Gross National Happiness

Bhutan doesn’t exist. It is a product of our fantasies, dashed hopes and frustrations ; an unattainable promised land.

As children, we'd place ourselves in the body of a hero to escape a feeling of weakness. Nowadays, once confidence is lost in our objectives, our work, society and economy, we turn towards the imaginary heaven that is Bhutan : a region of green valleys where money doesn’t matter, where fashion doesn’t dictate the rules, and where the destructive technology of the Occident is held at a distance by a spiritual force stronger than any material desire.

Yet, there exists a country with an identical name. More a giant construction site than a country, with an incessantly bloating capital, each and every river shackled by giant dams, it is a land carved into pieces by roads and quarries. This country was once the poorest in Asia. But to hide its rags, the concept of a Gross National Happiness was proposed, cannily replacing the near-inexistent GDP.

Bhutan has since morphed into a modern economy where business is now conducted as elsewhere. Gross National Happiness has become an excellent marketing tool, worked to its maximum to attract luxury tourism, limiting its visitors to only the most wealthy, exactly those who believe themselves to be entering into the Bhutan of storytales.

The true Bhutan has one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot in globalisation. It is indeed a country of storytales, but those of Brothers Grimm, still believed to be home to rumoured sourcerers where the high clergy dines on the minute savings of the people. All excuses go to collect donations, even a salute to the spirits of dead animals !

Next to the tourists blinded by their pipedreams, the Bhutanese appear to be emerging from a dark age : vampires, werewolves, pixies, elves and dwarfs ; a hagged and earthly people. Ambiguous creatures, at once close and strange, existing in a entre-temps surreal.