the purpose of environmentalism

Environmentalism is largely believed to be a virtuous movement. The reason is that it is pro humanity, though that concept is lost to some by now.

The earth began as a seething mass broken off the sun and cooled down, it’s noxious gases carried traces of life, which, scientists tell us, evolved into life as we know it on planet earth. The earth is still changing, continuously eliminating one life while giving birth to another.

By environmentalism, if we mean that we aspire to save the ‘earth’, it is similar to the fancy of the frog who thought he owned the moon that was reflected from the night sky into his pond. The earth is now what we are saving, because our lives are a blink of an eye to the history of the earth, and what we do are scratches on its great surface.

If by environmentalism, we mean saving that environment which is the best for human life, then, yes, we have a valid goal to aspire for. After we ‘destroy’ the earth, as some extremist environmentalists like to put it, this earth will still rotate on its axis, day and night, but whether there will be human beings populating it is a question.

The Bhutanese national Philosophy of Gross National Happiness understands this fact, underlining that for human beings to be happy on this earth, we must cultivate that environment that best lets us live in peace.

Or, in other words, we must protect the environment as it is in order for us to be happy, mostly because the process of life is too complex to be understood even now, and we know that the natural world, now, is optimum for our survival, but we are not sure what drastic changes either due to human activities or natural phenomena will do to life for human beings on earth.

It is necessary that we move forward in every environmental decision and issue with this understanding.

Climate Change, our scientists say, is happening. It is happening fast, and humans on earth are causing it. The rapid change in climate will be dangerous to humans in many ways, the delicate balance of our ecosystem turned haywire with what we do.

That we need to act to reverse the changing climate, is not a question anymore. The debate has reached beyond that, into who must act, and just how much.

It is also a known fact that any person living a modern life adds to the carbon emissions. The more complex the modernity of their existence, the more the emission. The standard of living of an individual is directly proportional to the size of their carbon footprint.

The Bhutanese live in heterogeneous societies too. While some of us drive, eat and drink a lot, smoke, build, heat up our homes with wood, own factories and use products upon products, others live in abject poverty, in villages, still ploughing their fields with the help of oxen, and emit next to nothing.

While our per capita emission is a negative value, thanks to those people who emit nothing and the huge forest cover that sequesters carbon, it would not hurt to limit our excesses, or change our habits so that we emit less. Setting an example is always good, especially when we are told that we are one of the countries with the most to lose.

But while every country is fighting hard to keep emitting as much as possible, saying their economies will collapse if they stop, are we bending over backwards in our conservation attempts? Why protect our environment if it comes at the cost of economic development, if we are keeping our poor people who could gain from the forests from achieving their GNH?

Between humans and the environment, humans must always be the priority. That is the point in environmentalism in the first place.

Either we increase our emissions, because, clearly, we cannot stop an increase without also stopping progress, or we demand that the western world gives us new ways to develop without adding more carbon to the atmosphere. 

desire- the root of all evil?

It is fascinating how reasoning is at times so skewed that one can argue to prove both sides of a praxis.

Take for instance the whole GNH, desire and Buddhism argument.

Our National Policy is Gross National Happiness. It is a noble goal no doubt. What could be the pinnacle of human achievement but that everyone is happy?

It is not surprising that Bhutan came up with the GNH idea, we are told. After all, we are a Buddhist country. Buddhism provides the answer to the root cause of all unhappiness: desire.

Hence, stop people from having desires, and then they are happy.

We could perhaps ban advertisements so that our poor uneducated villages never get to know what is desirable and aspirational, and therefore they will never crave for all that...

! What a way to achieve GNH!

And then, to top off this great reasoning, let us add a hackneyed quote or two. Like “Ignorance is Bliss.” Or “Money can’t buy you happiness.”

Hopefully you are convinced.

No? Do you have that niggling doubt that somewhere something is wrong with this whole argument?

Here’s why.

Firstly, Buddhism is about achieving enlightenment. It is about gaining control over yourself, not being swayed by the desires of the world in which we live. It is personal.

“Control your own desires,” the Buddha said. Not “Control everyone’s desires for them.”

So while it is rather nice of us to want to see our fellow citizens happy, let’s not practise their religion for them.

Another problem that peeks out of this argument is that while we, the ‘enlightened’ educated lot realise that it is when our desires get the better of us that we are not happy, we assume that our rural folk have no minds of their own.

Economic Development, one of the four pillars of GNH, is conveniently forgotten by many who argue that money is not happiness.

Just half that sentence is true. Yes, money cannot buy you happiness. But the full sentence must go thus, “Money cannot buy you happiness, after a point.”

Money can buy happiness for those people who do not have food, who do not have clean drinking water, nor electricity, nor education and medical care.

We like to imagine that our farmers are happy in their poverty and ignorance; we write ‘feel good’ stories about how the poorest people go about with the biggest smiles on their faces.

Yes, it justifies our lives. So what if we are the ones with the big pay checks and bigger cars, so what if we live in the capital where there is a huge hospital, lots of schools and even more teachers.

We are in search of some spiritual bliss, we are the main characters of a novel, whose blurb tells us “so and so has everything in life and yet they cannot find happiness, etc.”

But if the rural people are indeed happy, why are the villages getting emptier by the day?

When the majority is living in poverty, we cannot afford to think about spiritual joy

Hard Times

Pardon me for being a 'Tosh fan'. But when I heard that the issue following the mass resignation at Bhutan Times was going to be done by Tosh aka Tashi P Wangdi, I got all excited and made a mental note to myself to definitely not miss the issue. I even let myself think that despite all the problems, they might actually come out with a good issue.
And well? The paper was good! I read it from cover to cover, and even though it didn't shake the earth beneath my feet, it was good. It has been a while since we got to read pieces of writing that is uniquely that of the man who wrote for Times and Observer, whose writing is not mere words on a paper but expressions sharp like horseradish, assaulting the mind of the reader into wakefulness. The editorial was as expected, about the hulabaloo, but then again, a good read.
It is sad that Times is losing all these reporters, a great team of people, really. And I won't speculate on what really happened, because the people who are involved know best what the real issue was.
The BICMA angle was slightly surprising though, because I know for a fact that they never ask for accreditation from editors and reporters in new papers, so I don't get why they want that from the K4 team.
And also, I think what the journalists did would not exactly be legal, I could slam lawsuits on breach of contract and striking already.
But then again, this needs to be looked into deeply, seven people gave up jobs they probably loved, and they can't be dismissed as misguided or 'conspiratorial.'
It's tough to take a stand, but I can say that this matter needs looking into. Company laws notwithstanding, the fact that a media organisation is more than a business has to be looked into. I actually wish this matter would go to court, where the judiciary would examine the issue more thoroughly, because there needs to be legalities worked out on this, we can't simply depend on existing laws.
Bhutanese papers cannot be politically inclined. Just how much can an owner control the content of their newspaper? This needs to be sorted out.

The ugly face of child labour

Take a quick look through the front pages of our papers these days. The headlines scream of rapists, child labour, trafficking......things that we hardly admit to existing in our country.

Yet, what is the reaction from our readers?

Sometimes newspapers need to fear that constantly highlighting such issues may backfire and produce the opposite results to what we hope for. That instead of being wracked with concern because everything is not as perfect as we would like to believe in Bhutan, our readers will grow indifferent, accepting such things as part of everyday life. That they will glance at the headlines and it won’t mean anything to them except a graph with rising numbers.

Child labour is a real issue in Bhutan. And it is a shame because it may happen elsewhere, but it must not happen in a country that declares Gross National happiness to be its national policy that an innocent child does not get to lead the life he or she desires and deserves to.

And there are only two things we can do about this. We can admit that we are, like any other country, cruel to those children who we don’t feel responsible for, that we are the kind of nation that will accept that it’s children are living in despair. Or we can give their lives back to those children who deserve to play outside, not work.

But what we cannot do is globe trot, naming the pluses of the great philosophy of Gross National Happiness, teaching its ‘real meaning’ to the other countries who are unenlightened in our wise ways, while we know in our hearts that our children are suffering back at home.

The malignant hypocrisy hangs in the air when a rich official’s wife ill-treats her maidservant, who is only a child, while her husband attends international conferences and speaks to people about GNH. It happens in Bhutan.

Hypocrisy reeks out of the workshops where the mechanic’s helper is but a small child with a grease-smeared face, who we fail to look at; somehow, our gaze always goes through him.

It is a shame that we must remember every time we tell a newcomer about Bhutan the Shangri la. A shame, because we are the ones responsible for this despicable occurrence, and we are the ones who should act to remove it.

 We are the ones who should go beyond saying, ‘tsk tsk, he should be in school,’ to ensuring that he IS. The ones who should think of what kind of persons we re, when we employ that little girl from some remote village to work for us, to look after our children when she herself is no bigger than they are. When we deny her education, and in some deep-rooted way, teach our children, and worse, herself, that she is somehow less of a person than they are.

It needs a brief looking back into our own childhood, into the hurts and losses and all the emotions that we may still remember with clarity, and the realisation that they are just like that. Beneath those rough exteriors, they want a little love, and assurance of an adult, whose shoes they have stepped so early on in their lives while their hearts are still raw with childhood.

And we, the people who say with pride that our national philosophy is GNH, need to give out a little bit of that happiness to these children.

joie de vivre

Here is something I wrote when October began, and put up in facebook. A Lot of people told me that it made them happy, so I am including this here to 'spread the cheer' :)


"I feel like I have a steaming cup of, lets see, hot chocolate laced with...um, something nice and drowse inducing... stocked up in my heart.
And suddenly in the middle of an interview, in the middle of a street, in the middle of an article, in the middle of listening to KB Sir, I suddenly remember that it’s October, and it feels like I am taking a sip. Glorious warmth spills from my head to my finger tips, and I grin, and the person talking to me a. smiles, too, thinking it’s something they said, or, b. gets irritated and asks me what it is.
I shake my head, and keep grinning. I don’t know. It’s easy to be happy. It just takes a little sunshine. Heck even the sight of my hair frizzing in the rain, threatening to give Bob Marley a run for his money, gives me joy.
I laugh at my shadow, and say, “I love my frizzy hair!” kicking a clump of dried leaves off the pavement, while a couple of school kids snigger at the crazy girl hopping around on the street.
I look at my rattiest pair of converse, that has two rips on the back, the converse that goes way back with me, the converse that I nearly threw away in an airport once because of excess baggage, the converse that carried a marijuana badge until it broke and fell off one day so that now all that remains of the badge are the holes it made........the converse that mum chucked into the bin one day and I rescued (Mummy! I didn’t even throw it away at the airport! It’s my lucky pair!)And my heart breaks at how much I love my ratty old pair of converse.
I feel the wad of bills in my jeans pocket, and think about my birthday present....something that smells yummy like a big thick fat book, a new book by a writer I love but a book I haven’t read....maybe The Host?
I look at my middle finger, and my recently broken nail, looking at me stupidly, stubbily, from among its other, long and painted pals. And I love my stubby broken nail the best, poor me.
As I stand, quiet, quite alone, I can feel the laugh bubbling up inside me, and peeking out in a small smile while I try to smother it.
Why are people obliged to react when you smile?
They look affronted, (why is she smiling at me?) or puzzled (is she smiling at me?), or plain annoyed(why the hell is she smiling at me?).
Heck, I am happy. And its not love.
It’s October."

up and coming

First of all...Happy October! My favorite month! Not because I was born in this month...but because the skies are so clear, I always set a new shooting star sighting record in October, the leaves turn golden, and I love to crunch them under my feet as I walk back home. :)
Yesterday I attended the launch of a Women's Magazine...Bhutan's first- very exciting. I loved the content, I think they did a brilliant job, it looks and feels professional, and was interesting. I looked forward to reading it cover to cover at the end of the day, as much as I look forward to the latest Marie Claire lying under my pillow.
The magazine is prettily titled YEEWONG (something that appeals to the heart). The motto of the paper is "Bringing her forward".
I loved the magazine for many reasons. It gives me something to look forward to, it is about people I know, but at the same time, it is no less than an international magazine. I must confess here that I am a big fan of women's mags, but so are a lot of women.
Another reason is because it is brilliant and fun, and as the Editor (Pema Choden Tenzin ) plans to put in more stuff in the next issue, I look forward to it.
And third, I love the fact that the team who made this wonderful Mag happen are young people working for the first time. Pema was always brilliant, but still, making this happen is something special.
How wonderful to see people with immense talent, doing things that they love to do, and touching new levels of quality in their work!
I hope the story of the magazine is an inspiration to all! :)
Oh, also, Another interesting publication launched was the Business Bhutan newspaper, which is a weekly. It looked great and I am so sad that someone just picked it off my desk and i couldn't get another copy! Something else to look forward to, I hope they stick to the quality, we need awesome business stories for sure!
My congratulations to the publishers/journalists. It is a sign of Bhutan rearing up it's head, with bold new ideas, and smart young people. Promising.

Finding Life

What do you pack in your bag when you are out to set up a whole new life? That was what I was thinking, packing my bags for college- gosh, was it four years ago?
Travelling always exaggerates all of my emotions, maybe it’s the briefness, the fact that everything is going to be over, soon.
You will laugh at where I draw philosophy from, but Deidara in Naruto got it right, when he said that the beauty of life is in its impermanence. The feeling that you are going to lose it all soon, makes you love and hate harder; it spikes your sorrow and joy and wakes up your sense of beauty.
All I took to Chandigarh was a bag full of my life, a bag to represent my life of 17 and a half years, while I stepped into this new world.
Did I become a different person, in my three years there? I think so, in some ways. Places give you their own colour. People add to you their own flavour. I am different in every new place, different with every new person.
But this is a story of how I went to a new place with only a bag full of things that connected it to my old world. I dreaded living in a new place, without family or friends, for three whole years.
But I made friends; I even had what could have been a very odd family.
It’s amazing that wherever you step into the world, you find people who you should have met ages ago, who you know to trust, who make your life in that place worth living, who give you reason to wake up every morning and get out into life.
Three years is a long time, long enough to forget about impermanence, at least if you are looking at it from the beginning, not the end. From the end, three years is just too short a time. So I may have forgotten the sharp feelings that come with quickly passing time. Days slipped into days while I wrote out new chapters of my life.
Now at the end of my trip, I look back and everything is tinged with sweetness and sadness. I know I lived those three years well, all the triumphs and failures, all the tears and crazy laughter. I cherish each one of them now.
I gave away three years of my life to Chandi, and in return, I got sweet memories, a healing heart, and friends for life.
Travelling still spikes up all my emotions. I guess you could call it ‘heightened living’. But I love the feeling, and I love to find new worlds to give a piece of my life to. And I love the people I find, who I know I should have met ages ago, who I know to trust instinctively, who are your friends and family for that span of time when you are with them.
Thanks guys, for being my friends and family, for getting me out of bed every morning (sometimes not so easy, I know), and for letting me live my life with you in a way I am happy with now. 

Use the media!

It is sad to hear the popular view of the Bhutanese media as of now.

We are accused of misquoting; we are accused of wanting to ‘sensationalise’ every story, whenever a reporter introduces himself or herself, the response is, “Oh, I should keep quiet, otherwise you’ll write something about me.”

We wonder why there is so much animosity toward the media. Why organisations and individuals are wary of us, and think we are out to ‘get them’. Why our populace is so sensitive about the precise words that are attributed to them, sometimes words that they have uttered.

It could be that these individuals have had a bad experience with a journalist. But most of the people whose views on the Bhutanese media circles around “more balanced reporting needed, you guys misquote,” have never been quoted by a newspaper. Then why the acrimony?

We know about the subtle power of the media. The power to influence mass opinion, to convince. That is probably coming into play when the stories about a hotshot journalist grossly distorting facts are circulated. In our small society, circulars and the Boss’s word definitely should count as media. And yes, word is getting around that the media (us) is out to ‘get you’, so each and every one better keep their mouth shut.

Hence, the opinion of the never quoted fellow that the media is abominably incorrect in most of the things they report. ???Interesting to note that the civil servants seem unanimous in this opinion.

It is a sad development because the media is a power untapped. And great power can be used for great good, as well as for incredible evil. We Bhutanese have the habit of staying away from such things, but now we have the media, power at our hands, to use to our liking. And by us, we don’t mean media persons.

We mean you, the citizen of Bhutan; the person who has been born into this age.

Every time you say, “Tsk, Tsk, our system is terrible,” you must realise that there is something you can do about it. Every time you wish you could just fix something that is ailing the nation, you must know that there is indeed something you can do.

The world has excelled in the art of using the media for its purposes. We are still learning. ‘Public Relations’ is what they are calling them, these people whose job is to ensure that the media is utilised to the best interest of their employer.

News articles that promote certain ventures are replacing advertisement slowly. And as long as the story is factually correct, the fact that a paper chooses to publish about a certain venture should not be a problem for those who are inclined to be morally upright. But how to get a paper to write about your business venture? Make sure that there is a story there that they would like to publish. After all, we are after good stories.

Public Relations is emerging to be the most important kind of relations these days, something that companies, and individuals with something at stake (politicians) are recognising.

But t the rest of you can use the media for something else. And that is the most important. You can use the media to right a wrong, but bring out the wrong in the public glare. It could be something terrible that you know has happened, it could be a sad story we could all learn a lesson from, it could be something that is always overlooked.

But bringing a wrong, however big and small out in the open, is like sunning a jaundiced patient. We will cure it. After all, mass conscience is much better that individual conscience.

And that is how you can wield great power in the interest of greater good.

Fighting drugs with life

Suddenly there is a boom in the newspaper coverage of drugs. The stories tell of dealers lurking in the shadows, the tricks they use to get to abusers and elude police...it sounds like some mafia movie, or Hong Kong underworld.

Is it true, though? Have the menacing tentacles of drugs seeped into our society so thoroughly that we should worry? It is not Y2K that brought drugs into the land of the Thunder Dragon. But the stories seem to be getting more frequent. There seem to be more children out in the streets, ready to “experience.”

Is it a sign of changing times, changing beliefs? The hippie movement left this country untouched, and even though there were many students studying outside even in those days, old timers insist that they did not bring the habit in the country.

True, there were a lot less people studying outside those days, but there has been a change, that is for sure. A change in attitude, perhaps, on how we look at drug abuse, or rather, how the young generation looks at drug abuse. 

The attitude change is clear on many other areas- drinking, smoking, partying, money, sex....the generation gap is a clear cut line when these are the questions at hand.

Do these children know, that when they choose to experiment with drugs, when they say, “you should try out everything”, they are, in fact, hurling themselves into a spiralling abyss? Do they realise that when they pick up that tablet from that shady guy around the corner in Hong Kong market, they are looking at a life of sunken eyes, aimless gait, and desperate speech? That they are, in fact, declaring their hatred for their own lives?

The generation that went to school in the 90’s grew up with “Say no to drugs” slogan plastered all over school buildings, yet they have added to the numbers of abusers. The children now at school are still looking at the same posters, the one where the road forks, drugs leading to darkness and books and friends leading to a rising sun. But the message hasn’t sunk in.

Schools, it seems, are already overburdened with all sorts of responsibilities. But we need them to do more, our future grows up within those walls, and this is our chance of making some impact on them.

We need more lessons at schools. We need to tell our children what exactly it is that they are doing when they are saying yes to that tablet in the name of ‘gaining experience’.

Reformed addicts have stories to tell that don’t get told enough. They have stories of why (just like you) they thought they would do it because they were open to new experiences, and how, deep in their hearts, they didn’t love themselves. They have scary stories to tell of how they kept falling into a chasm of tablets and injections, how it seemed impossible to get out, and how, one day, they realised that they must get out, even if it was not easy. We need to get these stories around more.

We also need to ensure that our children love their lives that they feel they are worth something. Ever notice that the ones who do well academically are usually not the ones doing drugs? They have a sense of achievement. We need to give this to more of our children.

Budding artists and actors and singers should know what it is that they have in them. They need a chance to create that wonderful something that they themselves will be in awe of.

We need to give them a chance at  life which is much harder to declare hatred against.

Square pegs in a round hole

The season of the graduate orientation programme is upon us again, and along with it comes the usual issues papers bring up. One thing that comes to mind, seeing the multitude of fresh young faces ready to make the jump from education to employment, is the ever-present unemployment problem.

It is ironic that we should have a problem of unemployment in a country with population less than seven hundred thousand. A country that cannot even meet its own food and products requirement. A country where, some say, the population is too small to meet the labour force requirement.

There is a word that is used to define the capacity of its people. It is called ‘human capital’. Human capital is the stock of skills and knowledge embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic value. Looking at the ever widening unemployment, and then at the severe shortage of human resources, we can only wonder if our ‘human capital’ is under severe need of repair.

Businessmen say that the vocational graduates in Bhutan are not trained in the fields that they are in need of. A major problem that businesses have in Bhutan is the severe shortage of human resource. So we were told.

And yet, our rate of unemployment keeps shooting through the roof.

Whatever the case, unemployment is no longer the problem of a single ministry. It has been a problem for too long, and we have been simply scraping the surface of a much deeper issue all this time.

It is about time we decided to tackle this problem once and for all, because, obviously, solving this problem is about making the pieces fit.

It’s not only up to the labour ministry to tackle this problem, even though as the designated ministry, it is the mandate of this ministry to address both the problem of unemployment and human resource shortage.

The education ministry and education and training sector would be pivotal in playing a role, making sure that children are learning things that are necessary, important, and apt. Our country lacks skilled professionals; we lack trained staff in the hospitality, health, education, and some of the other most important sectors.

The agriculture sector, which could use educated people, who produce enough for us to be self sufficient at least in the fresh food department.

Our laws concerning foreign labourers seem a little irrational, given that they try to protect Bhutanese workers who do not exist. The regulations seem to emanate from a concern that there are unemployed Bhutanese, but then, the employers say that finding Bhutanese to work for them is impossible.

So, is our problem really that we don’t have enough jobs in the country? Not really, since we also have the ‘lack of human resource’ problem.

We have jobs, but we do not have the right people for those jobs. And we have people, but we don’t have the right jobs for the people. It is only a matter of fitting round pegs in round holes, and square pegs in square holes.

Sorting out this booming problem is not such an easy matter. We need to rethink our core policies, we need to re-examine every one that may be having a negative impact.

The right education, the right training, the right attitude, the right incentives, there is the thin middle path that we need to discover here.