Bhutan's Echoes, Lost Youth and a Vote on Ghosts by Royal Dictum

This is the first in a three-part series on Bhutan’s young, its old, and the efforts to bridge the gap between the two, seen through the the country’s annual Bhutan Echoes literature and arts festival.

Thimphu: Bhutan’s had it. It cannot, anymore. If last year’s Bhutan Echoes – the country’s marquee literature and arts festival – was a cautious reminder of the soft power of stories in the event’s first post-pandemic staging, this year’s was precise and emphatic in its message. It is all too well that the world sees Bhutan through the buzz-prisms of ‘happiness’, Buddhism and whatever passes for ‘Himalayan mysticism’, but Bhutan itself is very, very tired of being just that. 

The festival, from August 2 to 5, took place in a Thimphu that was exquisite but largely rain-washed. And yet not even the loudest thunder could drown out the voice of its key concern – that the country has to reconcile with the future to stop its youth from leaving it. And that it has to convince itself that to be happy, even on the Gross National Happiness scale, is to also allow its young to have hope. 

Scattered across Bhutan’s literary, media and arts landscape is a deep, almost desperate, drive to strike a balance between its time-told faith in the spiritual aspects of life and the necessity to make itself relevant for its young population – and here’s the catch – according to the parameters set by the rest of the world. The festival, its cannily planned sessions, and the idle chatter that the cruelly beautiful Royal Bhutan University campus afforded seemed to make it clear that the time for change is now. Suddenly, in grand old 2024, the same Gross National Happiness concept that Bhutan had so earnestly vowed to uphold just does not seem enough to be able to contain opportunities for all its people.

Since 1999, when Bhutan allowed its first TV to switch on, it has been steadfast in adhering to a principle of wellbeing that transcends mere economic indicators. The world, thus, has seen it as unbesmirched. This has been convenient for the world and has given Bhutan identity. But this projection of tranquility has come amidst crippling poverty. Its young have migrated to foreign countries, especially Australia, in stupendous numbers. Just in the 11 months between June 2022 and May 2023, 1.5% of Bhutan’s population had moved to Australia. Its youth unemployment rate is in double digits. It is difficult to be ‘happy’ when your home does not contain your future. 

“We as Bhutanese don’t feel like we belong to the same world as others,” says Sonam Pelden, one of Bhutan’s few women in tech, the co-founder of Curiouser AI, and a sharp philosopher. 

The tension in her words highlight the tension in the country. 

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Bhutan Echoes is a curious festival and straddles several roles at once. A festival of the liberal arts, it is also organised directly by the country’s department of tourism and the India Bhutan Foundation. Festival speakers, key attendees and journalists are given dinners, a taste of Thimphu’s performance scene and a tour of its sights. Overall, it is a pitch for Bhutan itself and since it is the biggest event so far for which the country opens its doors, it is an indicator of what the country wishes for itself.

Also read: Ensuring That the Sacred Is Still Alive in Bhutan

The festival has as its patron a hands-on queen mother, Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck. Her half-son is the king of Bhutan. The queen mother is a writer herself, but more viscerally, a very humorous orator. If the festival is a marker of Bhutan’s ambitions, then the queen mother is a marker of the festival’s spirit. Through sessions, she sat listening with rapt attention – with her eldest grandson, daughter and other members of the family alongside, or simply alone. “I want to hear Bhutan Echoes echo around the world,” she said in her inaugural speech. 

Given how geographically and politically cloistered Bhutan’s existence has been, her words are like a physical door opening. So is the fact that a few days before the festival was to take place, the organisers changed its theme from ‘mindfulness’ – a key Buddhist concept – to ‘enlighten, evolve, and evoke.’ It is difficult to not ascribe such a change into the obvious shift into a motive of wanting to move forward. 

It is not that Bhutan wishes to discard its spiritual core, but at Bhutan Echoes, it did work towards making it more accessible – in poetry that writes itself, the main event’s stage was designed like a traditional Bhutanese living room. Another case in point is this – the queen mother’s youngest grandson, Vairochana Rinpoche Ngawang Jigme Jigten Wangchuk, is a monk. He is 11 years old and the son of a Harvard-educated princess. Last year, at her Bhutan Echoes session, former judge and diplomat Benji Dorji asked the queen mother about this young monk. She said that he had always been wiser than his years and that monkhood had been a natural choice for him. “But let’s not talk about this,” she had quickly added. This was understandable – what’s a royal family without a veneer of privacy? 

So much more the surprise this time, then, when not only did the queen mother regale an entire audience with the detailed story of her grandson’s spiritual journey but also rattled off funny anecdotes from the young monk’s life in her session with publishing wiz Meru Gokhale. “We were not used to looking after monks!” she said in mock desperation, to a laughing audience. At three, she said, the Rinpoche was speaking in Sanskrit. At Nalanda, where his family took him on a trip, he was more tour guide than visitor. “A senior guide tried to test him. Sternly, he said that the place where we were standing was a granary,” she laughed. 

This opening up was organic yet cautious – a reminder at the very beginning of the festival that old can marry new, that it is possible to be devout and hopeful, to be young and a monk.

At one point, after speaking at length on ghosts, Gokhale said that she and the queen mother sounded like “two cuckoos are in conversation.” It set the tone of the festival – the fact that a royal whose presence in a room necessitates everyone stand up, and who thus had the power to dial up the seriousness of any chat, chose not to. 

Also read: Bhutan’s Funny Women and Brave Dreams

Later in the same session, in all her prescience, the queen mother asked the audience, “How many of you have seen a ghost?” 

A queen asking a hall full of people such a question is as Bhutan as things get. But almost the entire hall raising its hand in response is possibly testament to the fact that the past is not that easy to run from. 

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“We all have dreams but at this stage we are all kind of lost here,” says Tashi Yangden.

Yangden is studying for a BSc degree in forestry from the College of Natural Resources in Punakha, in east Bhutan. Yangden is from Mongar, 361 kilometres away. In Thimphu for a week to volunteer for the Bhutan Echoes festival, Yangden says she is already making plans to leave for Australia once her BSc ends. Her sister is already studying psychology there and her parents have been excited to send her too. 

“It’s the ‘Australia virus’,” she laughs. “People stop you on the streets and ask, ‘Hey, when are you leaving?’”

Yangden wants to get an advanced degree – something she mentions she cannot get – and return to Bhutan to work in its forests. 

So why do Bhutan’s young leave? “Two reasons are responsible. There is corruption – kids of rich people get jobs. And there are poor wages. In Australia, you are paid hourly. Here, you are paid a smaller wage at the end of the month,” she says.

As difficult as it is to reconcile corruption with a country known for its purity, Yangden’s words are a reminder that nothing is lost on the young.

It is this cynicism – that eternal prerogative of the youth – that Bhutan’s experts and policy makers are now working to remedy. More on that in part two.