — it goes quietly, one household at a time, when the tools stop being made and the young stop finding it usable. So I make the tools: the dictionaries, the typefaces, the recordings, the songs a child will actually sing. Not out of nostalgia. So that what was handed to me can be handed on.

I work independently as a coder and consultant, and that is what pays for the rest of it.

I am married to Phuntsok, and we have two children. They are the reason the phrase "whoever comes next" is not an abstraction to me.

Most of my thinking ends up as writing before it ends up as anything else.