Where to go from here?

We streamed LUNANA: A YAK IN THE CLASSROOM this week. Nominated for an Oscar as Best International Feature Film, the movie tells the story of a young Bhutanese teacher dispatched, over his objections, to the most remote school in the country, a 10 day hike into the Himalayan foothills. His electronic devices go dead, keeping a fire burning requires collecting yak dung, and the school doesn't even have a blackboard. But the children turn out to be bright and eager to learn, the village leader's daughter teaches him to appreciate the magic of this remote valley, and even to how to get along with Norbu, the yak who lives in the classroom. Too soon, the teacher leaves this beautiful place, returns to accomplish his urban dream of emigrating to Australia -- and realizes that he may have left behind something vital.

Sounds trite, doesn't it? And maybe it is. The actors are beautiful and the scenery majestic. The film was an unalloyed joy to watch.

Yet I realized overnight that the film had stayed with me; there's depth in it.

I had the privilege of traveling in Bhutan in 2013. It was a fascinating place: a constitutional monarchy with a governing parliament, chosen by elections that international observers characterize as largely free and fair. The state aims to give all Bhutanese young people a modern education. In a country with many local dialects, all students learn English along with Dzongkha. Education promotes Western science; urban dwellers are plugged in citizens of the world. Yet Bhutan is also trying to keep its distinctive Buddhist culture alive and flourishing. Professional life is carried on in traditional dress; politicians compete to promote "Gross National Happiness" as well as security, health, and prosperity.

None of this is easy to balance. People we encountered in 2013 openly discussed whether the balance -- old and new, capitalist and cooperative, scientific and spiritual -- that makes Bhutan feel unique could be sustained. The tiny kingdom sits between Indian and China, both seeking influence. It has a Nepali minority who are very poorly treated. And if Bhutanese are really free, will they continue to want to preserve the national way of life?

These questions are the subject of Lunana. The filmmakers don't bash you over the head with them, but they are all there to ponder amid the gorgeous scenery. Highly recommended.

Where the pandemic is reinforcing concern for the common good

Not all small Himalayan states adjacent to India are in the terrible straits to which the coronavirus has reduced Nepal.

Thimphu, Bhutan's capital from above

 The tiny, rigidly well-organized, little constitutional monarchy in adjacent Bhutan responded to the advent of vaccines with the kingdom's customary efficiency. According to NPR:

It took less than two weeks for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan to vaccinate almost all of its eligible population.

The country's vaccination campaign kicked off on March 27. By April 8, according to the Ministry of Health, 93% of eligible adults had gotten their first dose. Officials said 472,139 people between ages 18 and 104 had been vaccinated as of that date, and they urged other eligible individuals to follow suit. 

In a statement, Health Minister Dasho Dechen Wangmo described the campaign as a "sense of purpose that each of us is embracing to protect our country and the people we love." She urged individuals to get vaccinated to protect themselves and their communities — as well as King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. ...

... State-owned newspaper Kuensel stated in an editorial that the country's efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic have been "exemplary right from the beginning," thanks to leadership, front-line workers and what the paper describes as a cooperative public.

While noting it's premature to celebrate before people have had their second doses, it said that the country's size had certainly contributed to the vaccine's successful rollout — and that this has implications for tackling other issues related to the economy, unemployment and technology.

"As we realise the advantage of our smallness from the vaccination programme, it is a lesson too valuable to not replicate in our other endeavours," it concluded.

 Bhutan may not be a paradise of happiness, but cultivating a societal ethic of care for the common good sure pays off in a pandemic.

Saturday scenes and scenery: just an ordinary building

While traveling last month, I found myself  in Paro, Bhutan, sitting across from this commercial building. For Bhutan, this is an ordinary, modern, commercial building, nothing special. I thought to photograph the painted figures that encircle it -- they too are nothing unusual. Similar motifs cover every other building of similar size in the town.

The central panel portrays the four harmonious friends of Tibetan bhuddism.

These four mountain creatures run around the frieze. Every moderately prosperous building and residence that I saw in Bhutan was covered with such paintings. They aren't for tourists; they are there because Bhutanese like them. They advertize prosperity and right concern for the order of things.

These women sat on the steps of the building, consulting over a knitting project.

 

In the street, a cow might wander by.

Click on any of these photos to see enlarged.

An endangered language?

A friend suggested that I might want to look into a website called Priceonomics.com. She was right. The business of the site seems to be crawling the web for data and selling the results; their blog is a potpourri of odd and less odd factoids collected along the way. It's fun for a stats geek.

I was particularly struck by a posting that reports: Only 4% of Languages Are Used Online. The author became aware that his Egyptian friends largely used Latin characters on the web rather than Arabic letters. Arabic is in no danger of erasure by technological change, but the web does "endanger" many less widely used tongues.

But thousands of other languages may never make the leap into the digital age. A full 96% of the world’s 6,000+ languages appear to be dead when it comes to use on cell phones, laptops, and tablets, meaning that the Internet could be to languages what a certain comet was to the dinosaurs.

…Linguists note the extinction of languages with some pessimism: around 2,500 out of 7,000 languages spoken today are endangered. But the picture [mathematical linguist András] Kornai emerges with is much more alarming. Only about 170 languages, or 2%, are vital or thriving online. Another 140 (1.7%) are borderline cases. The remaining 96% (over 6,000) are still or “digitally dead.” And in Kornai’s opinion, given the prerequisites of a strong publishing infrastructure that includes technical tools to make it possible to use a language on digital devices and broad use by the younger generation, those 6,000+ languages have no hope of making the leap into the digital future.

This fit with some of what I saw on my recent trip to Bhutan. Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, is just the sort of language that gets left out of the international discourse on the web. According to an article in the Wikipedia, on Wikipedia, only about 160,000 of the Bhutanese are native speakers; the other 540,000 have other home tongues. Though Dzongkha is required for official business and is used for self-consciously Bhutanese culture (see this artist, for example), the language of instruction in the schools is English. English serves to bridge language gaps between Bhutanese and also with their large, sometimes culturally encroaching, neighbor India. And English is easily used on the web.

Bhutan is one of the those countries which is leaping much of the industrial age to move directly into the digital one. Instead of installing the wiring for telephone communication, they've gone straight to ubiquitous cell phone coverage. People don't listen to radio; because so many have electricity, a byproduct of the national export of hydropower to India, they've gone straight to television and computers.

A Bhutanese living room in an unpretentious house

One member of our group suggested that her elementary school teacher daughter's third grade class might make good pen pals for Bhutanese students. She had to be politely told that the children would have to use email; land postal service is an expensive relic of another time, barely known outside the capital. But schools seem to be wired. And our guide explained that one third of Bhutanese are in some kind of educational program. When he graduated 20 years ago, Bhutan had 43 graduates from college that year. Now 3000 complete college annually. These young people, and every shop keeper and professional and business person, are all online; most likely in English.

Bhutan aims to retain much of its traditional culture while adapting and succeeding in a very different present. Language will be an issue and could be a stumbling block …

Friday cat blogging: a few Bhutanese felines

Cats are everywhere in Bhutan ...

...including at the feet of this large monk.


This one was along the roadside at Chimi Lhakang.


And this one was one of the few residents of the disused former royal palace at Bumthang.


This one ruled the roost at a rural temple ...


while this one hunted among cut rice stalks.


This creature lives with the nuns at a mountain nunnery.

Bhutan: can it preserve while modernizing?

Bhutan is erecting the world's tallest statue of the Buddha at its capital Thimpu.

In response to some of my Bhutan photos, Rain asked:

Do they then have a wealthy class who suck up what income there is? Their lifestyle, as you photographed it, reminds me of the Mongolians with the way parts of modern life have come but not enough income in their traditional raising of animals to support anything but minimal living. The beauty of such is great but hard to imagine living that way.

These questions seem to me on the right track. They are all questions about how Bhutan combines the mixed blessings of modernity -- capitalism, democracy, Western science, education, medicine -- while trying to preserve its particular heritage.

There are fearsome powers in this world.

No one is more aware than the Bhutanese that opening to the world brings dangers as as well as material benefits. Electricity brings a less laborious life -- and a dubious flood of television images and video games. Better roads improve people's standard of living -- and tempt many to flock to the city where there are few jobs available to uneducated peasants and family ties break down. And so on …

The court is within the traditional administrative center, the local dzong: a massive temple/monastery/fortress and court building. National dress is required to transact business in the dzong.

Bhutan has its answer to these contradictions. That response is to teach and reinforce national pride and culture using the limited monarchy as its symbolic focus, to encourage continued wearing of the national dress by law (apparently seldom enforced), and to immerse citizens ever more deeply in its historic Tibetan Buddhism.

Guru Rinpoche, who tradition holds united the country through Buddhist practice in 8th century CE, is pictured as taming the tiger. Might that animal represent these fractious mountain people as well as their animist deities?

There are strict rules for visits to sacred sites.

And above all, there are the observances of Tibetan Buddhist practice which contain an ever-present awareness of principalities and powers, of cosmic powers and spiritual forces, that individual and collective humanity co-exists with.


The in-flight magazine of Bhutan's national airline, called Tashi Delek -- On the Wings of Dragons, pointed me to an extremely accessible dissection of some of these issues. Helena Norberg-Hodge writes about Ladakh, a region of Indian-administered Kashmir. Her insights also seem relevant to Bhutan's struggle to balance ancient and modern elements -- with the significant difference that the Bhutanese have very consciously anticipated the threats from modernity as well as its benefits.

… does development have to mean destruction? I do not believe so. I am convinced that the Ladakhis and other traditional peoples could raise their standard of living without sacrificing the sort of social and ecological balance that they have enjoyed for centuries. To do so, however, they would need to maintain their self-respect and self-reliance. They would need to build on their own ancient foundations rather than tearing them down, as is the way of conventional development.

Bhutan is striving to prove that this is possible. I can only wish these warm, smart people well.

Bhutan: rice harvest time

Walking along a path through rice fields, I felt as if I'd wandered into Van Gogh's Harvest in Provence.

Harvest scenes throw many of us into images from history I think. This is not the farming we've observed.

 Here, separating chaff from the rice grains with the help of the breeze ...

The sheaves are beaten on a tarp to catch the grains of rice.

All those cast away stalks will provide animal fodder over the winter. 

We were told that, for all this labor, Bhutan is not self-sufficient in rice; they must import from India.

Some Bhutanese young people

This young monk was intent on his mission -- I think that was delivering lunch to someone.

This boy insisted I must take his picture, but when I clicked the shutter, his friend seemed more pleased than he did.

We were an unfamiliar distraction, I think.

Adult work for a small person ...

At play outside a temple ... perhaps his relatives were within.

These are middle school students at morning assembly. We were told that one third of Bhutanese are in some kind of schooling and that the country (population ca. 700,000) produces 3000 college graduates annually. It is not clear Bhutan produces a commensurate number of jobs requiring higher education.

A few Bhutanese ...

Bhutanese are surprisingly willing to let tourists take their pictures. When I asked for permission, I was almost never waved away. This woman had just happily sold me some cloth she had woven; her more reluctant daughter could have hailed from any culture in the world.

This gent was harvesting turnips, for animal feed I think.

She watched us from her doorway ...

He stalked out to get a better look at us ...

Her delight in our appearance was not rare.

This city fellow saw no reason to interrupt his conversation to attend to passing tourists.

Over the next few days I'll be posting a bounty of photos from Bhutan ... tomorrow a selection of beautiful children and young people.

Friday critter blogging: Bhutan lets sleeping dogs lie

Few sights in Bhutan amazed me more than this one on market day in the town of Paro.


In Bhutan, dogs seem to plunk down wherever they wish and apparently doze contentedly.


Fear seems no part of their experience.

In this, Bhutan is very different from other poor countries where I have visited. In ten days, I only saw a human hit a dog once, apparently because the striker thought the animal might be bothering foreign tourists who had less friendly attitudes toward a stray. The dogs seem well fed. In Thimphu, the capital and only large city, they do bark incessantly at night, but otherwise practice the same contented behavior as their rural cousins. (There appear to have been only a few breed ancestors to these Bhutanese mutts.)

This article suggests that the apparent health and well being of Bhutanese dogs is related to people's adaptation to their equivocal relationship to meat-eating. As devout Buddhists, Bhutanese are ostensibly mostly vegetarians, but in fact they do consume meat. Their dogs conveniently dispose of the associated offal. Or so the article claims. It also reports a humane effort to sterilize 4000 of Thimphu's dogs to reduce the evening cacophony.

Homecoming, a kludge, and reason to hope

Back on the ground in the USA, I see we are living through a panic about the long delayed launch of what this country has been able of offer as a response to human infirmity. That Obamacare, that unwieldy kludge, is struggling with its own complexity is not surprising. When you promise to preserve a mass of historically accreted work-arounds and pockets of private profit, it is not surprising that you get a mess.

It's worth going the root of why this mess inspires such fanatical resistance. In a nutshell, from Thomas Edsall:

… the Affordable Care Act can be construed as a transfer of benefits from Medicare, which serves an overwhelmingly white population of the elderly – 77 percent of recipients are white — to Obamacare, which will serve a population that is 54.7 percent minority.  Over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act cuts $455 billion from the Medicare budget in order to help pay for Obamacare.

Those who think that a critical mass of white voters has moved past its resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other resources from the middle class to poorer minorities merely need to look at the election of 2010, which demonstrated how readily this resistance can be used politically. ….

Yes indeed, a dwindling white majority doesn't want "its taxes" used for "those people." And it can't hear that Medicare changes are designed to squeeze profiteers who drive cost increases, not the patients.

Fortunately, however miserable the interim will be -- and people will suffer unnecessarily during it -- the last few decades in California have showed that betting against the inevitable browning of the United States initiates a political death spiral for the party that chooses that path. Republicans are marginalizing themselves. And good riddance to them! Exclusion, greed and resentment are ugly -- our dark side -- the antithesis of what can make this society exceptionally good.
*** By the way, the country of Bhutan -- a resource-poor Himalayan quasi-monarchy/quasi-democracy where I've just spent ten days -- makes education and medical care free to all Bhutanese. I'm sure there remain issues of imperfect access to these common goods, but this obscure fragment of the back of beyond seems to have a clue about how a well functioning society behaves …

Bhutan: obligatory beer post

You don't go to Bhutan for the beer. But if you go to Bhutan, and you drink beer, try for Red Panda. It is not always available, but the flavor is more robust than the other stuff which is reminiscent of Budweiser.

Leaving Bhutan

When I wrote here that I was going to Bhutan, SF Mike commented

All the best temples with the coolest layouts are at the top of nanny-goat climbs up narrow mountain paths. You should be in heaven, but be careful.

He was on the right track. Here's one of the more accessible locations we scrambled to, a monastery and temple above the town of Paro:

I fly home within the next 24 hours. More pics and a few reflections over the next few weeks when I have less fickle wifi.

Bhutan too shares a war memorial

On this Veteran's Day, it seems only fitting to offer a picture from the Druk Wangyal Lhakhang, a memorial to the Bhutanese army's victory over an incursion by Indian insurgents in 2003. One hundred and eight chortens sit atop Dochula Pass at about 10000 feet. The surroundings dwarf the human edifices.

Warming Wednesdays: Hydropower development in Bhutan

Here's something I doubt I'll see anything of during my trip (see previous post): a national development strategy for Bhutan that builds friendly ties with its gargantuan Indian neighbor -- and provides electricity in a relatively sustainable fashion. Global warming will certainly increase Himalayan run-off in coming years. Presumably these smart mountain survivors are building for flooding as well as exploiting steady flows.

This post was queued up before I left for Bhutan.

"Leaving on a jet plane ... "

Tonight I am flying off on a two week trip to Bhutan. In the broad expanse of Central Asia, this tiny country is a narrow sliver of a place, sandwiched between India and China on the south side of the Himalayas. It's population is smaller than San Francisco's -- about 750,000. Its present size, shape, and governance (its monarchy was founded by local and regional consensus in 1907) reflects its history on the edge of first the British empire and then independent India. In recent years, its kings have promoted a democratic turn. It is predominately rural, Buddhist in a form we call "Tibetan", and zealous about preserving its cultural patrimony. According to that useful internet resource, the CIA Factbook, Bhutan is engaging in a

cautious expansion of the tourist sector, encourag[ing] visits by upscale, environmentally conscientious tourists.

That, I suspect, fits the bunch I've signed on with.

So why am I going to Bhutan? There are mountains, and people, and sights I've probably never imagined. Essentially I am going because I can, economically and physically. Neither condition will last forever. Meanwhile, I go and I will try to see and to take pictures. A short trip is not long enough to learn anything very significant about a somewhere new, especially a place with a truly different history and language than my own.

But even a short trip may change me. We'll see.

I may or may not have WiFi some places. If so, I may post at least some pictures. I have lined up some posts here (not every day but often) for the period of the trip … and will be back to regular posting by late November.

 

 

Click to embiggen.

Post title by John Denver, if anyone wondered.