Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [51]
The idea for all this was, of course, firmly rooted in that fine import called American Idol. Bhutan was not immune to the fever for Idol that was consuming the rest of the world. People rushed home each night to see the latest installment, beamed into Bhutan on a time delay via satellite on an Indian TV channel. In this country where television was still a relatively new phenomenon, any show that even appeared to be a live broadcast whipped the public into a frenzy. And when it had to do with the glitz of a Hollywood so far away, allowing for discussions over people with very un-Bhutanese names, such as LaKisha Jones and Jordin Sparks, all the better.
No less popular this February was the subject of who had sung on Kuzoo. In shops and offices and on the main street in town, everyone buzzed about it, bragged in the morning if someone they knew had been heard on the air the night before. As a representative of Kuzoo, I’d be offered unsolicited commentary on the previous evening’s callers anywhere I went. “The man from last night, not very good. The girl, excellent,” one man told me. “And that fellow who dedicated his song to both his girlfriends—very funny!”
The Symphony of Love ratcheted up to another level the already feverish adoration of Kuzoo.
THE CONTEST, PREDICTABLY, had its scolding detractors—chief among them one of the elder advisors to the station. Madame Carolyn was a sixty-something-year-old woman from Britain who had been imported decades earlier to tutor members of the royal family. She was one of a handful of outsiders on whom Bhutanese citizenship had been bestowed—an honor of which she was understandably proud, and which she flaunted to each newcomer she encountered. Madame Carolyn declared modestly that she didn’t understand why “HM”—cheeky, irreverent shorthand tossed into conversation by those privileged few who had personal access to His Majesty—had asked her, an “old hag,” to have anything to do with the station. In fact, she took quickly to the microphone, zealously taping segments about classical music, and little educational bits about English grammar and vocabulary. “Word of the day: unreconstructed,” her voice would trill, and then she would go on to recite the dictionary definition. Hers was the “eat your vegetables” portion of Kuzoo. Well-intentioned, definitely; necessary, perhaps; but nowhere near as fun as the Pussycat Dolls and Jack Johnson.
When visitors to the station assumed I must be the Madame Carolyn they heard on the air, I was surprised and a bit disturbed to be mistaken for this legend. It wasn’t so much that she was twenty years older than me; I didn’t want to be associated with such prim behavior. What the confusion of identity underscored was the fact that to many Bhutanese, Brits and Americans are indistinguishable—no matter how different we think we sound.
The idea that Kuzoo resources were being dedicated to something other than the celebration of Bhutan disturbed Madame Carolyn.
“We should be doing a call-in show to honor His Majesty’s birthday,” she scolded, lips pursed, to no one in particular. This February 21 would be the first time the nation would celebrate the new king’s date of birth. “Or to mark Losar.” Losar was the Bhutanese New Year, which this year landed just before the royal birthday. Both merited national holidays that would shut down the country for days. Madame Carolyn insisted she could not understand how young people could prefer serenading one another with silly love songs over honoring their king and their national heritage.
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE Valentine’s Day, the Kuzoo volunteers gathered in the room adjacent to the kitchen-studio to prepare for the finale. They’d taken to shortening the contest’s name: “SOL” they called it, unaware of the decidedly unromantic usual meaning of the acronym. A giant bag of Lay’s Spicy Indian Masala potato chips was passed like a football around the room. Several people flipped through the notepad, filled to the edges now with strike marks. Close to two hundred people had sung on the air. Scores