The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (19 page)

Former prime minister Jigme Y. Thinley conceded that Bhutan's hand was initially forced by outsiders. In an election upset in 2013, he and his ruling Peace and Prosperity Party were voted out, in part because of the country's decline in that second
P
. “What the modern world wanted was a system of measures, indicators quantifying everything,” he told me. “At first, yes, I was not very happy with this, because the pressure was on Bhutan to adopt . . . the attitude of the material world: anything that is good must be measurable. And what is measurable and quantifiable has a price to it.

“I thought it was demeaning the sublime value that human society should be pursuing. And I also worried that developing metrics could lead to pursuing what is measurable and what is quantifiable, thereby risking the possibility of leaving out what is not quantifiable—but may be far more meaningful and far more important to creating the conditions for happiness.”

Thinley changed his mind and acceded to the data-driven West, partly because he felt Bhutan's evolving instruments to assess well-being did, in fact, extract the essence of GNH. But, he added, “Bhutan has achieved what it has, not because we had the facility of metrics. We simply believed in the idea of happiness being the meaning and purpose of life.”

Tshering Tobgay was Bhutan's opposition leader in parliament when I visited him. Today he is prime minister. A tall, strapping man with a shaved head, his physical energy is barely contained. Soft-spoken, Harvard-educated, Tobgay at times answered each of my queries with a broader question. At other times, he was bracingly candid.

In American politics, Tobgay would probably be slotted as a libertarian brain with a communitarian heart. He heads the People's Democratic Party, which believes in smaller government, decentralized power, and a strong business sector—another seeming contradiction in the land of Gross National Happiness, where the governing policy stresses nonmaterial values.

Outside Bhutan, GNH enjoys great cachet in liberal circles, as dozens of cities and countries dip their toes in the philosophy. Bhutan's tourist logo,“Happiness Is a Place,” makes it a prized destination for spiritual-minded vacationers. But Tobgay is skeptical about the Western left's glorification of Bhutan—“the people who tout and market Bhutan as a living Shangri-la.”

As he put it, “Bhutan is small, nonthreatening. This can be very cute. And people who are frustrated are desperately looking for alternate paradigms . . . I want to tell them: Don't misuse our philosophy for your own political agenda.” To illustrate, he mentioned an American working for a corporation in Bhutan who writes a blog about the country. “He recently took a picture of the only baggage carousel in the airport—and he is shocked. He is mortified to find that it's packed with flat-screen LCD television sets. About three years ago, a whole team from Brazil—Brazil is very enamored of GNH—came here. They called me for an interview. And the anchor immediately pounced on me. She said, ‘We were disappointed. The airport was packed with television sets.' My answer to that lady, my answer to the American, and my answer to you is, Who on earth said Bhutan is a monastery?”

Each of Buddhism's Four Immeasurables—loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—has a “far enemy” and a “near enemy.” The far enemy is the virtuous mind's polar opposite—cruelty is the far enemy of compassion, for example. But the near enemy is trickier to root out, because while it seems wholesome, it is tinged with “mental poisons,” or destructive emotions. The near enemy of compassion, for instance, is pity.

Traveling through Bhutan, I kept thinking that the near enemy of the country's generosity and pride and abundant sense of time is complacency. Many of my contacts there also seemed disquieted by this shadow side of their benign culture. As a reader observed in
The Bhutanese
, “The truth is that GNH or no GNH we still struggle with our daily problems of corruption, indifference, and our general tendency to slack away at everything we do and give it the name of GNH.”

Until recently, the Royal Civil Service was the largest employer of the educated, and these undemanding office jobs were coveted. Despite a religion steeped in the idea of impermanence, citified Bhutanese had come to rely on permanent government employment and benefits. Now, however, government payrolls can no longer accommodate new college graduates. “We have been spoiled,” one official told me. Or as a long-term expatriate here explained, “The people have been infantilized. There is a sense of entitlement that is a time bomb for society.”

Bhutanese proudly abjure blue-collar work. In the construction sites that dominate the urban landscape, it is almost entirely Indians who hammer and saw, pour cement and lug rebar. And it is mostly Indians and Nepalese who make up the road crews that labor in broiling sun and biting cold with crude hand tools, repairing the damage from landslides. (The Bhutanese Citizenship Act of 1985—which raised the threshold for citizenship and erected bureaucratic hurdles for naturalization—hurt the Nepali-speaking residents of southern Bhutan, tens of thousands of whom were forced to move to refugee camps in Nepal. Oddly, the controversy is more conversationally alive in the West than in Bhutan itself, where people have been kept in the dark about the painful events of that time.)

“There are plenty of jobs, but the graduates don't want to take them because they think the job is low for them,” a teenage boy told me. “They want to achieve greatness at a single step. They want to go to office carrying briefcases and laptops. They see people carrying iPhones and they want to carry them, too.”

In 2000 there was one newspaper in Bhutan—the government-run
Kuensel
. Today there are 11, though nearly all are struggling to survive on low ad revenue. More than 84,000 Bhutanese are on Facebook and 5,000 on Twitter. Lively blogs command thousands of followers. And GNH is jokingly said to stand for Gross National Haranguing or Gross National Harassment.

Democracy has helped the Bhutanese find their voices. As a result, some have conceived an admiration—perhaps reverse idealism—for the United States, which they perceive as culturally more upfront and politically more transparent. This is especially true of those who have lived in the States. “What I liked about people there is they don't have a double standard,” said Chimi Wangmo, the feminist who directs the anti–domestic violence group RENEW, which stands for Respect, Educate, Nurture, and Empower Women.

As Wangmo knows well, domestic violence has been shrouded in silence. Bhutan's 2010 Multiple Indicator Survey found that 68.4 percent of women ages 15 to 49 “believed that a man was justified in hitting or beating his wife if the woman was not respecting the ‘family norms' such as going out without telling a husband, neglecting a child, burning the food or refusing to have sex with him.” When she began lobbying lawmakers for a bill banning domestic violence, Wangmo was met with incredulity. Opponents insisted that there couldn't be domestic violence in Bhutan, because “Bhutan is a GNH nation.” She countered their tautologies with facts, inviting legislators to RENEW's headquarters to view photographs and videos of battered women. (In February 2013, the National Council passed the Domestic Violence Prevention Bill.)

“Bhutan must come out of self-denial: It is not a Shangri-la,” said Wangmo. “No matter how much we flaunt GNH, no matter how much we picture ourselves as a happiness country, the hard reality remains that we are among the most backward, poorest countries in the world. GNH is a beautiful concept. But we could do better than this—not just talking about GNH, but living it. It's basically fundamental human rights, which the Western countries have done much, much better than us.”

With Gross National Happiness, Bhutan has turned the metrics of the material into the metrics of the spirit. At the moment, however, the country is poised between centuries-long traditions and an understandable rush toward the security and comforts that the affluent West takes for granted. Will these ambitions subvert the poetic possibilities of GNH?

While preparing for my trip, I had read a number of blogs from Bhutan. One in particular struck me as smart and eloquent, authored by someone who deeply understood this cultural turning point.
Land of the Thunder Dragon
is written by Yeshey Dorji, a government bureaucrat turned entrepreneur turned nature photographer.

I met Dorji on the street in front of my hotel in Thimphu. Tall and bespectacled, dressed in jeans and a black quilted Patagonia jacket, he was gracious, impatient, cantankerous, and funny as hell. Everyone seemed to know and respect him. Wherever we went in Thimphu, people greeted him with a smile or came up to talk politics or gossip, and I thought of him as the unofficial mayor.

Dorji is highly attuned to the poignancy of impending loss. “We have jumped from one very strange period to another very strange period,” he explained. “Today, people have all the time in the world to talk to you. It's not productive, but it's the human side of life. Soon, development will change all that. Bhutanese people will be abrupt, fast-moving. They will no longer be Bhutanese.”

Yet he also believes that Bhutan could learn from the American example. “Times have changed. We have to change ourselves. But we aren't willing to do that. I am convinced the Bhutanese mentality needs a makeover—total. We keep complaining about how fast your life is in New York. But without the development of that culture, you wouldn't be where you are.” What he admires about American culture is its energy, innovation, drive, curiosity, cosmopolitanism, ambition—qualities, in fact, that are conspicuous in Dorji himself and have enabled him to be a shrewd observer/participant in his homeland.

Like many people I met here, Dorji feels caught between two ideals: the past perfect and the future perfect—that is, the Bhutan that was serenely remote and the Bhutan that somehow will negotiate modernity. “Development changes the way people move, talk, think, the way they look at value. If you keep the same old habits, then you can't change the Bhutanese,” he said. “But the moment you change the Bhutanese, you've probably lost GNH.”

DAVID FARLEY

FROM
AFAR

“
YOU PEOPLE COME
to Varanasi from the West because you're so unprepared for death,” said the 85-year-old who opened the door. His voice was bullish and loud. “But what you're all missing is this: You need to be a
see
-er.” Now he was screaming. “A
see
-er! You understand me?”

I wasn't sure I did. I had come to Varanasi, a city of some 1.5 million people in northeastern India, on a mission: to engage with death (a strange quest I'll explain shortly). So there I was at a place called Moksha Bhavan, a gated housing compound about a 10-minute auto-rickshaw ride from the Ganges River that could best be compared to a convalescent hospital. Except no one there was necessarily sick or needing care. The place was more like a waiting room for death, for the people who come to Varanasi to die. According to Hindu belief, succumbing in this holy city gives people more good karma to achieve
moksha
, or liberation.

Seatia Nararyna, as the man who screamed at me was called, had been there for 22 years. “Your eyes are covered, and the only way to uncover them is to really know yourself. Meditate. Think about yourself. And do this until you find
ananda
,” he said. When I asked what
ananda
was, he leaned forward and looked deep into my eyes. I felt myself starting to shake.

“Bliss!” he screamed. “You need to do this until you have found bliss! Now go back to the ghats, think about yourself and death, and dedicate your life to
ananda
.” With that, he slammed the door in my face. So I went back to the ghats, the multipurpose stone riverbank steps that give access to the Ganges at various points.

Varanasi, it turns out, is a great place to die. People—alive and dead—have been gravitating to the city for millennia. The living come as pilgrims and tourists, visiting the plethora of temples that hug the riverbank; the dead arrive to have their bodies burned to ashes on a pile of banyan or sandalwood at one of two cremation grounds—Manikarnika ghat and Harishchandra ghat—and then scattered in the Ganges. To be cremated in Varanasi is to achieve
moksha
—a reprieve from the cycle of life and death: You don't have to endure rebirth in the world, you don't collect 200 rupees, you go directly to nirvana.

Which, given that I'm still alive, wasn't
exactly
why I was there.

When a good friend was killed in a car accident in high school, I felt profoundly unprepared. For the first time in my life, I found myself asking why such things happen. I didn't have any answers. What really disturbed me was the way many friends of the family reacted—by quickly and quietly drifting away. I decided that no matter how difficult it might be, I wouldn't turn away from the face of grief and death.

A few years later, I volunteered at a hospice in Los Angeles. As a “friendly visitor,” I'd turn up at the homes of the dying and chat about whatever they wanted to discuss. Often they would tell me how much they appreciated my presence, and that many of their friends, out of discomfort with pain and death, had already disappeared from their lives. Making these visits for about six months was a deep plunge into the way Western culture deals—or doesn't deal—with death.

The first person I visited after going through the three-week training program, a 67-year-old accountant, took his last breath as I sat beside him holding his hand. Being around the dying, and talking to them, helped demystify death for me. At least enough so that the questions of existence and mortality didn't haunt me as they had before.