WO R K S T H AT WO R K A M AGA Z I N E O F U N E X P E C T E D C R E AT I V I T Y I S S U E 8 , 2016/2017
IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK
Penis graffiti can be found almost anywhere in the world, but Bhutan may be the only country to have elevated it to religious art. Buildings across the kingdom are decorated with large, lovingly rendered phalluses in a wide range of colours, shapes and sizes, all painted by playful local artists. They are part of a national cult of phallus worship that many believe was inspired by the 15th-century Buddhist preacher Drukpa Kunley, whose own ‘thunderbolt’ was said to bring enlightenment. Believing that phallus depictions ward off evil spirits, communities treasure these mischievous murals, and artists create them with care and devotion.
w-t-w.co/ae4
For the greater part of its history Bhutan was one of the most isolated countries in the world. The small Himalayan kingdom started to attract international attention in the early 1970s when Jigme Singye Wangchuck came to power as the fourth king of Bhutan and introduced the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH). Since then GNH has become an integral part of the philosophy underlying the country’s development, a foundational idea mentioned in most official communications. Bhutan takes its people’s happiness seriously, but is not necessarily the happiest country in the world. In terms of economic development, Bhutan is one of the world’s smallest economies. It serves, however, as a brilliant example for other developing countries, proof that economic progress need not come at the expense of cultural heritage and natural resources. Bhutan’s very constitution dictates that at least 60% of its land area must remain forested in perpetuity, and it is the world’s only carbon-negative country, its vast woods absorbing more carbon than the kingdom produces. Bhutan is also an inspiration for developed countries, taking advantage of its small size to leapfrog traditional industrialised powers in a number of areas. The country provides free education and healthcare to all its citizens and is testing the use of drones to deliver medical supplies to remote areas. It was the first country to ban the sale of tobacco products. It plans to eliminate chemical fertilisers and pesticides and make all of its agriculture 100% organic within a decade. Small wonder then, that Western media have elevated Bhutan to a nearly mythical status, but Bhutan is still a real country with real people facing real challenges as it strives to maintain a delicate harmony between moderni sation and cultural identity. We decided to travel to this unique place to talk with people who live there and experience it first-hand rather than relying on the often inaccurate depictions of outsiders. We learned about the uneasy conditions for business and culture, but also about individuals who make a real difference: filmmakers who engage with their audiences by touring the country to show their movies, postage stamp designers whose work helps to raise funds for further economic development, and artists who are taking on a wider social responsibility and helping indebted farmers in the countryside. The trip to Bhutan was eye-opening, and we hope that you enjoy the stories we brought back with us. — Peter Biľak
Works That Work, Issue 8, Winter 2016/17 A Magazine of Unexpected Creativity published twice a year by Typotheque issn: 2214-0158 Edited by: Peter Biľak Copy editing: Ted Whang Proofreading: Johanna Robinson Editorial board: Jonah Goodman, Anne Miltenburg, Ed van Hinte Design: Atelier Carvalho Bernau Lithography: Mrs. Bright Printing: Drukkerij Tielen Binding: Hexspoor Typeset in Lava (designed by the editor) and Neutral (designed by the designers of the magazine) Made and printed in the Netherlands. Printed on certified, environ mentally friendly papers: Magno Gloss and Lessebo Design Contact: Typotheque Zwaardstraat 16 2584 TX Den Haag The Netherlands editor@worksthatwork.com worksthatwork.com @worksthatwork Subscriptions: Exclusively online at worksthatwork.com/subscribe Contributions: We are always looking for new themes and articles in various forms. Please send us your proposals and something about yourself. Try to be as specific as possible: explain what the subject is and why you want to cover it. Contributors this issue: Jonah Goodman, writer, Berlin Ugyen Wangchuk, photographer, Thimphu; Jessica Vernon, writer, Thimphu; Robert Urquhart, writer, Ramsgate; Hans van der Meer, photographer, Amsterdam Special thanks to: Lewis Beardmore, Chand Bhat tarai, Bhutan Creative Tours, Ujjwal Dahal, Rajeen Darlami, Jigme Goenpo Dorji, Embassy of the Slovak Republic in India, Rikesh Gurung, V.P. Haran, Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp, Ugyen Lhundrup, Thinlay Norbu, Chand Rai, Dechen Roder, Julie Savary, Marc Shillum, Frances Todd Stewart, and Taco Zwaanswijk. This issue of WTW was made possible thanks to a grant from the Creative Industries Fund NL, which kindly covered the cost of travel to Bhutan.
Patronage: Help us make Works That Work. Become a patron, and in return get copies of the magazine, your name listed in the magazine and on the website, and a personal thank you note. Your donation is tax deductible. Together we can make a great magazine. worksthatwork.com/patrons The following people helped to make Issue 8: A. Cruz Design Studio Wayne Ajimine Erik van Blokland Jo De Baerdemaeker Jason Dilworth Jose dos Santos Xavier Dupré Simon Esterson Fondazione eLand Konrad Glogowski André Göhlich Geir Goosen Kei Gowda Martin Jenca Frith Kerr (Studio Frith) Benjamin Listwon Ellen Lupton Anne Miltenburg Craig Mod Elizabeth Pick Bart van der Ploeg Satya Rajpurohit (Indian Type Foundry) Jay Rutherford Brian Scott/Boon SLONline, s.r.o. Astrid Stavro Martin Tiefenthaler (tga) Clodagh Twomey Typefounding typeheaven Martin Velits Dana Wooley Front cover: A traditional Bhutanese house decorated with a painting of a phallus, a protector against evil spirits. Back cover: Photo by José Guilherme Marques taken on the Praia das Furnas in Portugal. We invite our readers to take photos featuring WTW in unexpected environments. Every reader who submits a photo will receive a free copy of the magazine. w-t-w.co/q5l All photos by WTW unless noted otherwise.
In this issue:
Welcome to Bhutan
by Jonah Goodman 4
Being Bhutanese
8
by Jonah Goodman
Undercover Identity
22
Photography by Ugyen Wangchuk
A Water-powered Country by Jonah Goodman
28
Roadside Wisdom
38
by Jessica Vernon
Cat Hair, Mud Paint, Rice Banks and the Buddha
64
by Jonah Goodman
Forging Innovation from Tradition
44
an Interview with Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay by Peter Biľak and Jonah Goodman
Little Ambassadors of the Country
72
by Peter Biľak
Moving Pictures
80
Text by Jonah Goodman
Football on the Roof of the World 50 Text by Robert Urquhart Photography by Hans van der Meer
Drones and Phones 58 by Jonah Goodman
Improvised Animal Hospital by Jessica Vernon
86
Welcome to Bhutan Basic facts about this Himalayan kingdom of only 750,000 people. Collected by Jonah Goodman
Gross National Happiness Gross National Happiness, or GNH, is Bhutan’s most famous export. Invented in 1972 by the fourth king, GNH is the idea that personal feelings of stability in a country’s population are a better indicator of its success than Gross National Product. Since the late 1990s, GNH has been the guiding principle of the Bhutanese state, putting cultural preservation, environ mental conservation and good governance on an equal footing with economic development in the formulation of new policies. Every few years, a survey calculates Bhutan’s GNH Index by means of a byzantine array of nine ‘domains’, 38 ‘sub-indexes’, 72 ‘indicators’ and 151 ‘variables’. It currently stands at 0.756, up 0.013 from five years ago. For most people in the country, however, GNH is encapsulated by a sense that happiness is important, and money isn’t everything.
w-t-w.co/jma
5
Environmental Protection
Tourism
Bhutan has some of the strictest environmental conservation laws in the world. According to the 2008 constitution at least 60% of the country’s land must be covered by forest in per petuity, and it is strictly illegal to kill or trap any wild animals. Biological corridors connect huge national parks, allowing animals to migrate without human contact. As a result, Bhutan is an unspoilt haven for biodiversity stretching across three climatic zones providing a home to tigers, red pandas, snow leopards, 770 species of bird and over 5,000 types of plant.
For the first three quarters of the 20th century, Bhutan was a hermit kingdom almost entirely sealed off from foreign visi tors. That changed in 1974, when the state began to cultivate its ‘high-value, low impact’ tourist industry, hoping to avoid the kind of social and economic shock that holidaymakers had brought to other South Asian countries. Today, every non-Indian visitor pays a flat fee of $250 per day per person, which covers all accommodation, food and transportation as well as a guide and a driver. Tourists cannot travel alone and must have their plans pre-approved by a government-listed travel agency.
6
WTW #8
The King
Bhutanese Names
Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk is Bhutan’s much-loved Fifth Dragon King, or ‘K5’ for short. His father, widely referred to as K4, abdicated in K5’s favour in 2006, and two years later, with the country’s first democratic elections, the two of them oversaw Bhutan’s peaceful transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Today, Bhutanese society is still com ing to terms with the new rights and responsibilities laid out in the 2008 constitution. Some citizens are tentatively feeling out the extent to which ethnic equality and freedom of speech and religion are truly guaranteed. Others openly long for a return to autocratic rule, and vote only because the king has asked them to. Photo: Ugyen Wangchuk
Outside of the aristocratic Wangchuk and Dorji families, nobody in Bhutan has a family name. Instead, babies receive an astrologically auspicious combination of two names from a local lama when they are three months old, both chosen from fewer than 100 religiously significant words. Any order of these names is valid, and with a handful of exceptions they are all gender neutral. To make matters even more complicated, severely ill people may change their names permanently, sometimes more than once, believing it will speed their recov ery. Photo: His Royal Highness Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, K6, as photographed by his father His Majesty The King in 2016.
Welcome to Bhutan
7
The Dzongkha Language
TV and the Internet
More than 19 languages are indigenous to Bhutan and its tiny population. Dzongkha, the official national language of the country since 1971, is spoken by the dominant Ngalop minority. It shares around 40% of its vocabulary with Choekey, or Clas sical Tibetan, but had no written form until the 1960s, when a project began to set it down in Tibetan script. This was an imperfect process, and though Dzongkha is widely spoken, it is notoriously difficult to write or read. English is the language of government, while Dzongkha is used by the armed forces and judiciary. Both languages are taught in all schools, and though shop signs are typically in Dzongkha and English, the English text is usually larger.
Watching television or accessing the Internet was illegal in Bhutan until June 2, 1999 when the Fourth King announced that he was lifting the ban. It was a seismic shift for the country, and although television had an immediate impact and was even blamed for a small crime wave, the Internet is steadily remoulding the whole of Bhutanese society. At least one third of the population is connected, mostly with cheap, counterfeit smartphones, and almost everyone in the country is on Facebook and WeChat. Civil society initiatives thrive online alongside political intrigue and gossip, raising urgent issues around free speech and accountability. Photo: Paula Bronstein/Liaison
P A K I S T A N
New Delhi
N E P A L
I
N
D
I
A
Mumbai Satellite photo by Landsat. Redrawn from data by Google, SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO.
BEING BHUTANESE Jonah Goodman is a British writer whose previous contributions to WTW have explored war-torn Sarajevo, Californian prisons and wood-powered cars. For this issue, he flew to Bhutan to find out what makes it tick.
T I B E T
( C H I N A )
Thimphu
B H U T A N
B A N G L A D E S H Dhaka
Kolkata
M Y A N M A R
250 km (155 mi)
Naypyitaw
In a region where borders are unstable and often disputed, Bhutan has crafted a national identity that distinguishes it from its neighbours and emphasises its uniqueness and sovereignty.
10
Paro Airport, the sole international airport in the Kingdom of Bhutan. To book travel to Bhutan, tourists must hire a licensed tour operator and pay
WTW #8
$250 (€223) per day for a package that includes accommodation, food and transport. Also included in the daily price is a $65 (€58) fee that goes
You can learn a lot about a country from its airport. Like the ornate gates of ancient cities, 21st-century terminals are statements of identity, built with aspirational energy and utopian intent. Bhutan’s Paro Airport, opened in 1999, is no exception. But rather than soaring concrete, latticed steel and sparkling glass, arriving travellers encounter whitewashed walls, hand-carved window frames, and intricately painted woodwork. Fantastical demons stare from patterned pillars at the end of the luggage carousel. Instead of a hymn to a high-tech future, it is a Himalayan palace with an Airbus parked outside. Every building in Bhutan, every shop, warehouse, home, school, sewage plant and tractor dealership echoes this ethereal design, from the layered cornices under the eaves to the
towards education, healthcare and pov erty alleviation programmes. While in 1974 Bhutan hosted just 287 tourists, by 2015 that number had leaped to 155,121.
ornamental paintwork. Materials vary, but proportions are precisely followed. Each window is tall, narrow and arched. All roofs are gently sloped. Walls are uniform blocks of colour, detailed in vivid colours from a natural palette. There are no billboards and no bright shop signs. The citizens of Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, are equally distinct. The Bhutanese gho, a kneelength belted robe worn with wide white cuffs, is as commonplace on Thimphu’s men as collared shirts might be in a European city. Women wear its equivalent, the kira, a colourful, ankle-length wraparound dress, with a light shirt and a shortsleeved jacket. There are no business suits and no Western dresses. Walking into Thimphu may feel like stepping back in time, but this uniformity is actually new.
w-t-w.co/dgv
The immigration hall at Paro Airport. Like every Bhutanese building, Paro Airport is constructed according to the rules of traditional architecture and
11
decorated with traditional paintings and carpentry. The terminal building was commissioned in 1999 but looks just like any 17th-century fortress or monastery.
In the mid-1980s, many of Bhutan’s modern buildings looked much the same as any construction project in India. Students returning from their studies abroad walked the streets in suits and collared shirts. The young wore jeans and Western T‑shirts. Bhutan had strong traditions, but two decades after opening up to the world, fresh ideas were coming in along with international aid. Then in 1989 the clocks rolled back. You don’t have to look far in Bhutan to find the man responsible. He gazes out from badges pinned to clothes and from roadside banners. He looks down on you from a doorway as you emerge from the dark of a cinema screening, then watches you from a wall calendar as you eat in a restaurant. His face, emblazoned on the side
of a hangar at Paro Airport, is the first thing you see when you arrive and the last thing you see when you leave. The handsome countenance of Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the retired fourth Druk Gyalpo or Dragon King (the official title of the King of Bhutan), is everywhere in Bhutan, along with images of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, who succeeded him in 2006. Widely referred to as K4 and K5, the merchandise of their monarchy is as much a symbol of Bhutan as the national architecture and dress code. They are wildly popular, and with reason. When the Wangchuk monarchy came to power in 1908, Bhutan was an impoverished feudal state run by rival warlords and a national monastic body. The kings unified the country and replaced feudal brutality with the rule of law.
12
WTW #8
Jigme Singye Wangchuck (aka K4) became the king of Bhutan in 1972 at the age of 17 and is credited with many modern reforms in the country, including the development of the country’s infra structure, the introduction of the GNH principles,
They ended slavery and serfdom, instituted land reform and introduced citizenship, a civil service and a national assembly. At their command, the country’s few resources were devoted to providing roads, electricity, a postal service, free education and free healthcare. Thirty-four years after being crowned at the tender age of 17, K4 ended the absolute monarchy. In 2008, Bhutan became a democratic constitutional monarchy, in which the king functions as the head of state but must retire at 65. Today, according to Transparency International, Bhutan is the least corrupt country between the Gulf of Thailand and the Baltic Sea. For all of this, the simple existence of Bhutan may be the monarchy’s greatest achievement. The landlocked state is a tiny mountain nation of less than a million people, perched on the border between the world’s two most populous countries. Ugyen Wangchuk, the first Druk Gyalpo, played to the strengths of this precarious situation, and made a deal in 1911 with the British Raj. Bhutan’s fertile southern lowlands had been lost to the British in 1865, but its rugged Himalayan highlands had never been occupied by another
the unconventional ‘high-value, low-volume’ tour ism policy, and the imposition of democracy. Most of all, the Fourth King emphasised the country’s self-reliance, sovereignty and independence. Photo: Ernst Haas/Getty Images
country. In exchange for financial aid, Bhutan agreed to act as a buffer zone, keeping soldiers of the Chinese Qing government an extra 200 km (124 mi) from Indian territory. Bhutan gained even greater strategic weight when the British left the region in 1947. The peculiarities of Partition forced newly independent India to rely on a narrow, low-lying corridor of land, the so-called ‘Chicken’s Neck’, in order to reach its northeastern states. Bhutan and its neighbouring Himalayan kingdom, Sikkim, loomed over this vulnerable artery. In 1949, India doubled the aid it sent to the Wangchuk monarchy and reaffirmed the old arrangement, swapping the words ‘British Indian Empire’ in the treaty for ‘Republic of India’. It was a wise precaution. One year later, China annexed Tibet and became a very real threat along India’s northern border. India declared its intention to protect Bhutan, and backed up its words with yet more investment in the country, building roads and airstrips to defend against the Chinese; crucial infrastructure that propelled the nation into the modern age. Bhutan’s first five-year plan was funded entirely by Indian aid.
Being Bhutanese
13
For the mountain kingdom, establishing a clear national identity is crucial, as both their neighbours have a history of annexing small Himalayan kingdoms. The national dress, language, and architectural style have become important tools for defining the nation, differentiating it from its neighbours.
Suddenly, Sikkim collapsed. Even now, the circumstances are murky. There may or may not have been a coup. India may or may not have been invited to intervene, and Indian troops may or may not have placed the king under house arrest in his own palace and compelled him to sign away the nation’s independence. What is clear is that pro-Indian politicians called a referendum in 1975 and reported that 97.5% of Sikkim’s population had voted to abolish the monarchy. India annexed Sikkim. Almost overnight, Bhutan’s best friend became an existential threat. From Thimphu, it seemed that Sikkim had been destabilised by an ethnic Nepalese majority at odds with an indigenous ruling class. Perhaps only a stable Sikkim could keep the Chicken’s Neck safe, which was why India had stepped in. Perhaps, too, streams of exiled Tibetans passing through Bhutan had underlined the value of a distinct national culture, recognised and defended by the United Nations. By the 1980s, according to Karma Phuntsho’s authoritative History of Bhutan (2013), the young K4 had arrived at ‘a realisation that Bhutan’s unique cultural identity, in the absence of military might or economic power, was its defining strength for its sovereignty’. For the mountain kingdom, cultural identity was now a matter of life or death. As tiny as Bhutan is, however, its cultural identity is a matter of some complexity. Its isolated valleys and forests shelter a wide range of ethnicities, speaking at least 19 indigenous languages. No single group constitutes a majority of the Bhutanese people, but three distinct ethnicities account for around 80% of the population. The smallest of these, the Ngalop, in the west and north of the country, are Bhutan’s
ruling elite. The oldest are the Sharchop in the east, and the newest are the Lhotshampa, ethnic Nepalese who have been arriving in southern Bhutan since the mid-19th century. Both Ngalop and Sharchop follow Mahayana Buddhism. The Lhotshampa are historically Hindu. In 1985, ten years after the fall of the Sikkim monarchy, K4 radically revised his father’s inclusive citizenship policies. With immediate effect, anyone unable to prove that they were permanently resident in Bhutan before 1958 was to be stripped of their citizenship. They were welcome to reapply, but, in a country where adult illiteracy was the norm, would have to prove their understanding of Bhutanese culture in a written test. Two years later, the sixth fiveyear plan presented the ‘preservation and promotion of national identity’ as one of its prime policy objectives, not ‘because of sentimental values or to uphold past practices, but [as] crucial steps […] to consolidate and safeguard the sovereignty and security of the nation’. On January 16, 1989, K4 issued a royal decree. With immediate effect, a Bhutanese Buddhist set of ceremonial social doctrines called Driglam Namzha, or the ‘code of discipline’ was to be rigorously applied across public life. Gho and kira were made mandatory national dress in public during working hours, and failure to comply would incur a fine. Dzongkha, the dialect of the Ngalop elite, which had first been set down in writing in the 1970s, was emphasised as the national language. All architecture was to conform to a model ‘improved traditional house’ constructed in each of Bhutan’s 20 dzonkhags, or provinces. The remaking of the nation was underway. The only people in Bhutan who did not
Thimphu, the capital and Bhutan’s largest city, is home to some 100,000 inhabitants. The city has expanded rapidly in the last 15 years, and most of the city’s buildings are less than ten years old.
Driglam Namzha, the code of Bhutanese social norms and conduct, includes rules on how to dress. Wearing traditional clothing had long been ‘recommended’,
but in 1989 a royal decree made it man datory during business hours or when in public. The gho, a knee-length robe tied with a belt, is often worn over T-shirts,
trousers and shoes that tell more about the individual identity of the wearer. (See also the photo essay on page 22.) Photo: Ugyen Wangchuk
Being Bhutanese
Driglam Namzha, the code that governs Bhutanese cultural norms, covers every thing from dress and formal behaviour to art and architecture. Even modern
17
buildings such as football stadiums, power plants, car dealerships and this petrol station in Thimphu adhere to traditional models.
traditionally wear gho and kira were the Lhotshampa. Many did not even own the items. As an incentive, policemen were permitted to keep half of the 100 ngultrum (€1.34 or US$1.50) fine they collected for every breach of the dress code, and soon, as the government later admitted, ‘overzealous functionaries’ in the south were enforcing the new rules in ‘a provocative manner’. When the state stopped the teaching of the Nepali language in primary schools, Lhotshampa took to the streets in protest. A quarter of a century later, it is still taboo to discuss this period inside the country. All sides agree that the early 1990s saw unrest in the southern districts, that the army and militias from the north became involved, and that many Lhotshampa left. It is a matter of record that K4 visited communities in person to plead with them not to go, but by the end of the decade, over 97,000 people claiming to be from Bhutan, equivalent to one-seventh of the country’s population, were living in refugee camps in Nepal. Their testimonies, collected by Professor Michael Hutt at SOAS, recount forced evictions,
official harassment, and torture. Denied entry to Bhutan, almost all of those living in the camps were resettled between 2008 and 2015, as many as 84,000 in the USA alone. However, many Lhotshampa never left Bhutan, opting to stay in a restrictive nation where television was banned and free speech was unknown. Today they make up around 20% of the population, all wear gho and kira, and those that I encountered were proud to be Bhutanese, in private as well as in public. For all its faults, if Bhutan is defined by its differences from its neighbours, it is a beacon of stability in a troubled region. To the north, China has demolished sacred sites in a violent repression of human rights. To the west, Nepal has been devastated by endemic corruption. And to the south, at least for many Bhutanese, India is represented by Jaigaon, an anarchic border town through which almost all their imported goods must pass. When asked to describe the city, Lewis Beardmore, an India-based anthropologist, hesitates before replying, ‘Have you seen Mad Max?’
18
WTW #8
‘Why am I Bhutanese? It’s not because I am wearing this gho. What really makes us Bhutanese?’ Phub T. Tshering
In 1998, K4’s royal government put a name to its controlled approach to progress. Gross National Happiness, or GNH, emphasises the primacy of a sense of personal security over and above economic growth. As autocratic rule receded and democracy took its place, GNH emerged as a guiding principle composed of four core elements: good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, environmental conservation, and the preservation and promotion of culture. Dasho Karma Ura, President of Thimphu’s Centre for Bhutan Studies, led the project to shape GNH and helped to draft Bhutan’s first Constitution. As such, he is one of the prime custodians of Bhutanese tradition in the transition away from dictatorship. ‘We all know that culture will change,’ he explains. ‘It is ever changing, but it is wise to regulate the speed of change.’ If that speed is uncontrolled, he adds, ‘society becomes fragmented. As a small country, we must have some sort of gravity within ourselves.’ Across Bhutan, dzongs, monolithic monas teries, fill dips in the landscape like paperweights holding down a map. They are the original anchors of the Bhutanese state, and remain its prime bastions of spiritual and administrative power. In the centre of each one, past offices, through inner courtyards, in sanctums closed to the world, daily prayers take place in a damp, scented gloom. With a heavy, harmonic growl, chanting monks draw out the syllables of tantric mantras, gradually sliding from note to note. Like Dasho Karma Ura, they are preoccupied with time. Their low, slow, singing seeks to
extend the present moment, aspiring to a life with no future and no past. On the floor of a farmhouse in the Pobhjika valley, I sit with a family after dinner and watch monks on a small TV. It is a phone-in programme, and members of the public are ringing in with questions. In accented English, an offscreen voice asks ‘How can I negate my ego, when I am an I, the I is ego… and I focus on my ego… against my ego…?’ From the looks on their faces, the monks are struggling. So am I, and I go to sleep on a mat in the family shrine room, under yellowed postcards of a Rinpoche and an altar of plastic flowers. In the morning, as I stand outside to brush my teeth, I count the crude wooden penises suspended under the eaves of the house. There are five. I rest on a handrail, look down and see that its end has been carved into a graven glans. Startling at first, Bhutan’s phallus cult swiftly becomes familiar. The exterior walls of Bhutanese homes are frequently adorned with two-metre-high paintings of erect male genitalia. Tumescent or mid-ejaculation, they may have wings or eyes, their shafts encircled by smoke, dragons, or the fingers of a hand, and all are lovingly, carefully rendered. They are seen as holy guardians, keeping evil spirits away. Almost certainly, phallus worship is descended from ancient animist tradition, but it has long been absorbed into Bhutan’s Buddhist system through stories about Drukpa Kunley, the ‘Divine Madman’, a picaresque preacher from the 15th century. This knack for nesting the old inside the new runs right through to the present day. Alongside
Being Bhutanese
Football fans enjoying the Thimphu Premier League match at the Changlimi thang Stadium, the Bhutanese multipur pose national stadium that usually hosts
19
football games, archery tournaments (the national sport of Bhutan), and that witnessed the coronation of K4 and K5. Unlike a typical Thimphu scene where
the government ministries of the fledgling democratic state, there is a national institute for astrology manned by a hundred monks, ready to be consulted prior to major occasions. Free basic healthcare may be provided in clinics throughout the country, but so is traditional healing. Bhutanese practitioners of folk medicine are educated in national schools, officially certified, and specially trained to recognise serious conditions that require referral to a modern doctor. In many developing countries, people’s preference for indigenous medicine is a major problem. Bringing it into the mainstream doesn’t just respect local beliefs; it’s also a way to reach the whole population, and give help to all who need it. On the surface, change in Bhutan moves at a glacial pace. Bhutanese democracy is eight years old, yet the same political elite run the country as before the transition. Thimphu has expanded rapidly since 2000, but it is hard to say which buildings are new, as all are all built to the same aesthetic guidelines. The woman’s kira has developed two new variations in recent
people are wearing ghos and kiras, such traditional clothes are rare at an evening football game.
years, yet these innovations are so subtle that, under the toego jacket, they all look identical. For citizens living in an unchanging world, old cautions can be hard to shake. Police fines for failures to observe Driglam Namzha were discontinued over a decade ago, yet locals may still worry when they should or should not wear national dress. ‘Use your good sense and judgement,’ was K4’s advice on June 2, 1999. It was the 25th anniversary of his coronation, and standing at a golden podium in Thimphu’s football stadium (where the pavilion, naturally, resembles a temple cloister), he was announcing his fateful decision to introduce television and the Internet to Bhutan. ‘It is my sincere hope that the introduction of television will be beneficial to our people and country,’ he continued, ‘but not everything you see will be good.’ Filtering out the bad bits is the job of BICMA, or the Bhutan InfoComm and Media Authority, the media regulatory body of a nation where critical voices have struggled to take off and the independent press breaks little hard news. Yet
20
Dzongkha was declared the official national language of Bhutan by the Third King of Bhutan in 1971. Since
WTW #8
2010 smartphones have supported the Tibetan script in which it is written. Propagation of the language has been
this is far from a board of ruthless state censors. An inquisitive visitor is more than likely to be offered tea and something like sympathy by Chencho Dorji, BICMA’s humble, thoughtful Director General, a man responsible for overseeing functions that range from facilitating mobile phone coverage in remote areas to issuing film certifications. With only 18 staff, there is no time to be a ministry of propaganda, too. ‘BICMA could never inculcate a sense of culture,’ he says. ‘That would be like a policing job. It would almost be like a dictatorship, and that is not going to work any more now. Even as a parent, there is no point tying your children up and saying “You can’t go to the disco, the disco is bad”. You have to educate your children about why the disco is bad. If we can’t do that to our own children, how can BICMA do that to society at large?’ I go to the disco to see if it is bad. On the laserlit dance floor, young Thimphu men and women dance to Flo Rida and Rihanna. Mixed groups dressed in casual Western clothes chat boozily over white leather upholstery. The only sign that the establishment is in Bhutan is a leafy wad of doma, chewed betel nut, blocking a sink in the
instrumental for the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture.
men’s bathroom. At an afterparty, conversation revolves around Game of Thrones and the lyrics of Stormzy, an independent rapper based in London. Little of this culture has arrived through TV. Cheap smartphones brought in from Jaigaon or flown in from Bangkok are quietly revolutionising Bhutanese society. Today, a third of the population are on Facebook and even greater numbers are signed up to WeChat, where people send audio messages to each other in groups. According to UNICEF, around half of Bhutanese adults are illiterate, and not only does WeChat allow them to share news, but it also lets them do it in whatever language they like. By the side of a path in Paro, in the west of Bhutan, a middle-aged lady selling souvenirs shows me a two-year-old smartphone she uses to talk to her family in Trashiyangtse, on the country’s eastern border. They speak Tshangla with each other, the majority language among the Sharchop people, and one which has no written form. At a stroke, society has leaped ahead of the government framework designed to slow the pace of change. According to Dasho Karma Ura,
Being Bhutanese
they are ‘not so disruptive. They are just tools, you can use them how you want, but like TV, they should not overpower you’. Unlike TV, however, using the Internet is not a passive experience. Once stifled under authoritarian rule, a thriving civil society is emerging online. Social media in Bhutan is being used to organise social care, arrange cleaning campaigns and keep tabs on public toilets. But the door to the outside world has been flung wide open, too. Nearly everyone asked about smartphones mentions the problem of pornography. Almost exclusively American, it arrives through WeChat, sent by anonymous pranksters. For people like the souvenir seller, who uses WeChat to share photos of Tibetan monasteries and her favourite Buddhist lama, the clips from California are a frightening intrusion into an innocent world. There is not much that BICMA can do about it. ‘It is totally illegal to share pornography,’ explains Phub T. Tshering, the elected administrator, or ghup, of Lamgong Gewog in Paro district, ‘but the police cannot find out who puts it on WeChat. They send requests to Hong Kong, where WeChat is based, but WeChat won’t give them the information.’ Kuensel, Bhutan’s only daily newspaper, is widely read, but the former state agency breaks stories days after they occur and heavily moderates any criticism of the government. On WeChat groups and Facebook, there is no such censorship, nor any burden of proof. In the past, media control has relied on Bhutan’s small size; in a nation of 750,000, everyone knows everyone, and people self-censor. Anonymous accounts online are completely beyond such restraints. The impact on politics has already been profound. In 2013, during Bhutan’s second democratic election, a scurrilous blog called Bhutanomics ripped into the ruling party. ‘My god,’ says Chencho Dema, ‘the way they wrote. Cartoons. The content. You can’t imagine how they had access to such secret information. Everyone was accessing that blog. And it was an unknown enemy. You didn’t know who to prosecute.’ A failed attempt to block the site, involving the Druknet ISP and, possibly, BICMA itself, only made things worse. Tshering Tobgay and his PDP swept to power on a landslide, and once the new government was installed, the stream of wild accusations dried up and disappeared. ‘Looking
21
back now,’ says Chencho Dema, diplomatically, ‘I would say it had a political motive.’ In August 2016, in what is widely seen as a crossroads for Bhutanese free speech, the outspoken journalist Namgay Zam was prosecuted for defamation, having shared a Facebook post alleging criminality by the father-in-law of Bhu tan’s Chief Justice. ‘On Facebook we can control things,’ says Phub T. Tshering. ‘But on WeChat, we can’t.’ Unfortunately for Bhutan, the Chinese government can. Speaking at The Carnegie Council in the same month, Professor Joshua Eisenman at the University of Texas at Austin described witnessing a WeChat message by a government dissident transform into an innocuous article about Chinese dumpling vendors. Chinese power may have found a back door. Every five years, Dasho Karma Ura and his team at the Centre for Bhutan Studies carry out a GNH survey on a representative sample of 8,000 citizens. It is a check-up on the nation’s wellbeing, as defined by the four GNH pillars. To determine the nation’s cultural health, an assessment is made of the state of artisan skills, speaking a native language, participation in cultural activities, and Driglam Namzha, the national code of dress and behaviour. Preliminary results for the 2015 GNH Index show that the Driglam Namzha indicator is down by 17%. Worrying, perhaps, but the 2010 GNH Index found that a full 93.4% of the population thought Driglam Namzha was ‘very important’. Bhutan’s culture, the report concludes ‘is stable’. Twenty-seven years after they were formally introduced, Bhutan’s rules on clothing, architecture, and the outward symbols of nationhood are now ingrained elements of the national character. Out in the countryside, children peer into a cracked phone screen to watch Ap Bokto, a cartoon about a man dressed in a gho. By Paro Airport, guides waiting for tourists record each other singing traditional songs. Unwritten local languages are being kept alive. Communities are growing closer. And, amongst 1.7 billion Facebook users, perhaps it pays to be wearing something different. ☐
w-t-w.co/o31
23
Ugyen Wangchuk is a photographer, tour guide, and owner of the first Bhutanese eco lodge. He has published a book Bhutan—Portraits and Landscapes.
UNDERCOVER IDENTITY One of the most distinctive features of the Bhutanese is their traditional dress. The gho, a knee-length belted robe worn with wide white cuffs for men, and the kira, an ankle-length wraparound dress for women, are centuries old. Wearing them is a matter of cultural pride, but a 1989 law also makes this statement
of national identity mandatory for civil servants during business hours. For the mountain kingdom, establishing a clear national identity is crucial, and the gho and kira have become important tools for defining the nation and differentiat ing it from its neighbours. There is more room for individuality from the knees
down, however, and trousers, socks and shoes reveal something more about the people who wear them. These photographs feature a civil servant, a tourist guide, a teacher and a farmer, but not in that order. Can you guess who is who? (See answers online: http://w-t-w.co/o31)
A WATER-POWERED COUNTRY By Jonah Goodman
w-t-w.co/ygm
29
Some countries have oil and gas. Bhutan has high mountains, vast forests and powerful rivers, and has staked its future on hydroelectricity to fund its fast-growing economy.
At 12:50pm on July 31, 2012, in Suratgarh, a dusty Indian town close to the Pakistani border, a single circuit breaker flipped inside a power station. The local power grid stumbled and overbalanced. Eight minutes later it collapsed, putting the lights out across Rajasthan state. Blackouts are not unusual anywhere in India, but this time circuit breakers began to flip in Uttar Pradesh, then in Bihar, then in Jharkhand. In 90 seconds, the blackout had spread 1,600 km (990 mi) to the Bay of Bengal, and a cascade of failures was rippling north across the country. Hydropower plants along the Ganges tripped one after another in split-second sequence. Coal-fired turbines ground to a halt. By 1:30pm, half the population of India was left without power—almost one in ten people on the planet. In the tunnels of the Delhi metro thousands were plunged into darkness, while above them cars clogged the streets under dead traffic lights. In the wealthy city of Gurgaon, nurses scrambled to operate life-support machines by hand. Miners in West Bengal were trapped underground. Crowded trains rolled to a stop in the empty countryside. Temperatures rose in the humid summer air. It was the largest power outage the world had ever seen, and an unprecedented challenge for the operators of India’s grid. Decades of exaggerated promises by elected politicians had stretched the network beyond its breaking point, and the entire country had been running on a deficit. Worse, corruption and illegal power A customer buys cigarettes at a stall powered by a gas generator during a power-cut in New Delhi. The blackout,
lines meant that in some states true electricity demand was almost double official figures. Dead power plants have to be jumpstarted, but now stations with expensive self-start facilities were being knocked out by unpredictable loads before they could pass on their power. The system had come to a standstill. High in the Himalayas, in the lush forests of central Bhutan, four men in the control room of Basochhu hydropower plant sat at a console beneath a shrine to the Buddha. Bhutan had not escaped the blackout, but Basochhu, isolated at the end of the cascade, had. In the mountainside above them, 74,000 tonnes of water stood cradled in a serene, tree-lined pool. They let it all come down. Ten thousand litres (2,640 gal) per second blasted through a 420-metre (1,380 ft) pipe and into the Basochhu turbines. The lights turned on in Thimphu, then across the country. As Bhutan’s hydropower stations returned to life, the tiny nation kickstarted its giant neighbour. From east to west, India began to roll back the blackout. The miners were rescued. The lights turned on in the Delhi metro. By 9:30pm it was all over. Tiny Basochhu had saved the day. From the outside, with its ornate wall paintings, corniced windows, and distinctive layered eaves, the Basochhu plant could easily be mistaken for a traditional Bhutanese home. Two hydropower projects in progress a few kilometres upstream are far less discreet. Punatsangchhu I and Punatsangchhu II fill all available space at the bottom of their Himalayan
one of the biggest ever, cascaded over half the country, leaving 620 million people without government-supplied
electricity in the north of the country. Photo: Sanjit Das/Bloomberg
The upper station of Basochhu, an artificial reservoir of water which can be released into the turbines of the lower station, providing two hours of electricity for the entire capital, and which helped kickstart India’s power grid during the 2012 blackout.
32
gorge, packing pylons and concrete around the rushing white torrent. Set in series, each will be able to harness power from more than 400 tonnes of water every second. Combined, they will produce almost 35 times as much electricity as the Basochhu plant. Even with the recent completion of the country’s grid, that’s five times more power than Bhutan can actually use. They are a sign of things to come. Including Basochhu, Bhutan has four operational hydropower stations, but as many as 70 new plants are planned. Three of them, two at Punatsangchhu and one at Mangdechhu, will come online in the next two years. Another seven major plants are in the pipeline, and all of them will produce power for India. Since 2012, India has increased its power generation by a staggering 50%, but its appetite for electricity is insatiable. And with many of its low-lying rivers already crammed with hydroelectric turbines, the government has turned its eyes north to the Himalayas, with plans for 292 dams on its territory by 2030, according to a 2013 report in Science magazine. It’s not alone. The Guardian reported in the same year that China, India’s great rival, had plans for 160 dams, and is financing major hydropower projects in Pakistan, Laos, and Burma. Keen to expand its share of the rooftop of the world, India has focused attention on Bhutan. Indian investment has fuelled a spectacular hydropower boom that has given Bhutan the fastest-growing economy in the region, the third fastest in the world. Bhutan’s four major river systems descend 7 km (4.3 mi) on their way south through the country, and have a hydropower potential of 24,000 MW. During the five months of the rainy summer season, Bhutan currently produces just 7% of that, 1,606 MW, three-quarters of which is sold to India. But that already makes hydropower Bhutan’s biggest export, part of an industry accounting for 50% of the nation’s GDP. Output is projected to double by 2019, then triple again within the next decade. It’s an audacious national gamble. Hydropower endeavours have kept Bhutan’s external debt hovering around 100% of GDP for the past three years. Long a recipient of Indian aid, Bhutan’s latest ventures are 70% funded by Indian loans, rather than grants. Costs for
WTW #8
the first of the country’s ten new hydroelectric stations, the still-unfinished Punatsangchhu I, have ballooned to two and a half times initial estimates, exceeding the entire country’s economic worth. And it’s not just the loans that come from India. Most of the contractors on the projects are Indian. The engineers are Indian. The infrastructure around the dams is built by Indian companies. The loans may be paid off by selling the electricity the plants create, but there is only one customer for that power: India. And India helps to set the price. For Bhutan, however, this is about more than just money. Two of the four ‘pillars’ central to the government’s Gross National Happiness principle (GNH) are sustainable socio-economic development and environmental conservation. Hydropower could contribute to both aims, though they are not always complementary. ‘If you want economic growth, there will definitely be an impact in terms of pollution,’ says Thinley Namgyel, director of Bhutan’s advisory GNH Commission. ‘You need to construct roads, industrial estates. We sit together and see how we can improve, and we try to find the best way forward.’ The GNH Commission reviews the GNH of all governmental projects using the GNH Policy Screening Tool, which breaks the four pillars down into a set of 26 questions, ranging from queries about a scheme’s potential to ‘undermine Bhutanese values such as compassion and generosity’, to issues related to corruption, gender equality and botanical diversity. In fact, environmental protection and sustainable development were both well rooted in Bhutanese law long before GNH was enshrined in an eight-page questionnaire. All five-year economic plans since 1987 have espoused economic self-reliance as a guiding principle, even as the budgets to implement them have largely been provided by India. And Bhutan’s striking commitment to keep at least 60% of its land forested ‘for all time’—as its 2008 constitution states—was set in place decades earlier by the 1969 Forest Act, the country’s first modern law. Since then, Bhutan’s focus on conservation has only intensified. More than half of Bhutan’s land has been designated an environmentally protected area or biological corridor. Its wild biodiversity is legendary. By law, no wild animal
The lower station of Basochhu, a medium-size hydropower plant developed in cooperation with Austria in the 1990s. Bhutan’s many powerful snow- and glacier-fed rivers are ideal for hydropower, which is the country’s sole source of electrical energy.
Turbines at the Basochhu hydropower station. Like every other building in Bhutan, even this utilitarian building with highly restricted access is decorated in traditional style with ornamented Buddhist paintings that serve devotional as well as decorative purposes.
A Water-powered Country
35
All energy produced in Bhutan is clean and renewable, permitting the country to minimise carbon emissions and earn carbon credits. Although small, the country has vast hydropower potential, only 10% of which is currently being exploited.
in Bhutan can be killed, injured, or even captured. It’s a mandate that creates problems for the 120 staff living at Basochhu power station. ‘It’s not advisable to go for a walk at night,’ says Yeshey Samdrup, head of the Operations Unit, ‘because of leopards. Also wild boar. Better to do archery.’ In the jungle wilderness around the colony, langur monkeys clamber through the trees and bird calls background every waking moment. Once a month, Yeshey Samdrup leaves to see his wife and two children in Thimphu, but at all other times, this is home: a state-of-the-art Austrian power facility plugged into the side of a wild forest valley. Its interior is bright, airy and immaculately clean. Between arched, unshaded Bhutanese windows, traditional paintings are neatly spaced along the walls, while in the centre of the room, two large, blue pipes loop into two large, blue discs half-sunk into the floor. Benevolent bodhisattvas gaze down from colourful hangings. It might almost feel religious, were it not for the noise. The room trembles with the sound a river makes when it’s squeezed down a pipe to spin steel waterwheels. A roaring organ chord of every kind of hum, a kind of sonic drowning. All of the controls for Basochhu are in this lower stage, where they are operated by shifts of four people. But every now and then someone has to drive along 8 km (5 mi) of track to the upper stage of the plant, where an automated dredger clears sediment from the entrance to
the power plant’s penstock. ‘Whenever there’s a breakage of the [dredger] I have to go,’ Yeshey Samdrup explains. ‘Even if it happens in the odd hours, at say, 1am or 2am.’ He drives slowly to avoid hitting any animals on the narrow, winding road. ‘In the headlights, a leopard will not move,’ he explains. ‘He will stare at you, one or two metres from the car. It’s beautiful.’ A visit to the upper stage is also necessary after one of the area’s frequent earthquakes, so that he can inspect the entire length of the pipeline by climbing into the tunnel that houses it. ‘There are snakes down there,’ he says. ‘It’s very hot inside. Suffocating. Snakes like to be in such an area. People have seen pythons.’ Pipe inspections take a tense two hours. ‘Everything is useful in Bhutan,’ says Yeshey Samdrup, demonstrating how the dredger scoops leaves, branches, and other sediment into a large basin. ‘We make it into compost. We use it.’ The product may need a little refining, first, however. A glance into the muck pile reveals plastic bottles and bags nestling in the sludge. He sighs. ‘We’ve been advertising on social media and TV to educate people not to throw waste around, especially plastic, because it’s a big problem for hydropower plants. It really chokes the pipe.’ With a little over 700,000 people spread across a country the size of Switzerland, Bhutan has a population density one-sixth that of Nepal and a quarter that of the Indian province of Himachal Pradesh. Nevertheless, Bhutanese
36
WTW #8
While hydroelectric projects certainly have an impact on the environment, Bhutan’s ‘run of the river’ installations are less invasive than traditional dams, which block rivers completely.
hydropower does disrupt local life. Basochhu is a ‘run of the river’ plant, meaning that it only diverts 85% of the Basochhu and Rurichhu rivers through its turbines, rather than blocking them off entirely behind a dam. In theory, this is a low-impact compromise: the course of the river remains unchanged, so that the 200 people who live in the nearby village can continue to use it for their fields and households, and wildlife is affected as little as possible. In practice, older generations of Bhutanese notice the diminished power of the famous Basochhu waterfall nearby, and there have been other, unforeseen consequences. Trout will instinctively swim against the current as they migrate upstream, even when this leads them into the churning channel where the Basochhu plant releases its water back into the Punatsangchhu river. Twice a day, operations are paused to deal with the ‘more than a hundred’ fish struggling in vain to jump into the outlet. Locals hired as maintenance workers climb into the drained concrete canal to collect the squirming fish in buckets, small nets, and by hand, before throwing them back into the river. While they work, they are watched on CCTV. ‘They try to hide them,’ explains Yeshey Samdrup. ‘They put them in their clothes.’ So now workers have to line up on their way out of the facility to be frisked for fish. Concerns about the impact of the Punatsangchhu plants further along the river are of a different magnitude. Punatsangchhu II
lies downstream from the breeding site of the golden mahseer, a spectacular species of carp that is already endangered, and both dams disrupt the last habitat of the white-bellied heron, of which only around 60 remain in existence. In 2016 The Diplomat reported claims that the Environmental Impact Assessments which should have been prepared by the Indian firm WAPCOS for the ten new hydropower projects have never been made publicly available, despite requests. It’s hard to shake the sense, however, that environmental activists may be missing the wood for the trees, forgivable as that may be in a country where trees are individually protected by the state, logging is strictly controlled, and ‘injuring’ a tree is a punishable crime. ‘Bhutan is carbon negative,’ Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay told the 2016 TED conference. Not only does the country have enough forest to sequester three times as much carbon dioxide as it produces, but the clean energy exported through hydropower offsets about six million tonnes more, and the goal is to increase that to 17 million tonnes by 2020. ‘If we were to harness even half our hydropower potential... [we] would offset something like 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That is more CO2 than the entire city of New York generates in one year.’ Bhutan has every reason to take climate change seriously. ‘What will happen down the line?’ asks Yeshey Samdrup. ‘Maybe after 30 years of climate change, the water will be
The 1,200-MW Punatsangchhu hydro power project. Nearly 75% of all electri city generated in Bhutan is exported to
India. This provides India with cheap power, and Bhutan with valuable income and foreign currency. Hydropower
finished. All the glaciers will have melted. How will we generate power then?’ Many Bhutanese share his concern, but the country may not be in such dire straits. Following publication of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, it was widely believed that all glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035, until glaciologist Professor Graham Cogley revealed the IPCC’s claim to be a typo. The original, disputed, date was 2350. Even without glaciers, hydropower is likely to thrive. ‘All of our rivers are glacier-fed,’ explains Ujjwal Dahal, who manages operation of the national grid for Bhutan Power Corporation, ‘but 90% of our rivers are monsoon rainfall.’ Heavier seasonal rain over the past five years has steadily increased Bhutan’s power generation. Extreme weather events can even be a boon. ‘Look at 2013,’ says Dahal, ‘we made 20 million ngultrum (€265,000 or US$296,800) from
exports account for more than 40% of Bhutan’s GDP.
Cyclone Phailin.’ Beneath the lush vegetation carpeting the country, lie an estimated 1.3 million tonnes of untapped coal reserves, but neither these, nor the glaciers hold the key to the nation’s future. Bhutan’s real batteries are the forests themselves, protected by the country’s constitution. ‘More trees means more retention of water,’ explains Ujjwal Dahal. ‘So that it slowly seeps into the rivers in a steady flow.’ Preserving Bhutan’s resilient, diverse wilderness and clean, crystal streams is no longer only a noble aim. Against all prevailing wisdom, they have become key to the country’s economic growth. If its great gamble pays off, the tiny nation will leapfrog the open-pit mines and scarred moonscapes of its neighbours to land straight in a hydropowered paradise. ☐
38
WTW #8
ROADSIDE WISDOM
Jessica Vernon is an American writer and avid traveller who is fascinated by the way word choice can shape how people perceive the world around them. She is currently based in Thimphu, Bhutan, immersed in the juxtaposition of cultural and technological clashes taking place in the fabled kingdom’s capital city.
w-t-w.co/9rs
39
The wry, gentle wisdom of Bhutan’s roadside signs make every drive an opportunity to reflect on the journey of life, and quite possibly reduce traffic accidents as a result.
The taxi weaves its way along a slender, snaking road in an undulating dance of acceleration and deceleration, swerving around sleeping dogs and wandering cows. It overtakes a weighted lorry on a sharp curve, horn honking, only narrowly avoiding an oncoming Land Cruiser. We’re travelling the Western Highway between Paro and Thimphu, one of Bhutan’s mellower drives. Something on the side of the road catches the driver’s attention, and he instinctively slows down.
‘You find yourself paying closer attention to the road,’ says Chencho Dorji, the taxi driver, looking in anticipation for the next little nugget of wisdom. ‘I used to drive 90 kph (56 mph) on this road,’ he admits, ‘but when I see the signs, I remember to slow down. Now I only go 50–60 (31–37 mph).’
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished
These amusing yet subtly philosophical statements speak important truths to drivers who pause to ponder their significance. ‘People like the signs,’ says Chencho Dorji. ‘They are funny, but they make you think. Whenever I’m driving a long way I am always looking for these signs.’ In
Around the next blind curve is another sign: Life is a journey. Complete it
Alert today, alive tomorrow Speed is the knife that cuts the life
40
WTW #8
a country refreshingly free of roadside advertising, the signs break the monotony of long road trips, offering advice that ranges from practical to marital, environmental to philosophical, beckoning drivers to look beyond the thrill of speed on curvy mountain roads. If you are married, divorce speed There is a clear strategy behind these seemingly lighthearted road signs. ‘We are using humour to convey a subtle but important message,’ says Brigadier PKG Mishra. ‘No matter where in the world you’re from, humour is something that is easily understood, appreciated and remembered.’ Brigadier PKG Mishra is the Chief Engineer for Dantak, a project operating under India’s
Border Roads Organization (BRO). Since 1961, Dantak has built over 1,600 km (990 mi) of blacktop roads and 5 km (3.1 mi) of bridges throughout Bhutan. These roads, while cutting through some of the world’s most inaccessible terrain, are not innovative in their own right, but the witty signs dotting the roadsides do manage to steal attention away from the epic scenery, all while serving up bite-sized life lessons. As a division of the Indian Army’s Corps of Engineers, BRO builds and maintains transportation networks along India’s borders and throughout the neighbouring countries of Bhutan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The organisation specialises in building roads that seem to defy their inhospitable locations, spanning glacial rivers and clinging to the bellies of the Himalayas’ highest ranges.
Before 1960, Bhutan’s isolated valleys were connected by a series of rudimentary footpaths and mule trails. While the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars transformed the outside world, Bhutan remained completely insulated from these developments. It wasn’t until 1958, in the wake of China’s takeover of Tibet, that Bhutan’s third king, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, accepted Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s offer of economic and military assistance, and together the leaders agreed to open Bhutan to the world. ‘Roads are the most primitive way of developing a country,’ says PKG Mishra, and in April, 1961 Dantak broke ground on the first of Bhutan’s road networks, connecting the country’s remote villages and marking the beginning of a new era of infrastructure and information
for the tiny kingdom. Later, as road connectivity increased, Dantak spearheaded many other projects including microwave and telecommunication links, roads and amenities for the Chhukha Hydropower Project, Paro airstrip and helipads, Deothang hospital and Sherubtse College. ‘Dantak is not merely a road construction agency,’ PKG Mishra reflects. ‘Dantak is a way of life in Bhutan.’ BRO operates nearly 33,000 km (20,500 mi) of roads throughout the hilly terrains of India’s northern borders, and all along these winding roads commuters are greeted with signs urging drivers to stay alert, drive responsibly, and appreciate life’s journey along the way. This clever use of humour to encourage the safe use of their roads sets BRO apart from other transportation agencies. The signs are an
Roadside Wisdom
43
‘Our aim is to ensure the safety of the commuters, and we believe [the signs] make their journey more enjoyable.’ — Brigadier PKG Mishra
integral part of the organisation’s culture, says Mishra, and in a way have come to serve as a sort of trademark. They fall under the category of ‘roadside fixtures’, and cost estimates for the materials needed to build them are always factored into the initial budget planning for all BRO roads. There is no one person responsible for writing these slogans and no formal approval process for the content, nor is it possible to say for sure who first devised this novel safety strategy. ‘It is your own innovativeness, your own ingenuity, your own initiative, and your own mental calibre that help you come up with these types of things,’ says Mishra. He does try to ensure that no signs are repeated on the same stretch of road, though some of his favourites can be found on several of Bhutan’s highways. Dantak is currently working to add Dzongka text to the signs so that Bhutanese drivers who don’t speak English can enjoy them too. Bhutan has seen a huge spike in the number of vehicles in recent years, despite heavy taxes on automobile imports and fuel. The Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) reports that there are 74,612 vehicles in the country today, approximately one car for every ten people. Compared to its larger neighbours, it has relatively few drivers, yet Bhutan ranks high in incidents of traffic fatalities. According to the World Health Organization’s 2015 report on road safety,
‘Bhutan has a higher probability of road accident casualties as compared to countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh,’ both of which have populations more than 200 times greater. Disregard for speed limits, seat belt usage and drink-driving rules account for most of the fatal accidents on Bhutan’s roads. After whiskey, driving is risky Peep peep, don’t sleep The purpose of any road is to facilitate a journey, Mishra explains; they are a means of getting from one place to another. It is the responsibility of Dantak, he says, ‘not only to provide merely a physical means to achieve that end, but also to ensure that the roads are used properly and safely, so that the user makes it to his desired destination in a safe way.’ It is the responsibility of the driver, however, to take heed of the warnings. While it would be difficult to prove whether Dantak’s signs are actually improving safety statistics, it does seem that drivers notice and appreciate their messages. In the case of at least one taxi driver the signs changed the way he drives, and for that alone, this passenger is very grateful. So remember, please, Be gentle on my curves ☐
w-t-w.co/m97
45
FORGING INNOVATION FROM TRADITION An Interview with Tshering Tobgay, the Prime Minister of Bhutan
Tshering Tobgay is only the second prime minister to govern the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan since its first democratic election in 2008. Like every Bhutanese official, he talks about the Gross National Happiness philosophy which prioritises well-being over financial growth, but he also identifies Bhutan’s great challenges (employment, economics, infrastructure) and is taking concrete steps to transform his country. Since his election in 2013, Bhutan has become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies while maintaining its unique status as a carbon-negative country. Bhutan provides free education and healthcare for all its citizens, addresses issues of gender equality by recruiting women into important decision-making committees, supports rural
farmers with free electricity, and provides local entrepreneurs with low-interest loans. We met with Tobgay in his office in Thimphu, right after his return from Lunana, in the remote province of Gasa where he was holding meetings in preparation for a new five-year economic development plan. Even in this day and age, the best way to get to Lunana is a week’s hike across the Himalayan peaks. Obviously the prime minister is in great physical shape, but he is also able to negotiate the unique conditions of the country, bringing a much-needed pragmatism to the table, as well as the ability to improvise. We spoke to the prime minister about Bhutan’s development and the preservation of its culture.
46
WTW #8
‘Brand Bhutan is not about using branding to sell our country or to sell its products, no. It’s about celebrating what we value, it’s about celebrating our identity and who we are. It’s not necessarily about extracting something from Bhutan and selling it to the world.’
What are the current priorities and challenges facing Bhutan? You know that we are transitioning to a democracy? It was His Majesty the King who introduced democracy to our people; our people didn’t want democracy. It’s only been about eight years since we introduced democracy in the country, so one of the primary challenges has to be institutionalising it and getting people to understand its principles. But other than that, one of our biggest challenges is that we have to strengthen our economy. We have one of the smallest economies in the world, and we have to strengthen it because we need to create jobs. Increasingly, almost all our children are in schools now, and they will graduate and they will need jobs. So on the one hand, we need to strengthen our economy and diversify it to create jobs, but on the other hand we need to ensure that agricultural productivity increases, and that staying on the farms remains a viable and worthwhile career. What role does new technology play in Bhutan? And what role will it play in the future? Technology is pervasive now, especially modern technology, and especially those technologies driven by the Internet. And that’s good. Technology provides us the opportunity to boost development, to boost education, the economy, communications. The entire government is on an Internet platform and we are trying to go paperless even as we speak. We can reach out to any school and interact directly, primarily with the principal, but also with the whole staff. We can interact with every civil servant
throughout our country. We have an Internetbased performance management system, so we can see how our civil servants are performing, but increasingly, what we call G2C, Government to Citizen services, are all Internet based and I myself monitor if there are backlogs, and if so, where they are, and how efficiently services are being delivered. In healthcare, telemedicine is a bit expensive, but that said, we do use technology, whether it’s just a telephone or a Facebook group where doctors consult one another, or a GPS-based system that tracks the movement of ambulances. So yes, we are using and benefiting from technology, modern technology. Are there other ways that technology promotes democracy? Yes, yes. First and foremost in elections. We have EVMs, Electronic Voting Machines, and our people have accepted them. And when I was in the opposition I used social media a lot. I still engage with people on social media, and I would like to use it a lot more; however, time constraints make it a bit more difficult. Members of Parliament hold virtual conferences throughout the country so that they can interact with their constituents through video conferencing, so that is another use of technology for democracy. Do technology and economic development threaten to compromise Bhutan’s unique culture? I think that technology is just a tool; a culture and its value system are deeper. If technology destroys value systems then something is wrong with the values themselves, so technology just facilitates, expresses what is already there.
Forging Innovation from Tradition
47
Just before our interview Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay visited Lunana, a remote village in the Himalayas, to meet his constituents. The trip there and back is a six-day hike each way; no faster option exists.
You don’t think that technology affects traditional values? It shouldn’t but that’s not to say it won’t, therefore we must be aware of the danger and of the threats, and we need to educate ourselves. We need to use technology responsibly. But even if there are threats to our culture, technology also has advantages. Going back to social media, we can use social media irresponsibly, celebrating things that could actually destroy our culture, or we can use social media to celebrate our traditional values and our culture in such a way that we promote them and make them relevant in today’s world. Many of Bhutan’s engineering solutions are imported from other countries. How do you hope to encourage home-grown ingenuity? In two ways. One is by engaging our Bhutanese intellect, Bhutanese engineers, Bhutanese designers directly, rather than just waiting for foreign intelligence and foreign designers and foreign engineers. We have to use our own people. The other way is that we have to nurture our own heritage. For instance, we are rebuilding and renovating many of our monasteries and fortresses, what we call Dzongs, and those are now designed by our own people. We are renovating them and expanding them in a manner that is consistent with our culture and
our heritage. That is an example of Bhutanese ingenuity. And the way we are expanding agriculture, on our own farms in our own way, that is again driven by our own genius. What do you imagine Bhutan will be like in the future? Content, secure and happy. As a nation what we value most is the fact that we live in harmony. Throughout our society we have a love for our king, and the institution of monarchy will serve our future very well, and therefore I would like to see institutions that we celebrate today becoming even stronger tomorrow. Whether it is our culture, whether it is our spirituality, our community value systems, our family systems, our form of democracy, I see all of them going from strength to strength, all of them under the guidance and leadership of our king. I see our people continuing to enjoy peace, harmony and happiness in the future as we do now. What role does Bhutan play internationally? Firstly Bhutan is for Bhutan. Outside of Bhutan, we are a member of the world community, and therefore we should engage with the world, yes. We should learn from the world, and where possible, we should share with the world.
48
WTW #8
‘Normally branding is linked with marketing, and marketing is linked with consumption, but that is not the way for us to go. I believe that Brand Bhutan is a celebration of who we are and what we are, and we need to be very deliberate about how we promote ourselves and our products.’
What can Bhutan learn from the world?
And in terms of education?
The world contains a tremendous amount of experience, so whether it’s art and culture or leading technology, we have learned from and we must continue to learn from the rest of the world.
Education is enshrined in our constitution, so our kings have started a wonderful system where in spite of the fact that we are such a small economy, all people are given a free education and free healthcare. And free basic education and free basic healthcare are mandated by the constitution, so they are a responsibility. If future governments don’t provide free education and free healthcare, then they would be acting unconstitutionally.
And what do you think the outside world can learn from Bhutan? All of us can learn from each other. All of us. But it’s not for any one society to say ‘learn this’, and therefore we need to engage with one another a lot more meaningfully, a lot more sincerely, a lot more actively, so that all of us can become more secure and all of us can become happier, and it is the same with Bhutan. It is not for Bhutan to say ‘you can learn this, this, this’, because what others want may be different. It is up to the context and the priorities of the other people. What may be attractive to one group of people may be totally unattractive to another, and so it is with Bhutan also. What we choose to learn, what we want to learn, what we want to import from one country may be different from another country. Similarly, what Bhutan may have to share with other countries will also differ from country to country to country. What should Bhutan’s government provide to allow its citizens to live their most fulfilled lives? Security, and that security first and foremost has to be rooted in our institutions, our monarchy, our spirituality, our sovereignty, our culture, our family, our community. Security must be provided in the form of the continuity of these institutions and values.
How is the Internet changing expectations in Bhutan? Expectations are supposed to change. Education is supposed to change expectations. With education, if you don’t have a change in expectations then something is wrong. Similarly, with technology, if you don’t have a change in expectations, something is wrong. Now the question should be whether those expectations are good or not, fair or not, doable or not, achievable or not, and that’s an entirely different area. So expectations must be constructive and must be achievable. As in many areas of the world, youth unemployment is an issue in Thimphu. What do you believe has caused this, and how can the government improve the situation? On the one hand we have to strengthen, expand and diversify our economy to create jobs. On the other hand, we also have to make the existing jobs attractive. It’s not that there aren’t jobs; there are many jobs available in construction, agriculture and many other areas. The problem is they are not attractive enough for our people,
Forging Innovation from Tradition
49
Thimphu with his ceremonial sword on his right and a copy of WTW and a photo of K4 and K5 on his left, as well as Peter Biľak, Jonah Goodman and Taco Zwaanswijk.
and we need to make them attractive, but as I said, we also have to diversify our economy so that many more jobs can be created, and the best way to create jobs is through self-employment. We need to have a sense of entrepreneurship, and we need small industries, small and medium enterprises throughout our country where people can harness their entrepreneurial spirit to actually create their own jobs. What are some of the practical measures to promote entrepreneurship in Bhutan? We are making doing business easier. The World Bank has a Doing Business index in which we have improved by leaps and bounds in a matter of one year, from I think about 140-something to the 70s in a year and a half. We need to make doing business easier, but we need to work with our people so that they understand that entrepreneurship is not bad, it’s good, and they should go after their ambitions. But to allow them to do that, we also need to support them, and so for instance, all rural businesses are tax exempt. We also have something called the Business Opportunity Information Centre, which provides subsidised loans at 4%. At a commercial rate you would be lucky to get a 13% loan, but we provide a 4% loan as well as other support. These are all measures to help our entrepreneurs fulfil their potential. The other thing is to promote the dignity of
labour, to celebrate skilled work. There are many ways we do that. It starts from the school system and it starts by example, by personal example. We are providing government bonuses to construction contractors who hire 100% Bhutanese. We have a state-owned construction company that employs all Bhutanese. So there are many ways of doing it, and we need to do a lot more. How does economic development coexist with Bhutan’s efforts towards cultural presentation? These two things are often conflicting interests. The purpose of cultural preservation is for ourselves, it’s not for the world. If you are attracted to us, that’s a bonus. But the main purpose is for us to have a better understanding of who we are and to celebrate who we are. Does the increased number of tourists have a negative impact on Bhutan? Yes and no. Yes, it could have a negative impact; no, because tourists, like yourself, you come here and reinforce our own love of our culture. If you as a foreigner, as a tourist, are so happy with the culture as it exists and is celebrated in Bhutan by the Bhutanese, that reinforces the impulse for us, the Bhutanese ourselves, to believe that our culture is worth protecting. Not just for ourselves but for the world. ☐
50
WTW #8
FOOTBALL ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
w-t-w.co/9mn
51
On the day that Brazil and Germany’s football teams faced off in the 2002 World Cup, FIFA’s two lowest-ranked teams, Montserrat and Bhutan, also played their own final.
Hans van der Meer travelled to Bhutan to photograph the historic football game. Hans is fascinated by football, solitary goalkeepers, and unintentional spaces. Robert Urquhart studied fine art before finding a career based on having fun, travelling and interviewing interesting people. Since his first assignment getting naked in Newcastle, UK to experience the work of Spencer Tunick, Robert has kept his clothes on, writing as editor-at-large for Elephant magazine and teaching at London College of Communication. He now knows slightly more about Bhutan and football than he did before.
52
WTW #8
‘When you read about Bhutan or watch a documentary about it, it’s always about the temples, the Buddhism, the incense, the traditional dress, it’s all very traditional,’ explains de Jongh.
Some 15,000 spectators, triple the population of Montserrat, created a fes tive atmosphere at the Changlimithang Stadium in Bhutan’s capital Thimphu.
June 30, 2002 was a big date on the football calendar, the FIFA World Cup Final between heavyweights Brazil and Germany at the International Stadium in Yokohama, Japan. Watching the live broadcast together were two lesser-known national teams, lowest-ranking Bhutan and Monserrat, who’d just played each other in a very different match at Changlimithang Stadium in Bhutan’s capital city of Thimphu. The story of this unusual game was captured in a 2003 documentary, The Other Final, produced by Kessels Kramer, the Amsterdam marketing agency that made the whole event possible. The official story for the motivation behind The Other Final is that when the Netherlands failed to qualify for the World Cup, Matthijs de Jongh and Johan Kramer of Kessels Kramer were so disappointed that they decided to come up with an idea to entertain themselves during the long football drought sprawling out ahead
The game, recognised by FIFA as an official international match, brought together two nations that had never won a game before.
of them. Looking at the league tables, they hit upon the idea of getting the two lowest-ranked teams together and holding their own final match. ‘That’s the official version,’ says de Jongh, ‘but the real story behind it is that I had been in Bhutan in 2000 and 2001, and I was fascinated by the country and wanted to share it.’ The Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked country bordered by China to the north, and by India to the south, east and west. It ranked as the eighth-happiest country in the world in a 2006 Business Week report, and is widely known as a Shangri-La for its unspoilt environment and rigorous efforts to maintain its own identity. ‘When you read about Bhutan or watch a documentary about it, it’s always about the temples, the Buddhism, the incense, the traditional dress, it’s all very traditional,’ explains de Jongh. ‘So I said to Johan that we should do a project together; we should film something there, but
Football on the Roof of the World
we shouldn’t just cover the mountains or the temples—we needed some sort of contemporary angle.’ How did football come into the plan? ‘We looked up what Bhutan was doing with football, and at the time they were second-last in the official FIFA world ranking, which makes you curious as to who is the last. And that happened to be Monserrat,’ de Jongh remembers. They also considered a match with Ajax Amsterdam, the Dutch national champions at the time, as a somewhat less challenging alternative. ‘I tried the Ajax idea with the Bhutan Football Federation,’ de Jongh explains, ‘but they were a bit surprised and I wasn’t taken seriously.’ Returning empty-handed from Bhutan with five months to go before the World Cup Final, de Jongh decided that it was probably better to return to the more ambitious proposal of a Bhutan vs Monserrat match. Having sent two
53
faxes, one to the head of the Bhutan Football Federation (who happened to be the prime minister as well) and one to the Monserrat Football Association (MFA), the team at Kessels Kramer then sat back and waited for a response. Monserrat responded enthusiastically within a week. Bhutan didn’t respond until a month later, but having discussed it during a cabinet meeting, they also approved the match wholeheartedly. In the meantime, however, Monserrat had got cold feet and begun to doubt the project, leaving de Jongh and Kramer no other alternative but to travel to Monserrat to convince the authorities of their plan. Before setting off for Monserrat, de Jongh first travelled to FIFA headquarters in Zurich to get their approval. ‘We realised that if we were going to take this seriously and celebrate this as something serious (though with a certain lightness), then it also had to be an official international
A Bhutanese welcome sign for the Montserrat national football team. Due to the heavy volcanic activity on the
the small Caribbean island, the game was played in Bhutan, at an elevation of 2,320 m (7,656 ft).
match, otherwise, it would be just a gimmick,’ de Jongh explains. ‘I had a single piece of A4 paper with a picture of a Bhutanese player and a Monserrat player. I said to them, “For the love of the game is your motto, so… you must love this idea”.’ FIFA agreed to the match, but only if standard international rules applied. De Jongh agreed, and armed with the official FIFA paperwork he headed for Monserrat. Monserrat, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean, had recently been the focus of the world’s attention as it had suffered a devastating volcanic eruption that destroyed much of the tiny island, including its only football pitch. On arrival, de Jongh and Kramer met with the MFA and the local British government who were labouring to rebuild island life. Carole Milne, former UK Development Coordinator for the MFA, remembers the initial introduction. ‘It was a message out of the blue
from Matthijs: a marketing company was looking for people to help them invest in an idea, The Other Final.’ Her choice of the word ‘invest’ reflects the way that many in Monserrat viewed the project. Paul Morris, then coach of the Monserrat squad, recalls how the authorities’ attitude shaped the politics of the situation: ‘I knew this would be a great opportunity for the players, football in Montserrat and the country as a whole. The MFA president’s principal concern was “What are we getting out of it? What is our payment?”. I argued long and hard that we should see any payment as a bonus and that we should not pass up this opportunity. All costs and expenses had been guaranteed by the Dutch guys. I know [Kessels and de Jongh] both felt disheartened by the attitude at times.’ As for the players, Morris recalls that they were ‘slightly underwhelmed by the announcement, probably thinking, “it seems
Football on the Roof of the World
to be too good to be true, let’s wait and see if it really happens”.’ The reservations of the players and the escalating conflict between Morris and the MFA were not the only discouraging news. Back on the Bhutanese side, Kang Byung-Chan, coach of the national team, died, forcing the team to hire a last-minute replacement, Dutch footballer and coach Arie Schans. Then in Monserrat, the disagreement between Morris and the football association escalated to the point that Morris resigned. A number of players offered to resign with him, but he encouraged them to make the most of the opportunity to play. One of those players was Charles Thompson, today Deputy Commissioner of Police in Monserrat. ‘I was elated when I heard about the project,’ he remembers. ‘However, I had to do some research as to where Bhutan was.’ Geographical knowledge was somewhat lacking on both sides, neither of which was completely sure of the other’s location, but it wasn’t just the physical distance that separated the two teams; there were cultural differences to bridge as well. Milne recalls, ‘In Bhutan you bow to say hello, and here were a lot of young Caribbean lads who didn’t have the experience of going overseas where everyone is respectful and polite.’ But cultural, geographical and conceptual differences notwithstanding, the project began to come together. Monserrat, under the guidance of the MFA president, agreed to the deal. A contract prepared by de Jongh emphasised that no profit was to be made by Kessels Kramer and that any profits would go to fund football in the two countries. In Amsterdam, Jacqueline Kouwenberg, production manager for the documentary, was preparing the groundwork. ‘The most timeconsuming part was the logistics,’ she says. ‘Getting a whole football team from Montserrat to Bhutan, and getting crews and equipment to Montserrat and Bhutan for the shoots took work.’ Thanks to the diligence of Kouwenberg and Milne, however, the Monserrat team made it to Thimphu. Dutch photographer Hans van der Meer was on hand to meet and record the team as they arrived and was witness to the culture shock experienced by the Monserrat team as they suddenly found themselves under pressure
55
The idea for the match came from the Dutch communications agency Kessels Kramer, who used the event to bring worldwide attention to two cultures from opposite sides of the globe. Rather than focusing on competition, the resulting documen tary, The Other Final, celebrates bringing people together.
to perform for an expectant home crowd at a test match with a local side. Worn out from an exhausting trip that included five layovers and a three-hour bus ride on bumpy roads, and with half the team ill with a stomach bug, the last thing that they wanted to do was play an hour and a half of football. The huge crowd of enthusiastic spectators that had gathered for the game, however, was excited. Van der Meer recalls, ‘When I heard the team’s internal struggles, I said to the team captain, “Walk with me.” I took him and showed him the crowd, and he went back and said to the team, “Well, we have to play, there is no other way.” It was funny; I recall there was a cow crossing the pitch whilst they were trying to play. I think the local team won. It was a hilarious moment.’ Whoever won, Schans was encouraged by what he saw. ‘Monserrat is a low-lying country. Their team had climate sickness. When they climbed the stairs in the hotel they had to lie down to rest for 15 minutes. This was a plus for our team as far as I was concerned. Monserrat are physically big compared to Bhutan players; my players said, “Ah! It’s impossible to win against these kind of players,” and [the Monserrat side] were doing tricks with the ball on their shoulders and on their heads… they made their training into a real show. My players got smaller and smaller, and I said, “Look, boys, every game in the world, whether it’s Monserrat versus Bhutan or Germany versus Spain, starts with a 50/50 chance, so we will see what happens.”’ By the time that 30 June arrived, somehow everything had fallen into place. While the
56
Bhutan took on Montserrat (at the time 202nd and 203rd respectively in the FIFA rankings) for the title of the world’s worst team. After the match the Bhutan
WTW #8
and Montserrat players watched the official World Cup final on television together. Brazil beat Germany 2–0.
players from Germany and Brazil were preparing to play the match of their lives to a worldwide audience of more than 63 million viewers, Bhutan and Monserrat were also preparing to play for an audience of 15,000 and a Dutch film crew. The game took place in the lashing rain, but that did nothing to dampen the spirits of the home side. ‘When Bhutan scored the first goal in the first five minutes, my feeling was that the players were getting bigger minute by minute,’ says Schans. ‘They felt satisfied and thrust forward hard. The moment we scored that goal, the game was almost decided.’ In the end the score was 4–0 to Bhutan, the first official game the country ever won. Despite the pain of losing a shutout match, Monserrat took the defeat with good grace, van der Meer remembers. ‘There was no ridicule. This match was truly impressive in terms of
humanity. Both teams were very friendly with each other. After the game we all went and watched the World Cup for real, and the atmosphere was like it is all over the world: football brings people together.’ The World Cup Final made the usual headlines, but The Other Final made headlines of its own. The newswires had picked up on the feel-good factor of the underdogs playing their own final match, and the story quickly spread to international news agencies across the world. For Thompson the event was a reminder that ‘there are places out there, which, for a number of reasons, cannot be like the big names in the game today, but the simple facets of the game are held dear to their hearts. That even if we are from different cultures, backgrounds and ways of life, football means a lot to many people.’ For Schans the historic victory resulted in the offer of a permanent position, an offer that
Football on the Roof of the World
57 Football is fast gaining popularity in both countries, with a modest amount of money spent at the grass roots level. Since their first historic win in 2002 Bhutan has won seven other competi tive fixtures against other international teams and advancing in 2015 to the 159th position in the FIFA ranking.
he accepted, becoming the trainer of Bhutan’s under-20 team for a number of years. For the production team from Kessels Kramer the end of the match was far from the end of the adventure, and they returned to Amsterdam to finish the film. ‘There was a lot of work to be done after the film was made,’ says Kouwenberg. ‘We didn’t sell the idea to any broadcaster before the shoot; we had to sell it after we made the film to earn back the investments, and that part of the business was completely new to us.’ Released in 2003, The Other Final went on to be named best documentary at the Avignon Film Festival and to get special mention in its category at the Bermuda International Film Festival. In Morris’ opinion, ‘the end product was exceptional. It was a balance of exploring culture, common goals, possibilities, differences and joys, all through a single game of football. Fantastic. I praise the guys for resisting airing
their frustrations at the Montserrat FA for their pettiness during the process. They deserved all the accolades they received.’ At a time when FIFA is rife with allegations of corruption The Other Final remains a refreshing reminder of what football is really about. Kramer, like the other participants, cites the film as a remarkable, life-changing experience. ‘It was an extremely personal project and the one I love most,’ he says. ‘What I remember most about it is the enormous adventure of going to two very remote places with a super-small crew and hardly any equipment. It has created a lifelong friendship and bond with all the people involved. Whenever I meet one of our crew, they always tell me that this was the project of their lives. And that’s true for me as well. I still get job inquiries from all over the world based on this film. What it taught us is that a special idea can make anything happen.’ ☐
58
WTW #8
DRONES AND PHONES by Jonah Goodman
In a country where medical budgets and healthcare staff are stretched dangerously thin, telemedicine could help make the most of limited resources. As they wait for funding for more ambitious projects, Bhutan’s doctors are improvising their own home-grown solutions.
w-t-w.co/k19
59
California-based startup Matternet joined with the World Health Organi zation and the government of Bhutan to conduct a trial project to send medical supplies to remote clinics in the Himalayan countryside. In this photo Matternet’s CEO Andreas Raptopoulos
(in black) and Bhutan’s prime minister Tshering Tobgay (in red) watch a quad copter with a payload of about 1 kg (2.2 lb) in front of the National Referral Hospital in Thimphu. Photo courtesy of Matternet.
60
WTW #8 A tourist guide is receiving medical attention at the National Referral Hos pital in Thimphu. Healthcare facilities in Thimphu are well equipped, easy to access, and free to all. Outside of the capital it is more challenging, as most people must walk several hours to reach one of the Basic Health Units, which can make the difference between life and death.
Bhutan is held together by a single, vital thread. Spooled out between Himalayan peaks, the winding East–West Highway ties Trashigang in the far east to Thimphu in the west, then runs south to Phuentsholing on the Indian border. Almost all imports—diesel fuel, toilet paper, steel nails, cooking oil—arrive along this route, borne by eight-tonne lorries sputtering black exhaust fumes. The lorries move slowly: carved into the mountainside, cracked by cold winters and soaked by the summer rains, the highway’s crumbling surface is a thin, broken strip of potholes, mud and rubble less than three metres wide. Every year, the road claims lives, but though many of its victims are killed in collisions, landslides and precipitous falls, others are not involved in accidents at all. They die in the backs of ambulances, from infections, trauma, or acute appendicitis. Paramedics know that delivering a severely injured patient to surgery in less than 60 minutes, the ‘golden hour’, can make the difference
between life and death. But in Bhutan, the only staffed operating theatre is in Thimphu, and for patients who have to cross the central highlands to get there, the journey does not take one hour: it takes two full days. ‘The biggest challenge in Bhutan is the landscape,’ says Dr Kinzang P. Tshering, president of Thimphu’s Khesar Gyalpo University of Medical Services of Bhutan. Founded in 2013, his university is tasked with training specialists so that they can be available throughout the country instead of only in the capital. ‘So many cases require referral to Thimphu,’ he says. ‘Advanced infections, cancer, small babies with complications… there are so many issues where we have to transfer patients from east to west, over seven mountain passes.’ When construction started on the East–West Highway in 1961, average life expectancy was 33, and almost a third of all children died before their fifth birthday. Bhutan was plagued by tuberculosis, sepsis, pneumonia and unsanitary
Drones and Phones
living conditions. There were two hospitals, but only three doctors and two nurses in the entire country. Today, 90% of the population lives within three hours’ walk of one of over 200 Basic Health Units, or BHUs, each manned by two health assistants overseeing immunisation, sanitation, health education, outreach clinics and minor treatment. It’s worth the journey: free access to healthcare is guaranteed by the 2008 constitution, and largely thanks to the BHUs, life expectancy has risen to 70 and children are ten times more likely to survive to adulthood. The BHUs stand at the base of a referral system that can send patients on to one of 22 district hospitals, and from there to three regional hospitals, including the national hospital in Thimphu, home to the country’s only MRI machine and sole CT scanner. It’s proved a successful way of using limited resources to make maximum impact, but although Bhutan’s workforce of 240 doctors and 950 nurses is still growing, it remains sorely overstretched. The World Health Organization calculates that a country requires at least 23 healthcare professionals for every 10,000 people. Bhutan has just 70% of that, and though its general practitioners are spread throughout the country, its specialists are clustered in the capital, on the wrong side of the East–West Highway for over 40% of its citizens. First championed by the Fourth King in 1997, telemedicine—remote diagnosis and treatment—has been seen as a way to bring Bhutan’s scarce supply of medical expertise to its scattered population. A government duty to provide ‘100% nationwide access to a healthcare professional through technology-enabled solutions’ is even mandated by the country’s constitution, though progress has been patchy. A digital X-ray was set up in Mongur regional hospital in 2000, Internet-linked electrocardiograms were installed at two hospitals three years later, and 14 telemedicine rooms, each with a desktop computer, webcam and Internet connection, have been set up. A 2008 attempt to link hospitals across South Asia fell through, however, and similar projects have suffered from a reliance on one-time donations for funding. This year, near the southern town of Gelephu, a BHU that was frequently cut off during the annual monsoon trialled a medical camera system with
61
fibre-optic connections to the nearest hospital, yet rolling out such a system nationwide would be a huge undertaking. ‘We are trying to find out what is really required,’ says Gaki Tshering, the Department of Health’s telemedicine expert, ‘what kind of medical equipment will really benefit a basic health facility.’ Seeing and speaking to patients is one thing. Sending and testing samples is another. Most of Bhutan can only be accessed along mule trails, and several villages in the snowy north rely on mountain passes that open up only once a year. As the crow flies, however, even communities which take a week to reach on foot lie within 70 km (43 mi) of the East–West Highway, which is why the government has been eagerly exploring the use of drones since 2013. ‘The impact would be enormous in a mountainous country like ours,’ explains Tashi Duba, the Department of Health project manager who ran a drone testing programme. Samples could be collected within hours, and special drugs could be delivered where they are needed, making the most efficient use of a limited supply. With funding from the WHO, Bhutan’s government contacted Matternet, a Californian company specialising in autonomous drone delivery systems. ‘Our vehicle is fully automated,’ says Andreas Raptopoulos, the company’s CEO and co-founder, ‘able to fly by itself beyond the visual line of sight of any observer. You have an iPhone app that you use to initiate the flight, and once the flight is initiated, the vehicle just follows the mission plan according to coordinates downloaded from our cloud system.’ In a nine-day trial in Bhutan’s highlands in 2014, Matternet outlined how BHUs could be connected to district hospitals. ‘Let’s say you have two or three drones at the hospital,’ explains Raptopoulos. ‘On demand, a flight is initiated to a clinic. The nurse there has a blood sample that she or he puts into a box on the vehicle, then they recharge the battery and send it back. From the hospital, they can report the result with a text message, and send medicine back to the patient, placed in the same box and sent to the clinic. Each leg of the trip would take a maximum of 30 minutes.’ Communications are encrypted, the drone has a parachute in case of malfunctions, and local conditions can be accommodated: ‘In
62
WTW #8
The main road between Bhutan’s two major cities, the former capital Punakha and present capital Thimphu. Although the distance is only 72 km (45 mi) and traffic is light, the average speed is just 24 kph (15 mph) due to poor road conditions. In the summer, the monsoon brings heavy rains, landslips and falling rocks, while in the winter, snow and gale-force winds render high-altitude mountain passes inaccessible.
Bhutan they asked us to be very careful not to fly over yellow roofs,’ says Raptopoulos, ‘because those are the monasteries.’ In Raptopoulos’ words, the system requires just three things: ‘Good GPS reception, cellular telephony, and electrical power for the places we fly in and out from.’ Unfortunately, none of these can be guaranteed in Bhutan’s remote areas. Where the drones are most needed, writes Tashi Duba, ‘there is no (reliable) GPRS/3G service,’ and despite Matternet’s confidence in Bhutan’s GPS signal, the drone did not land as instructed. ‘The medicines or samples might be misplaced, or the drone itself could get lost in Bhutan’s thick forests.’ Power is also a constant problem. Although almost all of the population has now been connected to a national grid, there are frequent brownouts and power fluctuations. Charging a Matternet drone’s battery, equivalent to charging four iPhones, is easier said than done. A Matternet drone can fly for 10 km (6.2 mi) with a 1 kg (2.2 lb) payload, but most of the
remote areas are further than 30 km (18.6 mi) from the nearest health centre, which means more landing pads, more refuelling areas, more people, and more training. Many telemedicine plans suffer from the same problems, says Gaki Tshering. Fixed facilities require ‘constant training, almost twice a year, because health workers aren’t stationed for long in one place. They move around a lot.’ Training costs money, and ultimately, stretched finances have put a stop to every major telemedicine project so far. The close to US$250,000 (€223,200) that Matternet requested to carry out a second feasibility study was, recalls Tashi Duba, ‘an astonishing figure for a country like ours’. In the absence of major government projects, Bhutan’s medics have developed a home-grown solution. The Bhutan Telemedicine Group is a closed Facebook group comprising 320 doctors and nurses from around the country. Administered by a paediatrician, it has become a forum for consultation between doctors on
Drones and Phones
smartphones. ‘Social media is picking up fast,’ says Gaki Tshering, ‘and doctors have adapted it to do consultations. I’ve seen 228 cases discussed in two months from 12 facilities. They discuss cases from alcoholic liver disease to meningitis, miscarriage, pneumonia, anaemia, and seizures. They describe a patient, say, one with a skin rash, post a picture, then tag the dermatologists and say “please advise”. Other peers can view and comment. In an emergency, they can follow up with another message.’ Medics have even turned to instant messaging on WeChat: ‘They have a closed group of orthopaedics, a closed group of district medical officers, and that’s where they consult cases to get a quick response.’ The new methods have had the greatest impact on newly qualified doctors, whose first posting is traditionally one to two years of work in a series of remote BHUs. ‘By consulting a specialist, they get the confidence they need,’ Gaki Tshering says. ‘They have to be the boss in those
63
places, even if they’re new, and now they can say, “I’ve also spoken to specialists in the Thimphu national hospital and this is the reply. Even if you go yourself, you’ll get the same answer, so don’t travel for three days to get there.” It stops unnecessary referrals.’ The informal system is far from perfect. ‘We don’t have control or oversight over use,’ admits Gaki Tshering. ‘We’re concerned about confidentiality, and we don’t yet have a proper system to compensate doctors for their efforts.’ For her and her team, however, the doctors’ initiative is an outstanding example of teamwork and innovation that points the way forward, away from expensive projects and towards an official patient information system, synced from an app on a doctor’s smartphone to a national database. It’s not an idea from the WHO, or any external company, but one born in Bhutan, from medics striving to do the best with the little that they have. ☐
64
WTW #8
CAT HAIR, MUD PAINT, RICE BANKS AND THE BUDDHA by Jonah Goodman
Sonam Choki (in red), head of the Choki Traditional Art School, walks with other teachers to the daily student assembly that starts the working day.
Traditional Bhutanese art is not the expression of the artist, but a service to the public, designed to reinforce Buddhist values and precepts. New Bhutanese artists are finding ways to express themselves without forsaking the idea of art as service, a force for social good.
w-t-w.co/14x
65 See the video, hear the song: w-t-w.co/E1Euln
A thin fence of woven bamboo leans along a roadside outside the town of Paro. Behind it, a mechanical digger rumbles between mounds of red earth, blue tarps billow in the wind, and two-dozen women, some very elderly, stand in a long trough about 60 cm (24 in) wide, each holding a pole with a sturdy wooden cube at its base. As one, they steadily pound the earth at their feet and sing to keep time, following the lead of a young woman in a baseball cap in a raucous, full-throated call and response. This is the Bhutanese rammed-earth technique, a centuries-old method for building walls in which dirt is packed layer upon layer into sturdy wooden frames. The resulting thickness provides excellent, affordable insulation able to withstand the region’s frequent earthquakes. Traditionally, the pounding is carried out by women while men carry over the raw material, but some traditions can change. On this building site, the only man to be seen is driving the digger, scooping up earth in its hydraulic claw while the women toil with their mallets and songs. From the sound of their laughter and singing, the women are having the better time. This is a oneoff job for which they’re working nine-hour days for a daily wage of 600 ngultrum (€8/US$9),
good money for a farm worker in the area. The rammed-earth technique is a form of jinzo, or clay arts, and one of the zorig chusum, or 13 crafts of Bhutan, which were first documented in the 17th century, but are probably considerably older. The distinctly Bhutanese aspects of these preserved traditions are now promoted by the government’s Gross National Happiness policies, which deem their conservation a core component of the population’s well-being. The zorig chusum, in no particular order, are painting, paper-making, wood-turning, blacksmithing, clay arts, casting, carving, carpentry, weaving, stonework, metalwork, bamboo work and needlework. Fifty years ago, the zorig chusum were not only traditions; they were also the backbone of the non-agricultural sector of Bhutan’s economy. Predictably, some of them have begun to fall by the wayside as the country has increased its engagement with the outside world. Garzo, blacksmithing, has all but disappeared from its traditional bases in areas like the Punakha valley, as superior tools, knives and nails arrive from India. It was hard, painful and poorly paid work, and although it is one of the zorig chusum, not everyone regrets its demise as a local industry.
66
An instructor demonstrating use of colour in traditional Buddhist thangka painting at the Choki Traditional Art
WTW #8
School, a private institution that helps children from broken and economically disadvantaged families.
Other seemingly obsolete crafts have found new markets in the exponentially increasing numbers of tourists. In Thimphu, guides bring a steady stream of foreign travellers to watch dezo or paper-making in a factory where they can watch workers create individual sheets out of a basin of watery plant pulp, while above them, dancing bamboo rods flex and spring, suspending heavy wooden dipping screens like the fingers of a puppeteer. While crafts related to manufacturing have suffered, those associated with construction have come to thrive. As part of its push to promote a unifying national culture in the 1980s and 1990s, Bhutan’s government issued instructions that all new buildings should be in traditional Bhutanese style. Revised every few years, the Department for Urban Development and Housing’s Traditional Architecture Guidelines for new buildings emphasises the use of zorig chusum techniques. Rammed-earth and shingzo, traditional carpentry, are encouraged but not critical, whereas lhazo, traditional
painting, is described in the introduction to the guidelines as ‘mandatory’ (emphasis theirs) on all ‘architectural features’. Because of this rule, traditional painters in Bhutan are almost guaranteed employment in the country’s active construction industry. Even those who drop out after two years of a painting course have skills that make them as indispensable on building sites as an electrician or a plumber. Only three colleges in Bhutan teach traditional painting. Two are run by the government and only take applicants who have graduated from high school. The third, Choki Traditional Art School in Thimphu, takes students even if they have not, and specialises in training young people from underprivileged backgrounds to paint, sculpt, weave, or carve in order to improve their job prospects. ‘Artists were really looked down on in the past,’ explains head teacher Sonam Choki, ‘but nowadays the government has given their work a lot more emphasis.’ Historically, the only place where it was possible to receive any kind of art education
Traditional Buddhist art is guided by precise rules and proportions, and practitioners are expected to reproduce
religious figures to an exacting standard of accuracy according to existing mod els prescribed by religious doctrines.
in Bhutan was in a monastery. Sonam Choki’s father received this instruction as a monk, but one day he returned from a trip into the secular world with a wife and was sent out of the dzong for breaking his vow of celibacy. Paradoxically, this made him even more sought after as an artist, as although monks were the only people practised in traditional art techniques, they had high status and spiritual responsibilities that could make contracting them to work on building sites a delicate process. Having seen firsthand the demand for non-monk artists, Sonam Choki’s father started the first government art school in the early 1970s, the second one in 1998, and Choki Traditional Art School one year later, in 1999. That monastic ethos is easy to sense at the secluded mountainside campus of Choki Traditional Art School. A towering golden relief of the founder of Bhutan, the Zhabdrung, Ngawang Namgyal, looms over the entrance near a long line of prayer wheels. The school’s teenage students live at the school and follow a strict
daily timetable. After they wake at 5:00am, every minute of every day until lights out at 9:30pm is devoted to work, with the exception of two 15-minute breaks. Two hours daily are set aside for prayer, and as a treat on Sundays, breakfast is served at 8:30 am, 45 minutes later than usual. Classes are equally disciplined. Artists progress from level to level according to their ability to reproduce works to an exacting standard of accuracy. There is no room for interpretation, and finished work is never signed with the name of the artist. In drawing class, students begin by learning to draw exact freehand copies of their teacher’s pictures of the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. In the later stages of their training, they have to know the exact diagrammatic proportions for drawing Buddhist religious figures. There are thousands, but all are based on eight essential templates in which every shade and proportion, such as the relative positions of brow and bellybutton, is prescribed by longstanding religious doctrine. ‘This art is used by everybody in day-to-day life,’ explains Sonam
There is little room for creativity within the traditional arts. The head teacher commented: ‘The students wouldn’t want to risk bad karma because of
incorrect interpretations.’ Often students seek personal expression outside of their expected work output.
Cat Hair, Mud Paint, Rice Banks and the Buddha
Choki. ‘It’s not just decoration. People use it for developing their spiritual lives.’ For the first two to three years of their studies, painters at the school work exclusively with natural materials. They learn how to filter mud so that it can be used as a paint that won’t crack, and precisely which part of a cat has the finest hairs for use in paintbrushes (the neck). They work in the lingering stink of boiled cow skins, which release an extract that makes paints weatherproof and keeps colours vivid. On the wall of their studio, samples of pigment are hung up in small see-through plastic bags labelled ‘red mud’, ‘blue mud’, ‘yellow mud’, ‘tea leaves’, ‘rubia stem’ and ‘rhododendron’. To outsiders coming from an industrialised world, these disappearing skills inspire a special kind of wonder, but to young students, the strictures of zorig chusum can be frustrating. ‘Traditional art does not have any room for creativity,’ says Sonam Choki. ‘Once a piece is finished it is consecrated by monks, so it has to have been made according to the correct iconography. We cannot make any changes. We have to respect those values.’ Nevertheless, she and her staff are keenly aware of their students’ desire to innovate. ‘We said, “Okay, come up with any creative thing that you really want to make,” and we gave them one week. At the end of the week, they could not come up with anything. They had made the same images.’ This would come as no surprise to Asha Kama, the avuncular figurehead and co-founder of the Volunteer Artists’ Studio (VAST), an organisation started in 1998 by five working artists in order to provide art enthusiasts with the opportunity to develop their full potential. With a membership of around 260 volunteers including photographers, graphic designers, filmmakers, writers, musicians and painters, the VAST centre in Thimphu runs classes, workshops and camps in which an estimated 8,000 people have taken part over the last 18 years. Asha Kama, who punctuates much of what he says with an infectious giggle, is no stranger to the creative block produced by training in traditional art. ‘Opening up a traditional artist is a very difficult thing,’ says Asha Kama. ‘They cannot really conceptualise themselves as an artist. They consider themselves to be a technician or a craftsman, and can only be brought slowly to an
69
understanding that they don’t have to wait for somebody to tell them what to do.’ The teaching he encountered at a British art school during the 1990s, where ‘they dare you to open the shell, open the box’, falls flat with VAST students. Instead, Asha Kama and his colleagues try to spark artistry by placing students in situations that demand a creative response, specifically, on camps in rural Bhutan with up to 100 participants that last up to three weeks. ‘If you don’t feel any responsibility, how can you create?’ asks Asha Kama. ‘If you have not really understood the situation, how can you express yourself?’ When a VAST camp arrives at a new location, teachers send students out into their surroundings to meet people and learn about the local situation. This might typically be followed by a survey to gather more detail before they devise a project to work with local people to realise some social benefit. Two years ago, VAST carried out one of these camps in Gelephu, a poor southeastern region of Bhutan. ‘There is a huge alcohol problem in the border area,’ says Asha Kama. ‘So we designed a camp called Art Against Alcoholism. We had to design it, create it, and work out how not to get into problems in a community where 95% of people drink a great deal, and you’re planning to tell them something they don’t want to hear!’ The 45 creatives developed an exhibition about the ill effects of alcohol, which they presented to drunken guests of honour. ‘Our expectations are very low,’ Asha Kama clarifies. ‘These are situations where the government has been trying to do something for years without success. We went for 19 days, but at least we could benefit the younger generation there, so they can feel it’s their choice whether they drink or not.’ Last year, VAST took students to a village at the height of the monsoon for two nights to work in the fields and endure constant rain, swarming insects, heat, and semi-starvation. Still, ‘the hardest part was working out how to bring art into that world,’ remembers Asha Kama. ‘How could we promote and develop their local products so that they could sell them in the marketplace?’ Asha Kama says this teaching technique is not new in Bhutan. ‘Our parents didn’t go to school, but culturally we had this process of pushing understanding. Their generation would always connect us to problems, to make us realise how
70
WTW #8
In Bhutan, people don’t choose to be an artist because they are passionate about art, but because it’s a solid profession.
much effort goes into simple things by letting us be a part of it. I remember one day when I was very young my father made me take seven horses with heavy loads to another village on my own. I was proud of myself for doing it and facing the real challenges of being alone with those horses. Sometimes my parents would tell me to take some food to some other people, and when I arrived I realised it was because they didn’t have enough to eat. It was a way of learning. They were giving me a chance.’ Other inspiration springs from the government Communication Division that employed Asha Kama from 1982 until 1997, which would send small, elite teams of designers, writers, photographers, film crews and printers to stay in remote areas for months in order to teach mostly illiterate people about winter cropping and new methods of planting rice. Outside VAST’s centre in Thimphu, blue picnic benches are arrayed under primary-coloured parasols in a small garden between the river and the road. Sculptures by VAST artists—a Sisyphus dressed in a traditional gho struggling under a
rock; several tree trunks decorated with bright plastic bottle caps—stand among a small Sunday fair. There is tarot reading, a jumble sale, a painting class, and several food stalls. Three weather beaten men are cooking in large pans propped up on rocks over small fires. They are members of some of the 16 families in the small district of Zarbisa Chiwog near Punakha, who are the beneficiaries of the fourth Rice Bank project, for which this event is a fundraiser. The Rice Bank was an idea dreamed up ten years ago. ‘On one of our camps,’ says Asha Kama, ‘we found out that there were some people who had a problem finding enough to eat in summer. They would work on other people’s land and had too many debts to pay back. What could we do? The elders in the village suggested that if we simply provided them with a few bags of rice this would make them happy.’ Thinking things through, the situation began to look less straightforward. VAST did not want their donations to make anyone dependent or create expectations. Instead, ‘they can borrow rice
People taking part in the Rice Bank project, which aims to break the vicious cycle of debt of rural farmers. A supply
of rice is lent to farmers and returned in instalments with no interest after the crop is collected.
from a bank with no interest, and they can pay back in instalments.’ VAST set up a chairman and a small committee to oversee the distribution of a 2,000 kg (4,010 lb) supply of rice. Every year, anyone who has made a withdrawal has to return 20% of the debt. ‘This is where the creative side comes in,’ says Asha Kama. ‘We give them Indian imported rice, but they return high-quality red rice to the bank. We package and market it for sale in Thimphu and, soon, in Singapore and Japan, where it fetches higher prices. Then we split the profits to pay off our investment and save to start a new rice bank. We are turning their rice into even more rice!’ For Bhutan’s traditional artists, there are no easy ways to resolve the frustrations of traditional constraints, and for Thimphu’s budding contemporary artists, members of the scene admit that they have a long way to go. But the opportunities to self-express have had an undeniable impact on VAST’s young artists. There is the extraordinary story of Chand Bhattarai, who was caught up as a child in Bhutan’s early
1990s ethnic troubles, and lost childhood friends to drug overdoses and street killings. When he was struggling to find himself as an angry young man, VAST offered an outlet for expression and redemption. Today he runs an animation studio that has just completed Bhutan’s second animated feature, a children’s film about a dragon in a gho. Or Gyempo Wangchuk, a painter at VAST who trained in thangka, traditional textile painting, but used the ancient technique to depict his father’s descent into alcoholism and death in haunting detail. ‘The real artists in Bhutan’s history were the reincarnated lamas,’ says Asha Kama. ‘The creative power was in their hands, but they didn’t have the skill to realise it. They could say, “I want this building to be built like this,” and a set of craftsmen would be trained to do it and follow orders.’ He laughs again, undaunted by the challenges of a culture that has long separated creative vision and artistic skill. ‘Now it is time for the two to be combined!’ ☐
72
WTW #8
How a land where so much is governed by tradition became known (at least to stamp collectors) as a country of wildly groundbreaking innovation.
Burt Kerr Todd was probably first Ameri can to visit Bhutan in 1951 and later introduced postage stamps to Bhutan. While in graduate school at Oxford he
met the future queen of Bhutan, and he maintained contact with the royal family throughout his life. Photo courtesy of Burt Kerr Todd family archive.
w-t-w.co/x8t
73
Peter Biľak has designed postage stamps for two different countries. He is also the editor of WTW magazine.
LITTLE AMBASSADORS OF THE COUNTRY Practically speaking, a postage stamp is a small piece of printed paper with a layer of glue on the back. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about it. Its price represents partly the cost of production, and partly the markup imposed by the government that funds the postal delivery. Theoretically, the stamp’s production should be as cheap as possible so that the bulk of its price goes towards the service rendered, but since collecting these tiny bits of paper is one of the world’s most popular hobbies, with collectors willing to spend small fortunes on the never-ending stream of new stamps, there is a market for innovative (and more expensive to produce) postage stamps.
A stamp from Burt Kerr Todd’s first series of Bhutanese postage stamps, released on October 10, 1962. These are the only stamps ever to show Bhutan’s neighbour Sikkim as an independent state. (It was annexed by India in 1975.) When Bhutan produced its first airmail stamp, the country didn’t even have an airport. To this day, postal service in some areas of the country is provided by letter carriers who hike barefoot through the forest for days to reach remote villages.
Bhutan launched its postal system in 1962, opening its first post office in Phuentsholing, a small town on the Indian border, and producing its first postage stamps. Bhutan also opened its first paved road in the same year, clearly demonstrating its desire to open the hermit country to the world beyond. Although ambitious infrastructure and modernisation programmes, formulated by the country’s first five-year plan, were set up, funds to realise them were lacking. The Bhutanese government applied to the World Bank for a US$10-million (US$81.32M/€73.84M in today’s money) loan to help finance its infrastructure, including hospitals, roads and an airfield, but was rejected. One of the advisors who had drafted the application was Burt Kerr Todd, a wealthy American entrepreneur and a personal friend of the Bhutanese royal family. In the aftermath of the rejection, Todd spoke to a high-ranking official who had attended the talks, suggesting an alternative fundraising method: issuing postage stamps. In comparison with a multimillion-dollar loan, this may seem like an odd move, but Todd recognised that stamp collectors could indeed be an important source of income for smaller countries who created limited runs of attractive stamps designed mainly to be bought by collectors.
74
A series of philatelic firsts: circular coin stamps made of foil (1966); textured brushstroke stamps (1968); silk stamps (1969) and extruded plastic stamps
WTW #8
(1972). Todd hired artists and had stamps manufactured in China, Japan, Indonesia, Spain and Italy.Â
Little Ambassadors of the Country
The world’s first 3-D stamps depicted the Apollo astronauts (1967). The len ticular images were produced in Japan using photographs of toy divers with oxygen tanks on their backs.
75
Ever the maverick businessman, Todd suggested setting up the Bhutan Stamp Agency, a private company established in the Bahamas, which would produce the stamps and handle their sale on the international market. Up to this point, the Bhutan government hadn’t issued stamps and was sceptical of their ability to raise significant revenue, but it agreed to the project for different reasons. As a tiny nation sandwiched between the world’s two most populous countries, China and India, both of which had a history of annexing neighbouring Himalayan kingdoms, Bhutan saw an opportunity to assert itself as a sovereign state. Even if the stamps failed to generate substantial funding, they could help to build awareness of the country, raising at least political capital. Todd’s first stamps were a failure. Just as Bhutan was largely unknown in the global community, its stamps were largely ignored by the philatelic market. More importantly, however, stamp collectors rely on a closed system of philatelic trade channels and on specialised journals. As a newcomer, Todd had no access to these channels, but over time he sought and received the advice of insiders who told him that to get the attention of the philatelists, the stamps would have to be highly attractive, playing to philately’s existing conventions. After five years Bhutan Stamp Agency finally had its first major success. After exhaustive tests and years of development, a Japanese company hired by Todd was able to produce the world’s first three-dimensional lenticular stamps. This 1967 series, which featured images of astronauts and lunar modules, created a philatelic sensation. (Ironically, most Bhutanese had never watched a space launch, since Bhutan didn’t introduce television broadcasting until 1999, the last country in the world to do so.) The 3-D stamps were denounced as gimmicks by philatelists, but captured the imagination of casual collectors. Market-savvy Todd set up giveaway programmes in US supermarkets, where consumers earned Bhutanese stamps with the purchase of groceries. Nor was this the last of Bhutan’s unusual and innovative stamps. After the world’s first 3-D stamp came the first scented stamp. The first textured brushstroke stamp. The first bas-relief stamp. The first stamp printed on metal. The first on silk. The first on extruded plastic. By 1973, Bhutan’s greatest source of revenue was its stamps. The stamps functioned as Bhutan’s little ambassadors or at least cultural attachés, as Bhutan has a very limited number of diplomatic missions abroad, at present just five permanent embassies. Perhaps no other Bhutanese postage stamp has received as much attention as the so-called talking stamps. Issued in 1972 as a set of seven in red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white and black, and in two sizes, the talking stamps were miniature one-sided vinyl records with adhesive backs so that they could be affixed to letters, but also played on a standard turntable. The stamps featured audio recordings of folk songs, the national anthem, the
76
Perhaps no other Bhutanese stamp has received as much attention as the so-called talking stamps. Issued in 1972 as a set of seven, talking stamps were miniature, one-sided vinyl records that
WTW #8
had adhesive backs so that they could be affixed to letters, but also played on a standard turntable. The stamps featured audio recordings of folk songs, the national anthem, the history of Bhutan
in its national language, and the history of Bhutan as narrated in English by Burt Kerr Todd himself. Listen to the stamps: w-t-w.co/G3Acfp
Little Ambassadors of the Country
77
history of Bhutan in Bhutanese and the history of Bhutan as narrated in English by Burt Kerr Todd himself. The stamps came with a first-date cover envelope, and an explanation: This envelope contains your Bhutan postage stamp. In order to develop a national economy, these unusual beautiful stamps are now the principal industry. Bhutan is a tiny 90 mi. kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains. This stamp, one of a series, is a collector’s item. As intended, this oddity appealed to postage stamp collectors worldwide. Today a single talking stamp can sell for hundreds of euros. In 1974, two years after the death of the third king Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, a friend of Todd, the contract with the Bhutan Stamp Agency was cancelled. The Bhutanese Department of Posts and Telegraphs appointed the Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation (IGPC), a New York-based company representing many small and developing countries in the designing, production and marketing of postage stamps. IGPC continued to develop high face-value stamps with no local postal usage with themes appealing to international markets unrelated to Bhutan. Some of the IGPC stamps for example featured themes such as the Olympic Games, or the popular Disney characters Goofy, Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, who were virtually unknown in Bhutan at the time. In 1996 the Bhutan Postal Corporation was established as an autonomous organisation whose chairperson is the Minister of Information and Communications. Apart from providing domestic and international postal services, it also produces and markets stamps. Although IGPC still lists Bhutan as one of its clients, Karma Wangdi, CEO of the Bhutan Postal Corporation, informed us that Bhutan produces its stamps exclusively on its own. Today Bhutan Post designs all its own postage stamps in-house, but prints them abroad, usually in an edition of about 10,000 pieces. The themes are proposed by a Bhutanese advisory committee, balancing national interests with international appeal. Ninety per cent of the produced stamps are for philately purposes, the rest for domestic use to send letters and postcards. Tashi Wangchuck is Bhutan’s sole stamp designer at present. He is a busy man, designing about 14 series of stamps a year. With no graphic design courses offered in the country, Wangchuck picked up basic art and design techniques on the Internet. Today he is responsible for researching the stamps, producing the artwork and overseeing production. The global philately market is declining, not only because email and text messages are increasingly replacing traditional letter-writing, but also because the number of young collectors is declining too, raising concerns for the future of the once-popular pastime. Bhutan, however, seems not to be affected by those trends, and Bhutan Post plans to increase the print runs of its stamps to about 30,000 pieces, working with their agents abroad to market them. Most of the agents are in neighbouring India and China, whose markets are expanding even as the European and North American markets decline.
78
WTW #8 The headquarters of the Bhutan Postal Corporation in Thimphu is also a regular post office and the office of the Philately Division, where stamps are produced, as well as a postal museum.
The stamps illustrating this article were purchased from one of Bhutan Post’s agents, Mukul Bhowmik in West Bengal. Mr Bhowmik became interested in Bhutan’s postage stamps when he encountered the stamps produced by Todd’s Bhutan Stamp Agency, some of which were produced at India Security Press in Nashik. As an authorised stamp dealer Mr Bhowmik receives his quota of each newly produced stamp series, and usually has no difficulty selling them. While Bhutan Post generated a profit of 8 million ngultrum (€108,500 or US$74,210) in 2008, in 2015 that figure was already 13 million (€176,300 or US$196,600), thanks to its new philately website. ‘With the e-commerce site we should be able to make a huge jump in numbers; at least that’s what we are hoping for,’ says Wangdi. At the same time he is adamant that Bhutan Post chiefly represents national interests: ‘We cannot be completely market-driven. Our stamps are still our ambassadors, so from that perspective, we cannot just cover what the market wants. We are very conscious of what we produce and what we send out to the market. Everything that we do, even in philately, is governed by the Gross National Happiness philosophy and our culture.’
Little Ambassadors of the Country
According to Tashi Wangchuck, Bhutan’s sole stamp designer, this 2013 stamp series featuring traditional phallic sym bols (considered effective in warding off evil spirits) is currently the top seller.
79
Many things have changed in Bhutan, but stamps continue to play an important role. The newly opened postal museum in Thimphu is now a major attraction. At the museum shop, tourists are not only able to purchase Bhutanese stamps, but can also produce personalised stamps featuring their portraits set against one of Bhutan’s historic fortresses or temples, or even using photos from their own USB drives. Museum exhibits include a sculpture of Ugyen Tenzin, one of the last postal runners who retired in 2010 at the age of 56. Postal runners, people trekking off-road routes to remote areas, are also the subject matter of several stamps, and were honoured in a 2004 documentary movie by Ugyen Wangdi Price of Letter capturing Tenzin’s life and work. Even today, sending a letter to Bhutan’s Lingzhi region means that someone has to carry it on foot. The domestic postage rate for a letter is 20 ngultrum (€0.27 or US$0.30), and the journey includes crossing torrential rivers and camping in dense forests. Dorji Rhinzen, a son of Ugyen Tenzin, is also a postal runner. Speaking Dzongka through an interpreter, Dorji tells us about the five-day treks to Lingzhi that he makes once a month to serve 70 households that rely on him to bring official and personal letters. Lingzhi, a wild and mountainous region above the tree line, is outside of Bhutan’s electric grid system, but people use solar power and mobile Internet. In the summer he brings about 10 kg (22 lb) of post on every trip, while during the winter when there is no school, the load is smaller. Dorji doesn’t know of any other postal runners and may be the country’s last. In 2008 Bhutan Post released CD-ROM postage stamps, another world first, as part of Bhutan’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of its monarchy. The small-format disc contains video documentaries of events from Bhutan’s history: the anniversary of the monarchy, the coronation of the Fifth King, and the signing of the new Constitution. The CD-ROM postage stamps were issued in partnership with Creative Products International, a Pittsburghbased company headed by Frances Todd Stewart, the daughter of Burt Todd. ‘The CD-ROM was actually my dad’s idea,’ Stewart explained. ‘He never used computers, but knew about CD-ROMs, and thought it would be a natural development to make a digital version of the talking stamp.’ On the last day of our trip to Bhutan, I stopped by the headquarters of the Bhutan Post Office in Thimphu to buy the newest edition of the CD-ROM stamp, only to find designer Tashi Wangchuck behind the counter. I asked him what he was doing there, and he sheepishly replied that he likes to observe which stamps are popular amongst the tourists, taking cues for future series. (Phallus stamps were very popular, as well as stamps depicting monasteries.) Hydropower export and tourism have become the country’s most profitable source of income, but stamps continue to play their dual role, generating much-needed revenue to fund Bhutan’s development, and also presenting the country to the outside world. ☐
80
WTW #8
MOVING PICTURES by Jonah Goodman
Far from the glamour and big budgets of Hollywood or even Bollywood, Bhutanese film directors must also be their own promoters, distributors, ticket sellers, projectionists and road crew. ‘There’s a lot of light at play up in the mountains,’ says Ugyen Wangdi, with bright, dark eyes. A stocky man close to his 60th birthday, he leans across the café table, charged and brimming with impetuous energy. ‘Especially in the monsoons, when the clouds descend, sometimes you look up and all of a sudden a very strong light like a floodlight passes through some pocket and hits at a certain point. Then,’ he says, leaning back, ‘you see the mountain open up, and then, just like a curtain in a cinema, it closes again.’ More than four decades since he first picked up a camera, Ugyen Wangdi is still in love with the landscape of his native Bhutan. In the mid-1980s, he studied filmmaking at the Film and Television Institute in Pune, India, before
returning home with ambitious plans. At the time, only a wealthy minority of Bhutanese had been to the cinema or ever watched television, but he was determined to make the country’s first feature film. To help ease his audience into the new medium, he based it on a popular folk song about divided lovers. To bridge the divides between Bhutan’s 22 languages, his Dzongkha script included ‘a lot of silence, to the extent that people thought something was wrong with the sound systems’, relying on images to carry the narrative. ‘In our culture we have so much visual information,’ he explains. ‘It’s in our murals and our song and dance theatre. Like paint in the Sistine Chapel, they tell you stories. Our traditional masked stag and hound dance, for
w-t-w.co/pkb
81 Villagers carrying a VCR, television, gen erator and fuel in exchange for the price of admission to watch Bhutan’s first film during its tour in 1988. All Bhutanese films are still distributed in this way. All photos courtesy of Ugyen Wangdi.
example, tells you the whole life story of a saint.’ In 1988 he finished Gasa Lamye Singye. Among its first viewers was the Fourth King of Bhutan, who expressed concerns that the king in the film looked lonely and unhappy, but was satisfied with the explanation that costumes, props and extras for courtiers were beyond the production budget. With his blessing, the crew set out across the country, stopping in villages to sell tickets and mount screenings. ‘I would put up a screen out in a paddy field and charge a little bit for entrance,’ says Ugyen Wangdi, ‘but most of the villagers didn’t have a penny, so we let them watch for free.’ It was a sensation. ‘Because the story was a folk tale, people came to watch,’ Ugyen Wangdi remembers. ‘They were glued to it from the beginning to the very end, and would then go back to their homes and retell the whole story to those who hadn’t seen it.’ In the remote area of Laya, in which part of the film is based, the same people came to see the film on every night of its ten-night run. ‘They would shout out in the audience during the film: “This is the road to our home!” They really felt that the film was their thing. They sent me away with yak meat and other gifts, saying that such a thing had never happened in their village before.’ The crew would drive from location to location with a VHS tape containing the film and all of the equipment they needed, even a generator
and the fuel it needed to run. Their small projector would become misaligned on the bumpy roads, so sometimes the film was shown on a large television set borrowed from a member of Bhutan’s royal family. When the road ran out, the tour would continue on foot over steep, mountainous terrain, with local enthusiasts carrying the equipment on their backs in exchange for viewing privileges. Ugyen Wangdi recalls the great lengths people would go to to watch his work: ‘These guys came on a four-hour trek down from their village to see the movie. On their way over, they had stopped every 30 minutes to hide brushwood torches in the bushes, so that after the film they could make the four-hour trek back to the village in the dark, finding each new torch as the one in their hand began to burn out.’ Cinema had arrived in Bhutan. Dechen Roder, a younger Bhutanese filmmaker whose work has featured at international festivals including the Berlinale and Locarno Film Festival, describes the next ten years as a time when the few films that were available were foreign and television was banned. Those with access to a TV set ‘were watching movies on VHS tapes,’ she explains, ‘and those were mostly pirated “cinema prints”, where you can see people walking around and hear comments from the audience.’ Nonetheless, the Bhutanese films that did make it to market were lapped up by an audience keen to watch
82
films that they could relate to and understand, and up until 2000, the local film industry continued to grow and mature, until between ten and twenty feature films were being produced every year. However, Bhutan’s tiny, captive market was and remains a double-edged sword. ‘Our industry is so small’, says Dechen Roder, ‘that if even one copy of a film is leaked, the filmmakers will lose their whole market.’ As a consequence, Bhutanese films are rarely released on DVD, for fear of pirate copies being made in India’s border towns. Instead, producers rely almost exclusively on ticket sales for screenings in order to recoup the money they spend on a film. What’s more, because distributing copies of a film to cinemas and screening halls would raise the risk of piracy, only one copy of a film is made, and it is carried around the country in person by the producer. ‘Usually, the producer sits with his film during the screenings,’ she says, ‘to make sure it can never be stolen or pirated.’ The tour that took Ugyen Wangdi’s film around Bhutan in 1988 has been effectively repeated with every new release for the past 28 years. Touring a single film around Bhutan’s 20 districts takes one year and covers roughly 200 locations. One reason that it takes so long is because cinemas only exist in the country’s main towns, so most screenings take place in alternative venues such as school halls, and tour
WTW #8
itineraries have to take religious festivals and academic timetables into account. Tickets sell for 50 ngultrum (€0.67/US$0.75) to adults, 30 ngultrum (€0.40/US$0.45) to students, and the time on the road can be worth it: a typical Bhutanese feature film costs about 2,000,000 ngultrum (€27,000/US$30,000) to produce, and a big hit might make 2.5 million ngultrum (€33,000/US$37,500) from showings in the capital Thimphu, and then as much again from those in the rest of the country. Outlay for the tour is minimal. In most cases, the screening team turns up with a projector and uses a wall or a bed sheet to show the film. Tshering Gyeltshen is an actor, writer and director responsible for three of the best-known films inside Bhutan. Strikingly handsome and animated by a boyish confidence, he is one of the country’s bona-fide stars. He remembers touring his breakout debut film in 2005, Perfect Girl. ‘You wouldn’t have to book a hotel, people would welcome you into their homes. There wasn’t much in terms of entertainment, so every time somebody came with a film, it was like a celebration. People in the next district would hear we were coming and be ready before we arrived.’ The film’s soundtrack was particularly popular: ‘We sold around 25,000 magnetic tapes with the soundtrack and 12,000 CDs.’ Internationally, Bhutan’s most famous film is Travellers and Magicians, a dense, mystical
Moving Pictures
83 Ugyen Wangdi, Bhutan’s first filmmaker, and the founder of its documentary pro duction, setting up a showing of his film Gasa Lamye Singye. Ugyen Wangdi also introduced the present model of film distribution, visiting villages to mount film screenings.
rumination set against ethereal Himalayan scenery. It has little in common with films popular inside the country. There, audiences flock to melodramatic love stories studded with songs and dancing, with narratives that spring from an earthy kind of social commentary, neither sophisticated nor purely sentimental. Because Bhutan has no graded ratings system, all of the films approved for public viewing by the regulatory body Bhutan InfoComm and Media Authority (BICMA), are equally family friendly, but they make their points even in the absence of adult content. Kuenden Lhatso, a recently released feature, begins with sweet scenes of a young man and a beautiful girl dancing by a mountain lake, singing about their love. But when her lover leaves town, the girl descends into severe alcoholism, destitution and madness. The man returns, finds her homeless and takes her in. She makes a fragile recovery. They are together again, and almost happy, and then she dies. The movie may be splashed with Bollywood magic, but it delivers a real punch. ‘Anywhere in the world, visual mediums are the most powerful,’ says Tshering Gyeltshen. ‘They grab people and help us delve into social issues, and now with Bhutan becoming a democracy, there’s really no dearth of subject material for us to take up. Perfect Girl (a sympathetic portrayal of a call girl) was a commercial blockbuster because I took up a relevant social
subject that everybody felt inside and nobody was talking about, and it struck a chord with our viewers.’ Prostitution, AIDS and alcoholism have all been tackled by Bhutanese cinema in films credited with opening up national debate. Taking a film on tour gives filmmakers the unusual experience of witnessing the impact of their films first-hand. In his feature film Gawa, director Chand Rai addressed ‘night hunting’, the term applied to the Bhutanese tradition of boys whispering love messages to girls through their bedroom windows in the dark, or even quietly creeping into bed with them for furtive romantic encounters. In reality, it is often a cover for rape. Today, over 700 children born as a result of night hunting are not even considered Bhutanese, as they have no Bhutanese father in their birth certificate. On his two-year tour with Gawa, Chand Rai was approached several times by men and women after the screenings, keen to share their experiences with him. One was a nurse who said she was regularly asked by young girls for advice about abortions, which are strictly forbidden in Buddhist Bhutan. Having watched the film, she understood for the first time what may have been happening. Survivors of abuse revealed that they had felt stifled by the accepted culture around night hunting, and watching the film had given them the strength to speak out. ‘When people see and hear something together,’ says Chand
84
Rai, ‘it gives them confidence somewhere in their heart.’ Chand Rai struggled to get Gawa past the censors. ‘I had issues with BICMA, who said this was going to paint the country in a very bad way, and it was against GNH (Gross National Happiness). To me GNH is that when you have a problem in your community, you stand up about it and you talk.’ Ultimately, the film was passed, and BICMA is often willing to discuss certification decisions. In two regards, however, BICMA tightly controls the characteristics of Bhutanese cinema for public screening. Firstly, films may be in Dzongkha or Sharchop, the language of eastern Bhutan, but they cannot be in English. Secondly, all characters must wear official national dress throughout the film, although over the years special dispensations have been given for nightclub scenes and other narrative situations where national dress might be inappropriate. The demands of BICMA are relatively straightforward compared to those of the Bhutanese viewing public. Song and dance numbers are so much a part of Bhutanese cinema that, in the words of Tshering Gyeltshen, ‘no one has really tried not including song and dance in their film.’ Film length, according to Dechen Roder, is another concern. ‘If a film is under two hours, instead of two and a half or three hours then audiences feel cheated and ask to pay less for their ticket.’ None of these expectations
WTW #8
are policed by critics. ‘A few years ago,’ she says, ‘people wrote reviews, but they didn’t go down very well with the directors. There were angry filmmakers every time a review was not favourable. Now it’s just better not to be a critic.’ Nominally, reviews are still written, but tend to be neutral synopses with details about the screening itinerary. ‘They point out the nice things about the film and leave it at that.’ In person, audiences are more open with their opinions. Ugyen Wangdi vividly recalls being approached by a large group of angry monks disappointed with his decision to cast their favourite comedian as a man about to lose his mind. The golden age of Bhutan’s film tours may be coming to an end. ‘A kind of fatigue has set in,’ says Tshering Gyeltshen. ‘Now there’s cable TV, and everyone has a mobile and is busy on WeChat. Some people on the tours are actually starting to dictate how much they will pay to watch the film.’ Not only has digital technology made piracy more of a risk, filming equipment is also more widely available. ‘Now that anyone can be a film producer,’ says Tshering Gyeltshen, ‘there’s too many films on the market, some of which are poorly made. With too many films, sometimes you can have ten groups on tour converging in one place, such as a local festival, or tsechu. Fights can break out. Producers will be at each other’s throats, shouting, “He came into
Moving Pictures
85 Most Bhutanese films exist as one single copy closely guarded by their directors or producers to prevent unauthorised copying. Filmmakers carry the film from village to village themselves, arranging showings and selling tickets. Pirate copies in a market as small as Bhutan could kill the prospect of recouping the production costs.
my line first!”’ Tour teams have begun offering rescreenings of old films alongside new ones as an incentive: for a slightly increased price, people can watch two or three films instead of one. Margins are so small in the Bhutanese film industry, that even apparently minor changes can have major effects. Soundtrack CD sales have dwindled to nothing, and film songs can only be traded with radio stations in exchange for advertising air time rather than cash. The knockon effect of reduced receipts is less investment in film development, so the films themselves suffer. The latest plan from the Bhutan Film Association (BFA) is to set up something between a formalised tour system and a classic cinema distribution network. With 60 BFA screening kits placed across the country, the industry hopes to reduce the length of a national film tour from one year to between two weeks and a month. Each kit will contain one projector, two speakers, one screen and a Blu-ray player, and will be staffed by a trusted employee. The risk of piracy is increased, but the cost of renting equipment and personnel for a tour is greatly reduced at the same time. After its one- or two-year lap of the country, the precious copy of the film ends up in the home of its creator. In theory, it could be printed on DVD, but so few people have DVD players, the risk of piracy is so high, and the cost of production is so significant that filmmakers usually feel there is more to be lost than gained by a DVD
release. Rescreening is another option, but, as Yeshi Dorji, executive director at BFA, explains, ‘rescreening is very rare, because people never come! Really, the last option is to sell the film to BBS [Bhutan Broadcasting Service] but they get very little money for that.’ The National Library of Bhutan requests that a copy be sent to its archives, but according to Ugyen Wangdi, ‘no filmmakers send their work to them in case it gets leaked.’ Instead, directors keep the sole copy of their films boxed up at home. Often, after their first tour, they are never shown again. The only copy of Ugyen Wangdi’s Gasa Lamye Singye sits in his home on a Betamax cassette. Bhutan’s first feature film did not make money or earn a reputation abroad. An entire younger generation has never seen it and may never see it, but, he explains, its presence persists. ‘In my film of this folk story, there is a small, broken-down stupa at the point where the two lovers part. Recently I passed it by, and saw that the stupa had been rebuilt and was draped with flags. Villagers were dancing around it. I went over and quietly asked, “What are you all doing?” and they said “Don’t you know that this is the famous stupa where the two lovers parted? We can’t let it fall apart.” That wasn’t part of the folk tale before my film. I stayed with them as they retold the whole folk story. They didn’t know who I was. They told it, this time, and I kept quiet and listened.’ ☐
IMPROVISED ANIMAL HOSPITAL By Jessica Vernon
In a country where medical supplies are scarce for humans, let alone animals, two self-trained veterinarians are using whatever they can find to build the materials they need to treat the animals they take care of.
w-t-w.co/lxr
87 Besa the mule wearing one of the more than 50 home-made prosthetic prototypes that Jamie Vaughan has built using PVC pipe, metal, foam, duct tape and an automobile shock absorber.
88
Various iterations of equine prosthetics using recycled material collected over the years. At Barnyard Bhutan Animal Rescue & Sanctuary everything finds a purpose: rubber bands can replace ten dons; plastic coat hangers can immo bilise legs or stabilise hips; popsicle
WTW #8
sticks, coffee stirrers and assorted screws and scraps of metal can help set broken wings and bones; old oven mitts can keep paralysed legs from dragging on the ground, wheels of all kinds can become part of doggie wheelchairs, etc.
In the master bathroom stands Tsem, a fourmonth-old foal with long, knobby legs, a fuzzy brown body and an afro of a mane. A matching puppy lies between her tiny hoofs. The scene would be charming, if somewhat unusual, if it weren’t for the hideous wounds covered by the gauze bandages that swathe the foal’s entire hind quarters and abdomen. This is the ICU. Little Tsem was attacked by a pack of wild dogs after being separated from her mother in the forest. ‘But you’re a strong girl, aren’t you?’ says Jamie Vaughan as she scratches the small tuft of hair between the foal’s ears. For an injury as extensive as this, the best Vaughan can do is to keep the wounds clean and dressed and give the foal plenty of food, fluids and love. For an hour every day she flushes the wounds with sterile water using a garden sprayer, an improvised solution that, if all goes well, will help the foal fight off infection until she is able to leave Vaughan’s bathroom ICU. Improvisation and compassion are integral parts of Vaughan’s life. She moved from the US
to Bhutan in 2006 to open a resort in the agricultural valley of Paro, but the first stray dog she rescued there was soon joined by another, and a year later she had converted her resort into a make-do animal rescue centre. Today the Barnyard Bhutan Animal Rescue & Sanctuary houses 4 horses, 9 mules, 15 cows, 19 pigs, 42 goats, 16 cats and kittens, 240 dogs, 1 pigeon and 2 field mice, all living together happily on the 2.5 acre (1 hectare) property, which is fenced off into different compounds and dotted with makeshift shelters. Every day villagers show up with more injured or abandoned animals. Due to limited financial resources and restrictive government regulations, local veterinary services often lack the medicine and facilities needed to treat serious illnesses and injuries, especially in the areas of diagnostics and long-term care. Currently Bhutan has no veterinary specialisation courses, so government vets are all general practitioners in the broadest sense of the word. With these compounded limitations it becomes increasingly difficult to stay abreast of techniques
Improvised Animal Hospital
Marianne Guillet and Hendrik Visser with Pigu and a monkey, two of some 250 permanent residents spanning a wide
89
variety of species, sizes, breeds and disabilities at Bhutan Animal Rescue and Care (BARC).
and technologies. In a country where even the best human hospital doesn’t have facilities and medicines that the West takes for granted, veterinarians persevere with medicine’s most basic equipment. For a three-legged ox or a deformed mule, the Barnyard is their only hope. Vaughan had no formal veterinary training when all of this started, so she reached out to another foreigner, who had a reputation as ‘the Mother Teresa of Dogs’. ‘Marianne was a mentor for me,’ Vaughan says, speaking of Marianne Guillet, another self-taught veterinarian based in Thimphu. In many ways, she reflects, Guillet inspired her to take the situation into her own hands and to find creative ways to work with the limited resources available. Guillet sits on her sofa for a rare moment of downtime, shaving tiny slices off a bar of soap. ‘This is my therapy,’ she says in heavily Frenchaccented English. The soap is donated by the Taj Tashi hotel, which gives all of its once-used shampoo bottles and bar soaps to be made into detergent for mopping the clinic floors and sterilising towels. Leftover body lotions are mixed
with antibiotic ointment to make burn cream. A young Bhutanese woman, one of Guillet’s staff, sits beside her, slicing open disposable hotel slippers and removing the foam padding from the soles. The pads will be stapled to the inside walls of a makeshift dog house and covered with scrap plywood. This free insulation is a necessity throughout the Bhutanese autumn and winter, when evening temperatures drop well below freezing. ‘We recycle everything,’ Guillet says, ‘even expired condoms!’ (Expired, she stresses, not used.) One of those donated condoms is filled with cat’s milk and sitting in a mug of warm water. Guillet pokes a small hole in the tip and nurses a seven-day-old orphan kitten while his brothers and sisters crawl blindly over each other, their eyes not yet open. Guillet laughs, ‘See, condoms do save lives!’ Guillet, from France, and her husband Hendrik Visser, from the Netherlands, came to Bhutan nearly 20 years ago. In 1999 the couple founded Pilou Animal Rescue and Care, an NGO registered in the Netherlands, and in 2013 they
90
Visser built these dog wheelchairs, one that serves as a model, and another improvised version made from scrap
WTW #8
metal, electrical tape and toy truck wheels for the paraplegic patients at BARC.
established Bhutan Animal Rescue and Care (BARC). With severe importation restrictions and a tight budget, Hendrik’s engineering experience and Guillet’s improvisational talents (together of course with their passion and tenacity) are all that keep these organisations afloat. Their entire facility, located just outside of Thimphu, was built by Hendrik using donated and recycled materials whenever possible. It has evolved over time to meet the needs of their patients: additional monkey cages were built with donated fencing materials to accommodate newly introduced dominant males, a guarded outdoor area for paraplegics was made from metal casting moulds for concrete columns, and a bathroom ICU was stocked with emergency equipment built from whatever was at hand. ‘One learns very quickly to adapt,’ Guillet says. Even the most basic instruments available in the West remain out of reach for her, as for all of Bhutan’s vets. A simple item like a skin stapler is easily replaced by an ordinary office stapler, but vital instruments such as heart monitors or respirators are only dreamed-of luxuries for
Guillet. Without them, she and Hendrik take shifts throughout the night to monitor critical patients, manually inflating their lungs with a rubber squeeze pump when necessary. ‘I do whatever it takes to make it work,’ she says simply. ‘I try everything.’ Guillet opens a plastic storage drawer in what she calls her ‘improv room’. The entire room is filled with rescued things that just might be useful one day: rubber bands for replacing tendons, plastic coat hangers for immobilising legs or stabilising hips, popsicle sticks and coffee stirrers for setting bird wings, an assortment of screws and scraps of metal for setting broken bones, children’s swim floats and inflated shipping packaging for cushioning bed sores, old oven mitts for keeping paralysed legs from dragging on the ground, suspenders for immobilising joints, wheels of all kinds for building doggie wheelchairs, a jock strap for… ‘Well, I don’t know for what, but I’m sure I can use it for something!’ In Paro, Vaughan loads up her truck, off to buy de-wormer for the puppies and antibiotics for a new cow patient. When she drives back into
Visser taking a break with some para plegic dogs. People at BARC believe that it’s crucial for people to have someone
to turn to when they find a sick, injured, or needy animal.
the Barnyard for evening feeding, Besa the mule stubbornly refuses to move out of the driveway, nimbly evading all attempts to shoo her off, her new-found agility thanks to a prosthetic leg built by an American company, Animal Ortho Care LLC, and donated by the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. This is Besa’s second ‘real’ prosthesis after running through nearly 50 home-made versions that Vaughan built using PVC pipe, metal, foam, duct tape and an automobile shock absorber. This has become something of a speciality for Vaughan, and she has fashioned hundreds of peg legs for large quadrupeds over the years. Twelve amputee mules, horses, cows and bulls currently wander in the Barnyard corrals, sporting all kinds of prosthetics. Besa saunters by, a thriving example of adaptability, and a living testament to what compassion, dedication and ingenuity can achieve. Sitting in her living room, still shaving soap, Guillet reflects on what she calls an ‘illusion of independence’ that pervades modern societies. In rural cultures, she says, it is easy to see the
direct link between humans, animals and nature, but urban life breaks down that connection. ‘We have to work with nature,’ she stresses. ‘Nature is very well made. Everything we need already exists.’ This philosophy guides Guillet in the work she does every day, embodied in even the smallest act of recycling and repurposing. Looking out over the dirt compound at the Barnyard, hundreds of happy, well-adjusted dogs, mules and cows eagerly await the promised ‘Biiiiiiiiiiscuits!’ Their mounting excitement is palpable. At the end of the day, all of the hard work, epic failures and humble triumphs come together in these simple moments. In an age when man’s connection to the earth is fraying, this adaptable little pocket of courage and creativity thrives. ☐
Order the film online worksthatwork.com/bhutan
A TINY COUNTRY WITH
BIG IDEAS A documentary film about how Bhutan became an inspiration for both developing and developed countries.
Not Submitted to Any International Film
AWARD
Bern University of the Arts MA Communication Design
Is Research all about Publications? And how can we redesign Publishing? Study Design Research with Social Impact.
We’ve got some new typefaces to show you, such as Donald Beekman’s ff Berlage. Well, we can’t do it here, but if you head to
Handmade cycling apparel for Discerning riders
IsadoreApparel.com
VJ Software Footage Community Resolume.com
FontShop.com you can discover, explore and play with them.
Experience the land of happiness and book your trip with
Bhutan Creative Tours Official Bhutanese Tour Operator
Put yourself back in beta.
www.bhutancreativetour.com
∆ vcfa mfa in graphic design Ω perpetualbeta.vcfa.edu
DE PROGRAM / Den Haag Netherlands An intensive communication design program for students and professionals. June_18 to July_8_2017 www.collegeforcreativestudies.edu/ deprogram/
mfa mfa in in communication communication design design
connect. connect. collaborate. collaborate. create. create. Texas TexasState StateUniversity Universityisistaking takingaarevolutionary revolutionarynew newapproach approach to toit’s it’sCommunication CommunicationDesign Designm.f.a. m.f.a.––one onethat thatputs putsthe theneeds needsof of working workingdesigners designerson onequal equalfooting footingwith withfull-time full-timestudents. students. Unique Uniquemethods methodsof ofbringing bringingeducation educationto tobusy busydesign designprofessionals professionals isisone oneof ofthe thereasons reasonsprint printmagazine magazine(August (August2014) 2014)named named Texas TexasState Statem.f.a. m.f.a.Program Programone oneof ofthe thebest bestdesign designprograms programs in inthe thecountry. country.
application application deadline deadline SpringSemester Semester October October31 31 Spring Fall FallSemester Semester March March31 31 Graduate GraduateAssistant Assistantpositions positionsavailable available
mfacomdes.com mfacomdes.com @ @mfacomdes mfacomdes
Manufacturing handmade tiles and cement pieces since 1933. Collections by Herzog & de Meuron, Sybilla, Lievore, Carme Pinós, Barozzi Veiga, J.A. Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres, Lluís Clotet, Häberli.
huguetmallorca.com
Subscribe When you subscribe to WTW, you automatically receive the magazine twice a year, and you can start and end your subscription whenever you want. We also offer one-year and two-year gift subscriptions. Not sure about your subscription status? Send a blank email to subscribe@worksthatwork.com and within minutes you will get an automated answer about your subscription status. That’s also an easy way to check if your account details are up to date. Being an ‘independent’ magazine means being independent of external forces, which in turn means being fully dependent on you, our readers.
We wouldn’t have it any other way. ↗ worksthatwork.com/subscribe
Social Distribution Bring It Places If you are planning a trip, take WTW with you. We work with volunteers who have free space in their luggage and can bring the magazines to new places. Our website features a travel database where you can sign up to help deliver WTW. Just log in and enter your destination and travel dates. 50% Off You can get WTW at half price when you order seven or more copies. This is a great way to keep the price low and share the magazine with your friends, classmates and colleagues. We work in particular with schools and colleges, making the magazine affordable for everyone and creating an intimate connection between the publisher and readers.
Start by dropping us a line. ↗ distribute@worksthatwork.com
Join the WTW Social Distribution network and meet creative readers from all over the world.
