Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [104]
A group of boys passes us; they make a disparaging remark about the two chilips, which is rude slang for foreigners. Pema is flattered to be so incognito that she’s unidentifiable as a Bhutanese, but also wants to put the boys in their place, so she starts nonchalantly speaking to them in their native tongue about the weather and where they’re going. Turns out they’re headed to the Buddha, too.
Though they climb up through the woods and we stay on the paved road, built in anticipation of the carloads of visitors who will one day make this voyage, we arrive at the construction site at about the same time. A caretaker allows us in, breaking the rules since there’s no work taking place today. When I was here last year, there was just a clearing; now the Buddha has begun to take shape, and the distinct gleam of the 140-foot structure peeks dramatically through the mask of scaffolding. I wonder if when it’s complete it’ll look majestic or Vegasesque or a bit of both. The boys are taking pictures. We do, too.
“I love you, Lisa Jane,” shouts Pema, as she snaps away at the Buddha; then she trains her point-and-shoot camera on the ever-widening footprint of the Thimphu Valley below. There are so many cranes and construction sites mirroring the one before us that it looks like a giant game of SimCity. “I love you back, Pema Lhamo,” I say, and for a minute I forget how odd it is that I have this lovely friend, all these lovely friends on the other side of the world from my home. It feels less odd, really, than it does lucky.
IN THE WINTER of 2010, three big things were occupying the minds of the people in Thimphu. The first was the premier occupant of a new six-story structure next to the clock tower. As weary Indian laborers frantically tacked on the roof, curious customers packed the ground floor of Druk Punjab, Bhutan’s first commercial bank, sipping the free tea and eagerly signing up for new accounts. The bank was an outpost of an Indian concern, and it promised a critical link to the outside world that neither the established government-owned banks, the television, nor the Internet could: ATM cards that would work in India and in Bhutan, making it possible to travel for business or pilgrimage without wads of cash. There were other enticements, too: lower interest rates on loans that made it easier to build a new house or to buy one of the new cars from the fancy showrooms cropping up on the outskirts of the city. All this was big news in a place where just forty years ago there wasn’t any cash money and where the idea of institutional lending to the masses was still a cutting-edge concept. The pièce de résistance was the bank’s promise to introduce in a few months the ultimate trapping of capitalism: credit cards.
As if to tamp down the encroaching acquisitive spirit just a bit, and remind the Bhutanese of their Buddhist roots, a series of meetings was being held by educators during the annual winter break to discuss exactly how to introduce the fundamentals of Gross National Happiness into the school curriculum. Lately the Bhutanese elite had begun to feel that outsiders were doing a better job of examining and practicing the national philosophy than they were themselves. A lama was deployed to teach meditation skills to the assembled principals of the schools; by taming their minds, the thinking went, they’d be better equipped to help their students tame theirs. The prime minister graced one of the sessions with a four-hour speech that summed up his concerns:
Our challenge is that schools [should] not produce selfish economic animals who are only motivated to succeed at the cost of relationships, environment, and family. We have to convince the children that what parents have has nothing to do with who they are. Our little country, once so blissfully isolated in a remote corner of the Himalayas, seemingly protected by high