At a lonely border post high on the Himalayan frontier, Ramaswamy Balasubramanian peered through his binoculars at the People's Liberation Army soldiers stationed in Tibet—who were peering through their scopes back at him. Tensions between India and China had been high for several years since 1962, when the two countries traded shots across their disputed border. The PLA soldiers, knowing they were being watched, taunted Balasubramanian and his fellow Indian soldiers by shaking, defiantly, high in the air, their pocket-sized, bright-red copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao—better known in the West as "Mao's Little Red Book."