What makes Bhutan happy: discos, cars, and Burberry bags

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. [caption id=“attachment_51156” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Bhutanese watch a game of pillow fighting during a coronation celebration in November 2008 in Thimphu. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images”] [/caption] 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.) Continue reading on next page These days, the GNH ideals that proximity to family and a healthy, slower-paced lifestyle that allows time to breathe seem far more alluring to the country’s Western visitors than they do to young Bhutanese. Now, there’s nothing new about “the grass is greener” syndrome. People have always longed for what they don’t have: In the cities, we yearn for space and nature, to dig our heels into the earth. On the farms, we dream of the comfort and ease of a desk job, of the glamour of dressing smart. At the very least, curiosity about the other is just natural. But in the case of the US and Bhutan, that curiosity seems often to swell to mythic proportions. Citizens of the US fetishise the spirituality and underdevelopment of Bhutan, and take offense that the place might actually be imperfect.  “That monk had a mobile phone in a monastery! What a shame. What’s with all those discos and what do you mean there’s pollution in the capital city?” they exclaim. “Too bad those villages are getting electricity.  Now what will happen?” Let the well-to-do Americans live without their roads or cars and electricity or cell phones for a while and see how “off-the-grid” feels. That citizens of Bhutan fetishise the land of plenty stands to reason. Just watch a movie or TV show and you’d assume all Americans are rich, wallowing in abundance. (My host during my first stay in Bhutan apologised that my apartment was so modest, and when I explained that it was actually the same size as my place back home, he exclaimed apologetically, “But that can’t be! I’ve seen Desperate Housewives.”) Another contributing factor to the love affair with the US: The American tourists who come to Bhutan are hardly typical, but the Bhutanese assume they must be the norm. Few in the US can afford the two or three weeks of vacation and the many thousands of dollars it costs to visit. (Lucky Indian passport holders need not pay the $200-plus a day tourist visa, and might even get a break on the typically $800 fare into the Kingdom on the government-owned airline.) Young Bhutanese hear about their cousin who’s stowed away in New York and has landed a job as a nanny earning $500 a week, but they don’t learn the reality or economy of scale that in my country, such an income is equal to the poverty level. I’ve learned many things during my association with and around the so-called happiest place on earth. I’ve learned how to slow down. How to appreciate what I have in my overly busy home city. What I can do to make it a better place. Sometimes I wake up dreaming of the days and nights I’ve spent in Bhutan, the magical privilege of having seeing another land up close and immersing myself in it. Most often, I think of the kids I’ve met in Bhutan, in particular the ones in this video I shot in Mongar, Bhutan last October. They’d never met a US citizen before, and I felt like Margaret Mead as I introduced myself. They could find the US on the map pretty quickly. They even knew who my governor was, but only after their teacher gave them a prompt: “Terminator Part One, Part Two,” he said, and they all nodded knowingly. “Bhutan is just an ant,” one little boy mustered up the courage to speak to me. Yours may be a tiny country I thought, but the power of interconnectedness is growing — and ultimately, far greater. The rise in luxury goods consumption is one testament to that, but hopefully the power of Gross National Happiness turns out to be more powerful. Lisa Napoli is the author of Radio Shangri-la: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth (Random House, Rs 399), which describes her experiences when she moved to Bhutan, leaving behind her life in Los Angeles to volunteer at the country’s first youth radio station. You can find out more at her website or watch her YouTube video . This essay originally appeared on Random Reads , the in-house literary blog of Random House India.