Blog

Getting to know you…


It satisfies the voyeur in me.

I don’t know these people personally, but I feel like I do. They are part of my vast extended family, my community in the truest sense of the word. A barrier is removed that’s more than just physical when there’s nothing between you but a window, rather than, as in the suburbs, a fence, a driveway, and a half-acre of grass. Those that live in gated, manicured subdivisions, I think, are missing out on the meaning of community despite the lovely clubhouse, heated pool, and tennis courts that sold them in the first place with the hope of "getting to know their neighbors."

I like that my neighbors leave magazines and old books on their stoops. Pick them up as you please, then pass them on. Did your kid lose a glove? Go back to where you last saw it and you’ll likely find it waving back at you from the finial of a wrought-iron handrail. If your dog is thirsty, walk him by the brownstone where the owner leaves a large bowl of water and a hose for refills.

Statesman of Ancient Rome Cicero said, "We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race." (And, while I’m at it, the idea of community can even connect us to past generations. Poet and fellow Brooklynite Walt Whitman reminds us, "What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? / Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not, I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine.") There are many neighborhoods like mine around the country fulfilling those aspirations, but nowhere is that truer than on the subway.

During Friday morning’s ride, the conductor is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. At the Nevins Street stop: "Five train pulling in across the platform. Step lively and make your transfer, Brooklyn."

At Hoyt Street, as if he’s working the crowd at Yankee Stadium, he says, "Hoooyyytt! Hoooyyytt, here!"

Then at Borough Hall: "Hey Brooklyn, wake up! How you doin’ this morning?" It’s not like we can answer him, but regardless, I think to myself. "I’m okay."

The guy next to me is not okay, apparently. He’s reading the results from his employer’s random drug screening. I know this because, master of deduction that I am, I see the paper he’s holding says in bright red letters across the top of the page, "Substance Toxicology Report." I can also see that he has failed.

You may be thinking to yourself, "Why would he be reading such a personal document in public?" He doesn’t feel he’s in public, not in a general anonymous sense. He’s in his community — a personal, comfortable space. It’s the same reason the lady across the street from me will walk to the corner coffee shop in her slippers on Sunday morning. These areas are an extension of their private spaces.

So people read a lot of things on the train that would otherwise be classified as personal — bank statements, retribution summaries from lawyers, 401K reports, etc. It’s like an informal state of the union — getting up to date on your community. He looks wealthy but just got evicted; she received a sizeable inheritance; he is failing every class except gym. I just got a jury summons. (Note to NYC residents: you’ll regret filling out that benign-looking questionnaire.) People out in the ‘burbs buy People Magazine or watch Entertainment Tonight to catch up on the goings-on (most of which have dubious information at best); I just get on the subway and get the real scoop. {readmore}{jomcomment}

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Reviews

From the page to the stage

The universality of David Sedaris — a review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames.


 

After selling millions of books worldwide, penning an Obie Award–winning play with his equally well-noted younger sister Amy, and cultivating the kind of sweater-vested, lefty politico audience that must keep the suits at National Pubic Radio (NPR) waist-deep in spicy tuna rolls, how exactly does David Sedaris manage to keep himself fresh and culturally relevant? At the top of his game, Sedaris has always been the thinking man’s humorist — the kind of literary lothario that even your grandmother has heard of (and adores, naturally). Now, with his sixth collection of witty, observational-styled essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris has reached a crossroads in his epic career: either grow with your core base, or fade into pop cultural obscurity.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, along with its accompanying global book tour, can best be viewed as an ongoing case study in misfit dysfunction — a natural continuation to Sedaris’ trademark genre of wry, autobiographical narration. Whereas his previous collections have revolved primarily around the outrageous hijinks of his thoroughly unpredictable Greek family, the stories presented in Flames display a heightened sense of maturity and confident self-awareness, the sort of which that courses breathlessly through every page and every chapter. If Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris’ 2000 release about moving to France with his partner and his struggle to cope with learning a foreign language while thriving in a foreign land, stood as his literary adolescent years, then Flames represents full-fledged adulthood: a coming-out party for a now-seasoned world traveler; an awkward pupil of culture now especially skilled at the unusual art of adaptation.

As its inflammatory title suggests, Flames spends more than 300 pages highlighting emotions of fear and discomfort and the many perils of frequent travel, and no one recreates the outsider experience quite as vividly as Sedaris (in classic, peak form) does. There’s a reason why he is able to affix the title “noted humorist” to his business cards, and in Flames, the humor is no less sharp or wryly observant than in prior works. The difference here is that Sedaris is writing from an interloper’s perspective more frequently than he has in the past, and his descriptions of third party discomfort play as well as the book’s more personal elements do.

An early chapter entitled “Keeping Up” finds Sedaris watching vacationing American couples arguing loudly outside of his apartment window, taking desperate stabs at figuring their way around Sedaris’ adopted home of Paris, while concurrently mangling the French language as though it were a garbage-bound piece of paper. (One woman even mistakenly believes that her meager Spanish skills will suffice for the trip.) Still another story brings Sedaris to the doorstep of his father’s neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he makes acquaintances with a flamboyant 15-year-old, whose own Southern-fried parents proudly proclaim to be a homosexual. Odd, Sedaris sniffs in his biting narrative. In his own Southern childhood, identifying oneself as gay would have been nothing short of a death sentence; you’d have to find yourself a girlfriend “who was willing to settle for the sensitive type.”

The best story in Flames, however, is the memoir’s last: a multipart epic about the author’s two-decade-long love affair with smoking cigarettes and subsequent decision to give them up for good. It’s an arduous undertaking that has Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, relocating to Japan for a three-month excursion, steeped in the fundamental principles of cultural misfit-hood. Broken up into three distinct sections — “Before,” “Japan,” and “After,” respectively — the story offers an inside man’s perspective into Sedaris at his very best and most introspective, and indeed, the entire account reads as though the passages were copied directly from the pages of his diary. “The Smoking Section” is equal parts poignant and melodramatic, altruistic and self-serving, all at once. It is here that Sedaris demonstrates his remarkable ability to spin seemingly mundane scenes into funny and interesting lifestyle pieces, with no shortage of heart. By its conclusion, one can’t help but wonder why moving to Tokyo wouldn’t be just as, if not more, effective a method for kicking butts as attaching an endless parade of nicotine patches to one’s forearm would be.

As a performer, Sedaris’ star shines equally as bright, but in a radically different manner than his comedic persona radiates when regulated to the page. Currently underway on a multicity North American book reading tour, Sedaris has taken to reading out loud from works by other authors, a few of his as-yet unpublished essays, and even a smattering of excerpts from his personal journal, offering a rare glimpse of the author when he is unfiltered by the bounds of the editing process.

It’s fun to watch Sedaris relay his unique brand of offbeat, awkward humor to the audience in person, and listening to the introductory origins of each story provides the kind of elated enhancement that is more often applied to the most cherished of fantasy fiction, but rarely to the kind of observational memoir writing of which Sedaris has repeatedly proven himself a master. Robbed of the protection of editors and literary distance, many equally capable writers would more than likely find themselves foundering onstage. In his public readings though, Sedaris demonstrates that, on paper or off, he’s able to use his biting and keen sense of humor to make pathways into his audience’s hearts; put quite simply, he’s just a funny guy.

Converting humor from the page to the stage is no easy feat, and many fine nuances are often sacrificed in translation. The fact that Sedaris has been able to consistently maintain a long-lasting relationship with his avid readers stands as an overwhelming testament to his genius and talent as both a writer and a performer. The trick to remaining relevant is to grow and mature with one’s audience — a difficulty that has seen many gifted artists forfeited in its wake. Sedaris, conversely, continues to regenerate the kind of radiant humor and spark in both his writing and his performing that has simultaneously drawn in younger readers while keeping his core base unwaveringly interested. Upon reaching the summit of Flames, one gets the sense that this isn’t Sedaris’ zenith; rather, it’s something of a new beginning.

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Fiction & Poetry

The goblins’ drum

Write your secrets, they said.


I had a nightmare as a child, where goblins marched through the snow in step to the slow, steady rhythm of their drum, and the line of them extended way up into the mountains. Now, when I put my ear to the pillow, I can hear the sound again, and I remember them coming through the walls to get me.  

A large, slow-moving river runs through the center of my new life. I am a scholar now, not a soldier, and if successful, my achievements will be noted here and there in obscure academic circles. Dead leaves float in clusters along the banks of the river, just below the surface of the water, and a cold wind blows waves that lap the stones along its shore, and the dead leaves bob with the waves. This was where, months earlier, we met, and she refused to speak to me after I told her I’d been in uniform. She said she wished I hadn’t told her. I said I was thinking the same thing.

She’d been embarrassed, I think, by her anger during our introduction, and after months of polite smiles and quick hellos, she apologized. I told her she didn’t have to. She apologized again and said she hoped I didn’t hate her. I told her I didn’t, and when she said she didn’t believe me, I asked her to dinner. “If I behave strangely,” I told her, “it is only because I’m nervous around beautiful women.” I was glad to have been over there, I said, because I tried to be noble, and someone else might not have even tried. She asked if I had any photographs. Looking at smiling soldiers posing with guns, she said she’d seen enough before we were through with them. She would not look at me just then.

I think it is good to believe in things, meaning, to not believe in nothing, since already there is so little worth fighting for.

 

 

I come to my empty apartment wearing a sweater and the warm scarf she knotted around my neck the night before her return to Gaza. Two tea bags rest on my journal as a reminder to write about her. Being a humble woman, she didn’t throw them out after boiling them in water for us. They are dry in my fingers and smell of mint. The tea leaves crumble in the bags. She asked me if I’d ever been hungry and I told her how much weight I lost in training once. She was glad. I told her life is extremely short and she told me we are from different worlds. When she removed her scarf and wrapped it around me, I told her to keep it, because she wasn’t used to cold weather. Already, it was a harsh, dry cold that grabs your fingers and ears as soon as you step outside. She told me that she has hot blood and didn’t need it. I said I believed her.

I had felt happy to be alive again, taking refuge with her from the isolation of winter. Her bones seemed as thin and frail as a bird’s. I’d find her at the bar and sit beyond her circle of visiting artists. She could look so casual, glowing with heat, cigarette and wine, her curls in disarray, the burden of her compassion for this world hidden in the way she looked people in the eye and judged them for kindness. Few, it seemed, looked back.

She gawked when I showed her my home, said not even a good woman could save my children from extravagance. (I’d never considered myself this way.) She asked how to use the stove. I told her I didn’t want her to leave, that she should find a way to stay at the university, to extend her visa. She told me how confused she felt. I told her she is still young. She talked about her family. “You must love them,” I said. She told me I’m a good person, and I said she doesn’t know me very well. She said she wanted to see the inside of a prison, and I told her she is still young and shouldn’t be rash. We never had enough time to finish understanding one another. I told her about the paintings on my walls — about the one of the house blending into the pale mountains behind it, the home of my grandparents and place of my childhood.

That was where I knew all the stones for a half mile up and down the mountain stream and had given them all names, where hemlock needles would spin through the curls of fast-moving water, and, in places where the stream was still, one could crawl to the edge of a boulder, peer over it, and if the sun didn’t cast your shadow over the water, faces of minnows would appear below the surface.

At night, in the mountains, the goblins came at me but couldn’t get through the walls, so they would bend them, and objects from across my room would suddenly be right on me. They would whisper to me and then jump back to the other side again, and the walls would bend, and my grandmother would squeeze me against her and tell me everything is okay, that there is no drumbeat inside of my pillow, that it is only the beat of my own heart. My grandmother would sing Ukrainian lullabies and I could feel the goblins scratching themselves inside of my skin.

We cooked dinner and she asked me to play my music. She asked if I had any music from my family’s old country. I didn’t realize how much this meant to me. I told her they were singing about freedom and she told me that I must be very proud. I was. Many of hers, she said, are ashamed. Different worlds aside, I asked her to marry me. She agreed. If we are both single a decade from now, we will find each other and marry. “And living,” she added. I asked if she’d like to live in the mountains, and she told me it’d be up to me. I told her I’d try to remain unsuccessful so our children can grow up humble. I wished her great happiness and she told me to wish her great courage instead.  

They came through the walls again and marched back and forth in my room. Back and forth, seeing nothing with their blank fish-eyes, and they marched on their feathered legs and feet that look like human hands, their horns carving furrows in the plaster of my ceiling, and I could see their severed limbs.

When I was a child, I was told to write because it was healthy. They said write that you don’t know what to write, because it’s healthy for you to have an outlet, because you have no sibling to talk to, few friends. But the dreams persisted. I learned to slip outside at night to take walks, and I’d wait for the dawn before sneaking back to my bed. 

Write your secrets, they said. The woods across the stream were dark. The trees were older there and rooted in the seep bank. Some bowed so far toward the water, the tops of them touched the surface. The only way to cross came in the autumn, when the water was lower, and even then, one had to be an expert of the rocks. One had to know which way to hop so as not to strand oneself, or to unexpectedly step on a rock widely known among experts for its wobble. This knowledge was my secret. At night, the noise of the stream pushed away the drum.

I told her about the ringing in both my ears — something I’m learning to live with — and how I missed the sound of quiet. She lay with her ear to my chest and told me my heart sounded strong. She asked if they could still call me, if I’d go back, if I’d refuse.

My new is life is so easy, I feel guilty. I told her I would go. Of course I would go. Duty, I said. “Don’t,” she replied, “because we will kill you.” We. I told her I believed her. Her body was thin as a match stick. She said we had too much to say to one another before she had to return home, and I told her to write it all down.

When I told her she must be tired from carrying such heavy things all the time, she startled like she’d been doused with water, and touched me for the first time — the promise of something worthwhile, permanent. I asked her to put the heavy things down for a little while and sit on the swings with me. We’d gone for a walk. The stars were out. I told her I didn’t believe in God. She told me how confused she was. I told her I could spend all night telling her stories about the house and the mountains, and she told me she’d listen.

In the summer, I could skip one of every five stones off the surface of the stream and have it bounce onto the opposite bank. Scouts. In the autumn, I would gather the ones that made it and return them to the water.

One of the goblins stopped his march, looked straight at me with the jelly eye of a fish. I felt him crawling and twisting underneath my skin, his bones clattering against my own. I don’t know why they hate me.

“I like drinking and sex,” she’d told me, “but when I think about my father, I am ashamed.”

I’m alone now with my paintings and my heart, and I fear the truth will make me a very lonely person. At some point I became aware that the puzzle of the Earth did not quite fit together, and the goblins’ drum comes to sound like the question “why” hammering in my temples. I want to stop thinking, and yet: Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! The frail patches of logic I construct over the fault of the Earth collapse the instant they are created, and I fear the pressure is building somewhere deep, somewhere beneath the surface of the ocean, unseen, unheard, building slowly in the darkness. A pressure in the depths that may yet come roaring out from the darkness and toss the ocean in a wild and unpredictable direction.

At night, I’d pull sneakers over my bare feet and find peace in the chilly air, electric with the chants of unseen creatures. The road between my grandparents’ house and the near bank of the river looked like a striped serpent heavy in its slumber. A few paces off the asphalt, everything was dark. I would stand in the dewy brush, listening to the night, my eyes groping the darkness. Slowly, black and blacker things distinguished themselves in the shadows, and I’d feel for the path under my feet and follow it toward the gurgling stream, where stones shone white with moonlight and the water raced eternally between them. I’d watch the far bank, and the goblins’ drum would seem very far away.

“I’ll see you in 10 years,” she told me. Insha Allah.

I fell into the stream once as a child, when summer was still in bloom and I, too anxious to wait for the fall, attempted to reach the dark woods. I burst back up through the surface, sucking the sweet air, my sweater heavy with water, pulling me down, the sound of falling water all around me, skin bristling with cold, and my eyes flooding with the moon shadows of leaves on the water, and the dark woods alive in the starry night. I wanted the moment to last forever, like a painting. It was then I decided to follow the sound of the drum.

When I wrote, telling her they were calling me back, and that I would be going, she said good-bye.

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News

Suicide in paradise

Why do Sri Lankans kill themselves in such large numbers?


Many descriptions of Sri Lanka today are of the “paradise lost” variety: What was once a stunningly beautiful island with sparkling beaches and lush jungle is now a war torn country mired in a protracted ethnic conflict. The 25-year war between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has killed 80,000 people by some estimates and displaced hundreds of thousands, continues to grind on and hinders the tropical island from ever reaching its potential splendor.

There’s little truth to these descriptions, commonly found in tourist’s guides and the odd magazine piece. Death did not suddenly arrive on the doorstep of the paradise island 25 years ago. On the contrary, before Sri Lankans were killing each other in war, they were killing themselves.

 

 

In the early 1940s, Sri Lanka’s suicide rate was fairly average, but over the next decades it started to creep upward, gradually rising from roughly six people per 100,000 to nearly 10 people per 100,000 by 1961. Shortly thereafter, the number of suicides took a shocking leap, doubling between 1961 and 1971, and doubling again between 1971 and 1983, the year the civil war began. By 1995, 47 out of 100,000 people were killing themselves each year — one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

To get a sense of what these statistics really mean, consider that in the period between 1990 and 1995, it’s estimated that approximately 38,500 Sri Lankans took their own lives. That’s nearly half as many as have died in the entire war in a single five-year period. Some people argue that the killing of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka should be called “genocide.” But is there a word in existence that captures the tragedy of tens of thousands of people killing themselves? “Epidemic” doesn’t begin to accurately relay the horror of it.

Judging by the suicide rate, Sri Lanka is not a country of particularly happy people. But the reasons for this can’t be blamed on the civil war, the most publicized aspect of Sri Lanka’s recent history and the easiest culprit. The burgeoning suicide rate throughout the 1950s and 60s doesn’t support a direct correlation. Other theories, such as a high number of failed love affairs in the country or a widespread inability to deal with negative emotions, seem to fall short of being able to explain the magnitude of the problem.

 

 

Further complicating the matter is the fact that indicators used to measure a country’s general happiness, like gross national happiness (GNH) or subjective well-being (SWB), show that Sri Lanka scores are average. According to these scales, which take into consideration levels of poverty, health, conflict, and education, Sri Lankans are less happy than people near the top — Americans and northern Europeans — but more happy than Indians, Russians, and most of Africa.

Measurements of happiness such as these should be treated with suspicion; they aim to capture through statistical analysis what is essentially intangible, a state of being within the human heart and mind. But with very broad strokes they can give a view of how people see themselves. Are they satisfied with their lives? With their work, relationships, and health? Overall, Sri Lankans score the same SWB rating as the Portuguese, and yet their suicide rate is much, much higher.

One of the more disturbing yet compelling explanations for the high number of suicide deaths is the use of severely toxic pesticides in Sri Lankan agriculture. In 2007, a team of doctors presented a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology which claimed that the increase in suicides coincided with the rising importation of deadly pesticides, such as methamidophos, monocrotophos, and endosulfan. When ingested, these chemicals act similarly to nerve gases developed during World War II and are extremely fatal. During the years of Sri Lanka’s soaring suicide rate, pesticide poisoning accounted for two-thirds of these deaths.

 

 

In 1995 and 1998, the Sri Lankan government enacted bans on importing highly and moderately toxic pesticides into the country, and within a few years the number of suicide fatalities decreased significantly. It’s unclear whether the number of attempted suicides decreased at all, but today the suicide rate hovers at around 22 per 100,000 people — nearly double that of the United States, but half of what it was during Sri Lanka’s peak. The researchers behind the epidemiological paper attempted to isolate factors other than these import bans to explain the decrease in suicides, but couldn’t find any. “We found no evidence that the trends were specifically associated with beneficial changes in levels of employment, alcohol sales, divorce or with periods of civil war,” they wrote. 

In myriad ways, the implications of these findings are troubling. If the mere presence of deadly pesticides was responsible for the start of the suicide epidemic in Sri Lanka, it could be inferred that the suicidal impulse had been there much earlier but the methods weren’t nearly as effective. It could also be inferred that the ban on pesticides and subsequent decrease in suicide deaths has merely stanched an ongoing tragedy. From what limited current data exists, Sri Lankans still seem to attempt suicide in relatively large numbers, but the fatality rate is lower.

 

 

The sources of this epidemic remain unexamined in part because psychological research in Sri Lanka is a relatively new and undeveloped field. There have been few if any widespread studies by experts from within or outside the country that attempt to document and analyze the underlying causes of Sri Lanka’s suicide rate.

“We have many who are interested in the field, but have little systematically collected knowledge of ‘Sri Lankan’ psychology,” said Dr. Shamala Kumar, a university professor of psychology, in an interview with a Sri Lankan newspaper in November.

In a sense, experts have so far only managed to explain how Sri Lankans killed themselves in such great numbers in past decades. But the emotional, psychological, and philosophical heart of the problem remains a mystery.

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Commentary

Dispatch from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness

Learning from Bhutan.


When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, he explained that “we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.” And that is what the Bhutanese have been working on since the 1970s, when their last king realized that the country’s gross national happiness was more important than its gross national product.

It’s my first time in Bhutan, but after two days here, I am captivated by the country’s beauty and the civility of the people. And as I open a second bottle of Red Panda beer and gaze over the lights of Thimphu, I feel very privileged to be here. Just a few years ago, it would have been pretty unlikely for someone like me from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to have even thought of attending a conference like this. But over the past few years, the idea of developing alternative measures of progress has become close to the OECD’s heart. It is work that has been the focus of the OECD-hosted Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies for the past three years.

 

 

For 60 years, gross domestic product (GDP) has been the dominant way in which the world has measured and understood progress. This approach has failed to explain several factors that have the most significant impact on people’s lives. During the last decade, a large amount of work has been carried out to understand and measure the world’s progress. The Global Project is the first systematic global effort to “go beyond GDP” by enabling and promoting new ways to measure societal progress, one high-profile example of which is French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission comprises some of the world’s great thinkers and includes five Nobel laureates.

The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies aims to foster the development of sets of key economic, social, and environmental indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of how the well-being of a society is evolving, and seeks to encourage each society to consider in an informed way the crucial question: Is life getting better?

The Global Project is an international network of organizations from all sectors of society. The main partners in the Global Project are the OECD, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the European Commission. Research institutes, development banks, nongovernmental organizations, and statistical offices from both developing and developed countries are also working with us.

The project has three main goals:

  • What to measure? In order to measure progress, we must know what it looks like, and so we are encouraging debate about what progress means in different societies. The project is developing methods and guidelines to carry out these debates effectively.
  • How to measure progress? The project is developing best practices in how to measure progress and its component parts, some of which are not yet measured well using existing statistical indicators.
  •  Ensuring that those measures are used. New information and communication technology (ICT) tools offer huge potential to turn information into knowledge among a much broader swathe of citizens than those who currently access such information. The project is developing new tools for public use.

At the heart of the Global Project is the development of Wiki-Progress, a global collaborative online platform that will serve as a hub and focal point of the many existing and nascent initiatives to measure societal progress at national and local levels.

The OECD is among those that believe that grassroots conversations around measuring progress — and the outcomes a society wants to achieve — can change the political debate: They can shift discussion from arguments over the political means to agreement on the societal ends. This also echoes U.S. President-elect Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. … Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America’s promise, the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

There is mounting evidence that discussions on indicators of progress can foster a sense of what the U.S. president-elect described as “our sense of common purpose, our sense of higher purpose.” The OECD is working to promote this approach. And there is much we can learn from the Bhutanese.

Jon Hall is project coordinator of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. He presented the paper “A global movement for a global challenge” at the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in November in Thimphu, Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Measuring the Progress of Societies
A global movement for a global challenge
Papers from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness in Bhutan
A teacher’s view on the Gross National Happiness conference

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Commentary

Happiness in Bhutan

A national ideal.


My romance with Bhutan began in February 2000, when I flew for the first time from Bangkok to Paro, the only airport town in Bhutan. The airport had no radar detection device. Planes could only land and take off in broad daylight, in good visibility. At the time, “planes” meant the two aircraft owned by Bhutan’s national airline, Druk Air. As we neared Bhutan, the arid landscape gradually gave way to layers of mountains looming grey and purple in the distance, becoming luxuriant with vibrant shades of green as the plane glided over them. Mountains and valleys interlocked with one another like fingers of hands clasped in prayer. I had the inkling I was about to experience something quite different from what the biggest cities and fanciest resorts of the first world could offer.  

 

 

The day my husband Mike told me about his potential assignment to consult in Bhutan, I looked up the country on the Internet. Cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about the size of Switzerland, was the Kingdom of Bhutan, with India to the south, east, and west, and Tibet to the north. Further research told me the country had no constitution or political parties, no freedom of assembly, press, or religion. No church to attend, only Buddhist temples. No electricity in most parts of the country, and limited TV broadcasting even in places with electricity. No traffic lights anywhere, not even in its capital, Thimphu. No fast food restaurants. And little medicine except the indigenous kind.

There was a dress code: National dress was required to be worn in public. My findings were depressing enough to make Bhutan a curious — even fascinating — place to see. 

As tourists in the first two weeks before Mike started work, we had a guide who took us from Paro to Thimphu and across the mountain pass Dochu La to Punakha, the winter home of the Central Monastic Body. We also journeyed eastward to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan. We even braved the narrow, nerve-racking, mountain-hugging roads south all the way to Phuentsholing, on the border of India. The fortress-like dzongs, or monasteries, intimidated and awed me. Houses decorated with auspicious, painted symbols of dragons, flowers, and wheels caught my fancy, while wooden phalluses — hung from roofs to ward against evil — initially rendered me speechless. Buddhist relic-filled chortens, prayer wheels big and small, and forests of prayer flags fluttering in the wind were spiritually uplifting.

But what really filled me with wonder was that every man, woman, and child looked happy.

Happiness radiated from weather-beaten faces, with their windburned cheeks and smiles that showed teeth stained red from betel nut addiction. It was quite obvious that happiness in Bhutan was not born of material wealth and comfort, for those were lacking everywhere I looked. The Bhutanese people as a whole might be poor by Western standards, but they are not destitute. Begging and unwelcomed soliciting are not in the Bhutanese vocabulary. While tourists to many countries would have to pay to get a picture taken with a local outfitted in his or her national dress, I got all my pictures taken with Bhutanese men in ghos and women in kiras for free, for my payment often came in the form of letting adults pore over my Lonely Planet Bhutan or showing children the magic of my binoculars. What a breath of fresh air. The children might look shabby, with snotty faces and dirt-encrusted fingernails, but they all had school and parents who provided for them.

And they all looked happy.

A highlight of that first trip was a night in a farmhouse in a small hamlet during our Bumthang Cultural Trek. That evening, we shared a meal with the family, comprising a couple and their two sons. We sat on the floor around the bukhari, or wood-burning stove, in a kitchen surrounded by soot-blackened walls. The room was dimly lit with a low-wattage bulb, which our host proudly told us was fed by electricity generated by a solar panel on the roof. We dined on buckwheat pancakes, yak stew and curries, and lots of chilies, which Mike and I politely declined. Arra, a strong wheat- or rice-distilled drink, was poured, warming the body and the spirit.

In spite of the dark and drab surroundings of the interior, it did not take much to feel the contagious effect of happiness. That night, Mike and I were given the best room in the house in which to sleep: the altar room, reserved for the deities and VIP guests. In the darkness of the room, lit only by a flickering butter lamp on the altar, surrounded by statuettes of Buddhist saints and thangkas depicting deities, I was not afraid. Mike fell asleep as soon as his head hit the mattressed floor, but I stayed awake for a long while, thankful for the opportunity to be sharing in the happiness of an extraordinary nation.     

On my second visit to Bhutan, in 2002, I went to the public library in Thimphu and picked up a copy of Kuensel, the national weekly. “Chorten vandal sentenced to life,” the headline read. Also on the same page: “Eight HIV cases detected in Bhutan.”

Little international news made it into the paper. Neither did anything critical of government policies. Surely there must be some souls unhappy with contentious issues even in the most fairytale paradise on earth?    

“They are careful of what they print, aren’t they?” I remarked to a man reading nearby.

He gave me a curious look, and said, “Yes, it’s a pretty good paper.”

Up until 2008, the country had no constitution. But for 100 years, the Bhutanese people had placed their faith in the king and his benevolent, if absolute, governance. Peace and harmony reigned in this kingdom which, to the developed world, might seem deprived of the fundamental rights of democracy and freedom. On my visits to Bhutan, I have observed that the Bhutanese are intrinsically happy, if happiness could be summed up to trust in their beloved king and his government, contentment with their way of life, faith in their religious beliefs, harmony with their environment, peace with all sentient beings, and the highest regard for the cultural and spiritual traditions of their country. 

With a new king and Bhutan’s first constitution, the kingdom has entered a new era, one of democratic beginnings. The Internet has become accessible, more programs are broadcast on television, and new hotels are being erected.

It’s progress by Western standards.

But what about happiness?

 

 

Elsie Sze is the author of the novel Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, which spans from the war torn China years of the 1930s to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. Her forthcoming novel, Heart of the Buddha, is about Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Books offer clues to finding happiness in tough economy
Substantiating GNH
Lessons in Gross National Happiness

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Interviews

Riding (uphill) to prosperity

A town thrives because of biking, but not everyone is happy.


The only noise you hear is the water rippling over rocks, as the Lehigh River cuts through a steep valley near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Bikers ride along a paved path that gently slopes at a 2 percent downward grade. The lush carpet of trees on the mountains eventually gives way to a small picturesque town that looks like a place you’d see in the Swiss Alps.

This little town of 4,800 supports two bike stores that shuttle riders to the beginning of the Lehigh Gorge Trail, as well as quaint stores, B&Bs, and several restaurants. The weekends buzz with activity.

 

 

Jim Thorpe has come a long way from its days as a depressed mining town to the biking center it is today.

The first time we came through Jim Thorpe, it was to raft. But since then we’ve been back three times to mountain bike, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, and shop on Main Street.

We spent plenty of money there, so I was surprised to hear about the anti-bike sentiment. Bike tourism seems to have lifted this town from its depression. Why would a town bite the hand that feeds it?

“It’s animosity between the locals and the visitors,” said Tom Loughery, corresponding secretary of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “Existing residents had no idea that the town had something special to offer. They complain that it now takes 10 minutes to get across town, and the restaurants are crowded.”

They don’t seem to link the visitors to the newly-renovated homes and buildings and the full tax coffers.

No irony was lost when this town changed its name from Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a versatile athlete of American Indian descent who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, but these were rescinded when it was learned he’d earned a minimal amount of money during college playing basketball. Although he played professional football and baseball, his later life was marked by poverty and alcoholism.

Mauch Chunk had been a thriving coal and railroad town. In an attempt to replace those dying industries with tourism, town leaders agreed to let the widow of the disgraced athlete bury his body there in 1953 and changed the name in his honor. The tourists never came, until the 1990s. But it wasn’t to see Thorpe’s grave. It was to go biking.

Copious studies support the idea that biking can boost an economy. Mountain biking has been the fourth most popular adventure activity among U.S. adventure travelers, according to a 1997 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. Sixty million adult Americans bicycle each year. Bicyclists spend money on this recreation, which creates jobs and brings revenue to communities. The Outdoor Industry Foundation reports that bicycling contributes $133 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

Declining towns can capitalize on their natural gifts. Not every mountain biking center needs spectacular rolling rock trails like Moab, Utah, or the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains that Durango, Colorado, offers. Woodlands and flatlands can be developed into biking arenas. Plus, the trails can be cleared with volunteer efforts and a few inexpensive tools. In Jim Thorpe, timber roads and coal mining roads had already been cut through the woods.

Looking for new sources of income, West Virginia aggressively pursued bike dollars in the early 1980s. It sponsored races and reaped the benefits by establishing itself as a biking mecca. The Hatfield-McCoy trails that were opened in 2000 have proven very successful. After a decade of work to build community support and of agreements with 20 different landowners, the shared-use trails have added $51 million to the economy, drawn 303,000 visitors, and created 1,572 new jobs.

Yet some still oppose biking there.

“The Nature Nazis think they are saving the world from mountain bikes,” complained Matt Marcus, owner of Blackwater Bikes and the president of the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association, describing his experience with officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Anti-bike groups claim that bikes cause erosion and trail widening,” said Drew Vankat, policy adviser for the International Mountain Biking Association, “when in fact research has shown bikes cause no more impact than horses.”

Vankat has been at the forefront of a battle with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. The Forest Service director in Denver proposed eliminating bikes on the Monarch Crest Trail — based on research done before mountain bikes were even invented.

“They don’t want to lose pristine nature and feel if you allow bikes, it will open up the floodgates,” Vankat said.

The town of Jim Thorpe felt the backlash too.

“The state of Pennsylvania outlawed biking on state game lands, and while only four trails were affected, the perception was that there was no more biking in Pennsylvania. That was in 2004, and it really hurt the economy,” said Loughery of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “We’re working hard to gain them back.”

To be fair, not every cyclist is courteous. Some refuse to ride single-file or around a puddle while off road, widening the trail. But the benefits far outweigh a few examples of bad behavior.

The Forest Service argues that allowing bikes into the woods would open the door to allowing in four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). So the agency takes the position of “no wheels at all.” That’s easier: The Forest Service is under siege from powerful companies like Kawasaki Motors. Bike manufacturers lack the deep pockets to fight for inclusion. Although ATVs are noisy and pollute with their fossil-fueled engines, equating pedal-powered bikes with ATVs makes no sense.

Depressed regions have an opportunity to recreate their image and character. While not as powerful as coal or steel barons, bike riders can help towns overcome flagging economic fortunes, if they can overcome the naysayers.

Additional Reading:

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Lehigh Gorge Trail

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Blog

I sleep on Black Friday


A Wal-Mart worker is trampled to death on Black Friday. To those of you who killed him, to those of you who stood by, those of you who tried to trample his co-workers as they tried to help him, and to those who complained when the store was closed due to the tragedy — you all make me almost ashamed to be a human being. Nothing you can buy, no matter what the price or how badly a loved one wanted it, is worth killing someone.

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