Firstpost

By Lisa Napoli

On my third trip to the kingdom of Bhutan, I harboured two illicit items: a hand-me-down Burberry purse, donated by a well-heeled American friend for my brand-crazed Bhutanese friend who’d become enamoured of luxury goods after hours of inhaling juicy episodes of Sex and the City. And a one-terrabyte hard drive jammed with a motherlode of Western music, donated by an anonymous friend as a gift to the staff of the country’s first private radio station, Kuzoo FM.

As an outspoken foe of piracy and as a “content creator” myself, I felt supremely guilty about the latter item. The donor convinced me that no authorities could possibly begrudge this “sharing” of his music collection with the good people of Bhutan. I dubiously assented.

Turns out, those Kuzoo deejays were more interested in the hard drive than the music; they fought over the coveted hardware. They took greater pleasure in illegally downloading the tunes from the Internet, one by one, as needed for their programmes. Scanning through the drive’s contents was just too much tedious work; they wanted to choose their music themselves.

My brand-crazed friend, however, beamed with delight at the Burberry purse, while I cringed at indulging such crass materialism.

Ever since the fourth king of Bhutan opened up his country’s borders to tourists and his virtual airspace to television and internet, there’s been a growing and twisted love affair between the place known as the last Shangri-la and my homeland of the United States of America.  Some might call it globalisation.  I call it the “spell of the other.”

Like most Americans who have had the privilege of travelling to Bhutan, I became intoxicated by it the very first time I stepped off the plane in January 2007 to volunteer at Kuzoo. What could be more different than the United States, particularly the gritty, frenetic madness of Los Angeles I  call home?  A mysterious, faraway, once off-limits kingdom steeped in ancient Buddhist tradition. A pristine landscape; gorgeous hand-loomed textiles giving a colorful, uniform attire to all. Most mesmerising of all was the royal commitment to the people’s Gross National Happiness over GDP. For this cynical business reporter who’d fallen hard into a midlife malaise, Bhutan offered the perfect ingredients of an all-consuming love affair.

It wasn’t long before I’d meet others also entranced by the spell. Fellow volunteers marvelled at our good fortune to be working in this place that others spent thousands of dollars to visit.  At the airport home, tourists glowed as they sifted through magnificent digital photos on their pricey cameras. While I’ve been on the road to promote my new book, Radio Shangri-La, people have waited for me at bookstores and libraries to whisper, knowingly, “kuzoo zampo” (hello) and share their photos and fondest memories of their journeys, more wistfully than most people share snapshots of their kids.

Over the last four-and-a-half years since my first visit, I’ve been learning how reciprocal this love affair is. Young Bhutanese are ga-ga for the US. I’ve also learned the lengths to which many of them will go to get their feet onto American soil, in the belief that if they do, their very limbs will turn to gold. As far as they’re concerned, the elders can keep that “Gross National Happiness” ideal, as long as they get a nice car and better handbag, or cash to build a bigger house (though the average Bhutanese house already accommodates a large extended family, and homelessness is hardly an issue in the kingdom).

“I’ll do any job you can get me,” begged the 20 year-old daughter of a Bhutanese friend.  “Taking care of old people, being a nanny, anything.” (Would she do those jobs in her homeland?  No way. Young Bhutanese recently enrolled in a nanny class in the capital city of Thimphu complained about the prospect of actually having to take care of other people’s kids.)

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