Is Bhutan Enough for Its Young?

This is the second 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. Read the first here.

If you are in the audience in the auditorium of the Royal Bhutan University for a session of the Bhutan Echoes literature and art festival, then you get to look at people speaking on a wooden stage designed to look like a traditional Bhutanese living room. But, say, the talk has tapered off and no longer has your attention, and your eyes wander to the thick fluttering curtains just beside the stage, then you get to see the Himalayas rolling out and away, from the threshold itself. Wind from the outside travels in with ease. From your seat inside, you see flower bushes swaying – on the campus and on the majestic mountains.

The fact that the Gross National Happiness scale originates from this land finds home in moments like these, scattered across the breadth of Bhutan.

From crowded India, it is difficult to imagine how life can prove to be a troublesome entity for anyone in such surroundings. And precisely because of our incredulity at the concept must we listen carefully when Bhutan’s young raise a point about being forced to leave such beauty behind for basic opportunities. 

Tandin Tshomo is 15 years old and Rigzin Lhamo is 18. On a trip from their school in Paro to attend Bhutan Echoes in Thimphu, the two are calmly sitting outside while a session was on – in possibly the most polite expression of disobedience there was. Rigzin is in her final year at school, and reticent about sharing what her plans are. Tandin says she wishes to study English. “Options are limited here. Since my siblings are already in Australia, I will be going there too,” she says. 

“If you have the chance to return to Bhutan after getting a degree abroad, would you take it up?” I ask.

Both Tandin and Rigzin nod cautiously. 

In these conversations, you feel like an intruder looking in. Are three days at a festival enough to arrive at the heart of a nation which is questioning whether its own ethos is enough for its young? Certainly not. And yet you cannot evade the all-pervading sentiment among Bhutan’s thinkers that a lot is lost, that this loss is a source of deep discomfort and that articulating this discomfort is something that Bhutan has begun only now. 

“Is happiness really synonymous with Bhutan or is it just what the Bhutanese think?” asks entrepreneur and social worker Sangay Tshering at a session. The question echoes through the whole festival. 

In part one of this series, I had discussed how Bhutan’s flagship festival this year is wracked with the drive to make Bhutan something more than a nation caught in its spiritual trappings. Building bridges between the past and the future is a strenuous task for a nation, especially when a chunk of your future is already out of the country and pursuing thousands of individual, fragmented futures.

But won’t Bhutanese people carry their robust cultural identity with them, some even becoming more patriotic than those within its borders – as Indians have seen happening often? Bhutan is, after all, the country where you are required by law to wear the traditional gho and kira garments if you are on government or office business or in formal occasions. All of the country’s buildings are required to follow a set of architectural guidelines. Will all be lost within a few years abroad?

One of the country’s foremost sociologists, Dorji Wangchuk minces no words. “Cultural markers and paraphernalia do not make a person, it is what is inside. We get so caught up in cultural markers here. ‘You have to wear the gho, you have to wear the kira, you have to do this ritual or that ritual.’ For me, if you’ve really built your identity inside, the rest are just manifestations,” he says.

Wangchuk borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin – a philosopher himself found through rediscovery – to put forth the idea that the Bhutanese are holders of a “chronotropic identity” where “a change in timespace configurations triggers a seamless shift in roles, behaviours, discourses, modes of conduct, mindsets, and cultural practices.”

The old, he says, are eager to hold onto a collective identity. The young believe that identity is an individual pursuit. In the process, Bhutan has lost its innocence, Wangchuk says.

“Loss of innocence doesn’t mean you’ve become more mature. Innocence is the quality of being authentic. That is the most precious thing that Bhutan has to guard…If you ever travel to rural Bhutan, people are going to treat you like their daughter. That’s the innocence I was talking about,” he tells The Wire.

Wangchuk, without his knowledge, is sparring ideologically with another speaker at the festival – tech wiz Sonam Pelden, the co-founder of an artificial intelligence company, who was also part of a 2017 Forbes ‘30’ list.

Pelden is everything Bhutan wishes to be. In a session where she was the lone speaker, she stood on stage for 40 minutes, practically exhorting Bhutan to step into the future.

“We can be champions of Gross National Happiness while having a flourishing economy,” she says. 

And then, in a sharp jab to Wangchuk’s ideas of being, she adds, “Ideological purity is a dangerous thing. We will watch ourselves become irrelevant, it will be a huge loss.” 

Also read: Bhutan’s Funny Women and Brave Dreams

Pelden is not wrong. Chhoewang Rinzin Lhamo is a second year student of nursing and midwifery at the Royal Thimphu College. Lhamo, a volunteer at the festival, is loath to leave for higher studies. 

“I grew up in a joint family, I won’t survive without them!” she laughs. But because leaving is a necessity, Lhamo has arrived at a compromise – she will work for a couple of years at a Bhutan hospital and then go. She grins.

“Younger people need to have the trust that their work will be acknowledged,” says the sociologist Wangchuk. “The responsibility to foster a sense of belonging is very much left to the elders. Your family is tasked with making you feel like you belong. Likewise, our leaders in the country, it’s their job to make people feel acknowledged and at home,” he says. 

Wangchuk says that a select few in his generation were sent abroad by the former king with the clear dictum to learn how things work, return to Bhutan and implement it here. But the return which was ordered to Wangchuk’s generation may not be so smooth for Tandin and Rigzin, he admits.

Some measures Bhutan has taken to appeal to its young are more obvious than others. Last year, the king, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, announced plans for the ‘Gelephu Mindfulness City’ – an economic hub at the Gelephu town near the Bhutan-India border, which aims to be sustainable. Not the usual Special Economic Zone, this city will be “inspired by Buddhist spiritual heritage, and distinguished by the uniqueness of the Bhutanese identity,” the king has said.

The king plans to throw Bhutan’s doors open to the world later this year to show visitors the strength of this promise, says Kinley Dorji, a Columbia alum who started the country’s first paper, Kuensel. As Dorji mulls who to reach out to for maximum exposure, an unfurling is afoot. There is less talk of preserving ideals of happiness and more on marrying idealistic tenets with economic prosperity. More on the people caught in this shift in part three.