The night is very dark in Dharamsala, the small hill station in northern India where the Dalai Lama lives, and the shops are so few that after 9pm you can see more stars than lights. Internet connections are always a gamble here, not least because the phones tend to go down as soon as the electricity comes back on, and it’s not often I can access AOL in less than two hours flat (in the land that produces many of the world’s greatest software engineers).

Yet at 11.17pm, a figure is hunched over two computers (the only two) in the Tibetan government-in-exile’s guesthouse. Tickets for a U2 concert in Los Angeles seven months later are about to go on sale (at 10am in California), and this fool is trying to get online the moment they become available at www.ticketmaster.com. He clicks away frantically while a night-watchman shoots him baleful glances and wild dogs bark across the hills.