Bhutan Quotes

Ketika pohon terakhir ditebang, Ketika sungai terakhir dikosongkan, Ketika ikan terakhir ditangkap, Barulah manusia akan menyadari bahwa dia tidak dapat memakan uang.

I would not have done anything differently. All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I am not saying that they were all good or that they happened for a reason...but they have been right. They have been okay. As far as revelations go its pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self help movement. Okay won't get me on Oprah, but okay is a start and for that I am grateful. Can I thank Bhutan for this breakthrough? It's hard to say […] It is a strange place, peculiar in ways large and small. You lose your bearings here and when that happens a crack forms in your armor. A crack large enough, if you're lucky, to let in a few shafts of light.

I wanted to throw myself into an experience that was too big for me and learn in a way that cost me something

If I had to name the biggest difference between Bhutan and the rest of the world, I could do it in one word, civility.

There are all kinds of ignorance in the world. Education, learning to read and write, doesn't necessarily give us knowledge. We have to learn to use our minds to see what is really happening.

Bhutan does seem a bit unreal at times. Hardly anybody in the U.S. knows where it is. I have friends who still think the entire country is a figment of my imagination. When I was getting ready to move there, and I told people I was going to work in Bhutan, they'd inevitably ask, "Where's Butane?" It is near Africa," I'd answer, to throw them off the trail. "It's where all the disposable lighters come from." They'd nod in understanding.

The Rough Guide to Nepal; The Great Sights of Canada; America by Car; Fodor's Guide to the Bahamas; Let's go Bhutan.

...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

(It’s a good thing the gho is so handy, because all Bhutanese men are required to wear one during business hours. Bhutan is the only country in the world with a dress code for men.)

It was the ruling King of Bhutan himself who, in the 1980s, set up a system that measured national advancement according to Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product.

For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela vs Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn't the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child.

There was something intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it.

What if I didn’t want to have babies because I loved my job too much to compromise it, or because serious travel makes me feel in relation to the world in an utterly essential way? What if I’ve always liked the looks of my own life much better than those of the ones I saw around me? What if, given the option, I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies? What if I simply like dogs a whole lot better than babies? What if I have become sure that personal freedom is the thing I hold most dear?

I submit that comfort is a diversion, and it’s not related to happiness.

The average Bhutanese knows much more about the world than the average American...(for Americans)It is more comfortable to watch fake news about celebrities than to know what's happening in China or southern Sudan. But events happening in China or Sudan affect us so much more because they are real.

A man met the Buddha after the Buddha became enlightened. The man was awed by his remarkable radiance. "What are you?" the man asked. "Are you some kind of celestial being? A god, perhaps?" "No," said the Buddha. "Well, then, are you a magician or wizard?" "No," the Buddha answered again. "Are you a man?" "No." "Well, then, what are you?" "I am awake," the Buddha replied

Just as Alice, when she walked through the looking glass, found herself in a new and whimsical world, so we, when we crossed over the Pa Chu, found ourselves as though caught up on some magic time machine fitted fantastically with a reverse...

It is undeniably the case that in our society we do not easily accept that death is a natural part of life, which results in a perpetual sense of insecurity and fear, and many are confused at the time of the death of a loved one, not knowing what they can do to help the one that has passed away or how to address their own grief. Exploring ways of overcoming our fear of death and adopting a creative approach at the time of bereavement, that is, focusing one’s energy on supporting the one that has passed away, are both extraordinary benefits of the insights and practices that are so beautifully expressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When I think of these things I often remember the Dalai Lama saying: ‘When we look at life and death from a broader perspective, then dying is just like changing our clothes! When this body becomes old and useless, we die and take on a new body, which is fresh, healthy and full of energy! This need not be so bad!’ Graham Coleman Thimpu, Bhutan

You find things when you're looking hard for other things. The trick is to be awake- which, granted is harder than it seems.

It is remarkable, the lines that connect people. You can strike up a conversation with someone, a stranger even, and discover that you have a friend in common, that your aunts were from the same town, or that his best friend can grease your way into Bhutan. It seems on those occasions that we are all like strands of DNA, spun around each other in a double helix.

Orang-orang di Amerika Serikat tidak mencemari lingkungan sebagian karena takut didenda. Orang-orang di Bhutan tidak mencemari lingkungan karena mereka takut kepada dewata rumah kaca.

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That’s nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world’s poorest people.

Everything is more meaningful because it is connected to the earth. There are no signs to read, no billboards or neon messages; instead I read the hills and the fields and the farmhouses and the sky. The houses, made of mud and stone and wood, are not hermetically sealed. The wind blows in through the cracks, the night seeps in through the rough wooden window slats.The line between inside and outside is not so clear.

Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. […] Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic.

Grotesquely, there are cheerleaders for the king of Bhutan because of his claim that he seeks to increase gross national happiness, when Bhutan is one of the poorest and one of the more authoritarian countries in the world.

Semua momen dalam kehidupan saya, setiap orang yang saya temui, semua perjalanan yang telah saya tempuh, setiap keberhasilan yang telah saya nikmati, setiap kesalahan yang telah saya buat, setiap kerugian yang saya tanggung adalah bukan masalah.

There is a difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plan touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over, slowly, in bits and pieces. […] It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.

I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is requires. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeat the mantra of contentment: “This is just enough.

Bhutan is the land of la. The monosyllabic word serves as all-purpose affirmation, honorific, and verbal tic. Mostly, it is a softener, appended to almost everything. La means “sir” but also “ya know.” I like the way it sounds and, during my weeks in Bhutan, use it myself, but always self-consciously, never finding the right rhythm.

am late for my afternoon coffee with Linda Leaming, an American who has lived in Bhutan for the past nine years. Asia has attracted its share of spiritual seekers, or lama lickers as they’re sometimes called, but Bhutan was closed to outsiders until the 1970s. Even after that, it was not an easy country to get to. You had to want it.

Acceptance is so much a part of being in love, and love can make a person exceptional

And it made me sad that in the U.S. we don’t mend things anymore. Mending and fixing broken things is deeply satisfying. More

He rarely wanted to own any of the stuff; he was happy just to look.

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so.” That was John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century British philosopher who believed that happiness should be approached sideways, “like a crab.” Is Bhutan a nation of crabs? Or is this whole notion of Gross National Happiness just a clever marketing ploy, like the one Aruba dreamed up a few years ago. “Come to Aruba: the island where happiness lives.

Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn’t even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references.

I wondered what a traffic report from my commute during Bhutan’s morning rush hour would sound like, and laughed. The cow path is clean this morning. We’ve got Ap Khandu’s cows grazing by the fly-over, so it’s all clear to the Mushroom Centre with no cow patties. But you’ll want to watch the mud near the boys’ latrines—there could be some surprises—and be careful of that third rock as you make your hop over the brook. It’s a little bit wobbly this morning. You

There’s too much structure in the world: too much insurance, litigation, unfulfilling work, fighting; too many credit cards, receipts, forms, taxes, mortgages, traffic jams, obligations—and always enormous pressure and fear as a result. The

I feel slow. I think slowly, I talk slowly, I react slowly. In the blur and rush of everything around me, I am more mindful. The mindfulness has grown quietly and surely, perhaps more a result of my slow, sparse environment in Kanglung than my own efforts. I can see how it would evaporate here without a consistent daily practice. I

As you rusticate, you'll encounter beauty and ugliness, peace and danger. But it will be real and of the earth. I'm an optimistic person, but deep inside all optimists, there's a bound-and-gagged pessimist sitting in the basement, struggling to get out. I believe if we don't deconstruct our lives and learn to be more earthbound and earth-friendly and sustainable, and try to live with all God's creatures, even if they're not big-eyed and behind bars in a zoo, or on our screen savers, then sooner than expected we'll be forced to, through political mandate or economics or from overuse of our resources.

1. Dari balik tingkap ini aku sengaja mengintaimu, memasang kamera pada jalusi untuk melihatmu mencumbui malam. Seperti gerimis yang baru saja turun, menggiringmu melewati teras rumah tetangga lalu sengaja menggeletakkan tubuhnya di atas sofa abu abu yang dulu engkau beli dari pesta Sri Ratu. Tangan tangan hujan tidak meronai pipimu dengan warna merah jambu melainkan coklat tua agar senada dengan jaket yang dikenakannya. Walau, ia hanya seorang penjaga yang membawa suar kemana mana. Namun ia juga adalah samudra tak bernama yang tak urung menelikung tubuhmu dengan kata luas tak terperi. Sebagaimana kata kata rayuan yang diucapkannya bergema bersama lantunan tembang tembang lawas yang ia rekam sepekan sebelumnya dari sebuah aplikasi di internet. Ia tak menyembunyikan tangannya yang sibuk menggali harta karun jauh ke dalam lubukmu. Membiarkan pikiranmu terbang melayang ke pelataran Sukuh, ke atas puncak arca garuda di Cetha dan lalu melayap jauh hingga ke Khajuraho. Menangkap semburat lidah api yang asyik menyigi setiap detail relief candi yang akan membuat nafas kalian tersengal sengal. Memanggil awan dan memetakan semua rencana perjalanan wisata mimpi kalian ke Thailand, Bhutan, Nepal, Burma, India, Sri Lanka, Maladewa hingga ke China. Pada lukisan Lee Man Fong engkau menjelmakan dirimu menjadi seorang gadis Bali yang bertelanjang dada. Bersimpuh di bawah pohon sambil memantrakan puja. Sementara aku terjatuh dan terjerembab berungkali dari loteng ini dengan kaki yang goyah dan juga patah. Tak sekali kali berani beranjak hanya untuk sejenak menghela nafas. Karena lelaki pembawa suar itu telah menaikkan tubuhmu ke atas kereta berkuda dan menjelmakan dirimu menjadi seorang permaisuri. Seperti paduka Sri Ranggah Rajasa yang menyunting Ken Dedes di balik kejayaan Singosari. Ia sungguh lelaki pemberani yang tak gentar mengajakmu menari. Menjelajahi gunung, lembah, kebun dan persawahan di bawah naungan pohon pohon banyan di pinggiran jalan. Melewati sekumpulan bocah yang tengah bermain gundu, gobak sodor dan sunda manda. Engkau tak menghiraukan mereka dengan bising lagu dangdut di balik suara desahanmu. Menancapkan lembing pada setiap cubitan bibir yang bernafsu menyadap getah dari busung dadamu. Tajam gigi taring dan juga geraham yang menerakan sebuah marka rahasia di atas jenjang lehermu. Sedang mataku terantuk gelap yang berjatuhan di bawah pintu palka yang merapuh ini, saat layar mulai terkembang dan lelaki keturunan nelayan itu menggeser lunas perahumu di atas lidah ombaknya.

It was the ruling King of Bhutan himself who, in the 1980s, set up a system that measured national advancement according to Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product.

What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father’s brother’s sons, mother’s sister’s daughters. And there are 2 sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals.

(4151)GNP(4151) Technical Assistance to Enhance the Anticorruption Capacity of Developing Countries As the ACRC’s technical assistance, which started in 2007 with Indonesia and Bhutan, have successfully been pushed forward

Happiness, he said, warming his hands around a fresh cup of coffee, is a choice. “You have to brew it in yourself. Even from a lump of food, we choose each grain to suit our need. Likewise, in the philosophical manner, we choose to be who we are.

use plants indigenous to Tibet, Tibet, and Bhutan.  A few of them are very rare, and frankly, I’m not even sure if they can be found in the wild any longer.  There is one particularly hard-to-find species that only reproduces every twelve years.  I have a large garden where I continually grow the plants needed.  They must be harvested, dried, and stored.”               “Would it be okay if I took a look at your page?  That way I’ll recognize the book  if I ever find it.”               “I memorized the formula and no longer need to refer to the page, though I do look at it from time to time to admire its beauty. 

In Bhutan, if I have three things to do in a week, it’s considered busy. In the U.S., I have at least three things to do between breakfast and lunch.

I have never been someone who likes rules or structure. I don't even like ruled notebook paper. There's too much structure in the world: too much insurance, litigation, unfulfilling work, fighting; too many credit cards, receipts, forms, taxes, mortgages, traffic jams, obligations and always enormous pressure and fear as a result.

Bhutan was the first nation to establish a permanent fund to finance the long-term protection of its native and rare flora and fauna.

Acquisition of immovable property by entities incorporated in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, China, Iran, Nepal and Bhutan would require prior approval of RBI. However,

Afghanistan Kabul Argentina Buenos Aires Australia Canberra Austria Vienna Bangladesh Dhaka Belgium Brussels Bhutan Thimphu Brazil Brasilia Bulgaria Sofia Canada Ottawa Chile Santiago

The greatest religion gives suffering to nobody,” reads a weather-beaten sign, quoting the Buddha, at Chele La pass, the highest motorable point in the country, near Paro. This maxim is everywhere evident. As a Bhutanese friend and I walked in the mountains one afternoon, he reflexively removed insects from the path and gently placed them in the verge, out of harm’s way. Early one morning in Thimphu, I saw a group of young schoolboys, in their spotless white-sleeved ghos, crouching over a mouse on the street, gently offering it food. In Bhutan, the horses that trudge up the steep trail to the Tiger’s Nest monastery are reserved for out-of-shape tourists; Bhutanese don’t consider horses beasts of burden and prefer not to make them suffer under heavy loads. Even harvesting honey is considered a sign of disrespect for the industrious bees; my young guide, Kezang, admonished me for buying a bottle of Bhutanese honey to take home. (Chastened, I left it there.) In

Dari semua tempat yang saya kunjungi dan orang-orang yang saya jumpai, ada satu yang selalu terngiang-ngiang: Karma Ura, cendekiawan Bhutan dan juga orang yang selamat dari kanker. "Tidak ada yang namanya kebahagiaan pribadi," katanya kepada saya. "Kebahagiaan seratus persen bersifat relasional." Saat itu saya tidak memaknainya secara harfiah. Saya kira dia melebih-lebihkan untuk memberi penekanan pada penjelasannya: bahwa hubungan kita dengan orang lain lebih penting dari yang kita kira. Namun sekarang, saya menyadari bahwa yang dimaksud Karma itu sama persis dengan yang dia katakan. Kebahagiaan kita sepenuhnya dan benar-benar saling terkait dengan orang lain: keluarga dan teman serta tetangga dan wanita yang nyaris tidak Anda perhatikan yang membersihkan kantor Anda. Kebahagiaan bukanlah kata benda atau kata kerja. Dia adalah kata sambung. Jaringan penghubung.

The well-being of people was to be considered before the sheer generations of goods and cash, before rampant growth just for the sake of an upward slope on a graph. Quality of life was to take precedence over financial and material success. Compassion toward and cooperation with your fellow citizens was fundamental, essential, rather than mowing down the other guy with abandon so you could succeed.

Being, not having. Happiness above wealth. It sounded great to me; Bhutan certainly appeared to have its priorities straight. At least, it seemed to have the same priorities I was craving more of in my world.

When he was a kid he had read the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, which hinged on the premise that the people of Athens had somehow been persuaded to select seven maidens and seven boys by lot, every few years, and send them to Crete to serve as monster chow. This had always struck him as the weakest point of what was otherwise a great yarn. Who would do that? Who would choose their kids by lot and send them to such a fate? The people of Bhutan, that was who. And the people of Seattle and of the Canelones district of southern Uruguay and of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the South Island of New Zealand, all of which Doob was scheduled to visit in the next two weeks to collect the maidens and the boys they had chosen by lot. They would do it if they could be made to believe it would protect them.

Molvi Baba in Bhutan for vashikaran and love solution +91-9660015498

The country's various habitats are believed to contain close to 200 species of mammals and over 600 species of birds.

Thimphu not only has the best handicraft shops in the country (it does), it's also the best place to actually see the products being made, from

If you only visit two towns in Bhutan, make them Paro and Punakha. The west is blessed with the country's loveliest dzong (Punakha), one of its oldest lhakhangs (Kyichu Lhakhang) and its most dramatic monastery (Taktshang Goemba). These are the big sights that you simply have to see.

The two- or three-story houses have ground-floor walls made out of whitewashed stone or mud, and upper levels of mud and wood. The narrow windows with their scalloped tops have sliding wooden slats to let in light and shut out the rain or the cold. The exterior walls are decorated with elaborate paintings, in faded blues and reds, of lotus flowers, deer, birds, and giant stylized phalluses (“to ward off evil spirits,” Rita says). Ladder steps lead to heavy wooden doors with irregular latches and locks. The roofs are covered with stone slates, or wooden shingles held down by large stones.

We stop when we reach the top, climb out, shivering in the cold and ghostly mist under wind-blasted trees, to read the sign erected by the Public Works Department: “You have reached Trumseng La, Bhutan’s highest road pass. Check Your Brakes. Bash On Regardless. Thank you.”

This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morning, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh.

I’ve just been transferred to Kanglung,” I say. They look at me to see if I am joking, and then they look at each other. There is a long, terrible silence and we all look at the floor. Karma Dorji wipes his runny nose on his sleeve and looks up. “Oh, miss,” he says sadly. “Please don’t go.” “Just a minute,” I say, and go into the bathroom. I latch the door and turn on the tap full force. When the water is running noisily, I lean my hot forehead against the damp, flaking concrete, and cry.

I need to be alone. After a full day of talking, smiling, listening, showing, nodding, translating, I want to be alone. I want simply to come home, close the door, and sit in silence, gathering up the bits of myself that have come loose. I want to think, or not think. I want to rest.

Before either men could commence a deliberation over who knew more of the hotel’s history, Coraline injected, “India was writing the last chapters of its saga of independence when The Imperial opened its doors in the 1930s.” She paused before proceeding, “Pandit Nehru, Mahatama Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten met under congenial conditions to discuss the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan on the very ground we stand on. Adding to that, the Nehru family also had a permanent suite within the walls of this ‘Maiden of the East.’” She let out a discreet chuckle that I think only I caught. Both men stared at the female, not knowing how to respond. Before either one of them could opine, she continued, “If only walls could speak. Here indeed is a repository of fascinating anecdotal material for authors of romantic and detective fiction. It was here, at this very site, that one could clink glasses for the Royals to their war efforts, urge Gandhi to quit the India movement, or dance to the strains of Blue Danube, belly dance like a belle from Beirut or be serenaded by an orchestra from London.” The group of us stared at the big sister, wondering how in the world she knew so much about The Imperial. My teacher and Jabril pressed for affirmation. Instead, she vociferated, “Notably, The Imperial has the largest collection on display of land war gallantry awards in India and among its neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Bhutan and China. It also holds a sizeable record of orders and decorations bestowed by the British Royalties to the Emperor of India as an honour to the local Maharajas, Sultans and ruling Princes from the various Indian states.” While Narnia’s chaperone continued her historical spiel, the recruit pulled me aside and whispered amusingly, “Although everything my big sister said is true, she’s having fun with you guys. Her information is from the hotel’s brochure in the guest rooms.” I quipped. “Why didn’t you tell the rest of our group? I thought she was an expert in India’s history!” She gave me a wet kiss and said saucily, “I’m telling you because I like you.” Stunned by her raciness, I was speechless. I couldn’t decide whether to tell her there and then that I was gay – but at that very moment, Andy appeared from around the corner. “Where did you two disappear to?” he inquired. When Narnia was out of earshot, I muttered knowingly to my BB, “I’ll tell you later.”, as we continued the art tour browsing portraitures of India’s Princely Rulers of yore.

the mental energy here, the level of awareness that comes from paying attention, from having less stuff around and having less on our calendars, is formidable. In

When you’re occupied every minute of the day, there’s simply no time for this kind of awareness.

In the U.S., we were both surprised by the excessive array of things in the stores, and by the large number of stores. Face it: we are over the top with stuff in America.

As magical and strangely wonderful as I found Bhutan, so Namgay found the U.S. equally strange and wonderful.

Before we took the trip, he had never been on an elevator, eaten a hamburger, or enjoyed a chocolate milkshake. He’d never seen a vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, trash compactor, ATM, vending machine, car with automatic locks, or Western-style movie theater. He had never been to a shopping mall, ridden in a car on the Interstate, or traveled at over 40 miles an hour. He’d never seen a rodeo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Rubin Museum of Art in New York filled with Himalayan art, or drunk a single-malt scotch. Now he counts all of these marvels of Western culture as some of his favorite things.

The notion of choice also intrigued Namgay, since the limited number of items in any given shop in Thimphu precludes it. In a small shop in Thimphu you might find one tablecloth, one pair of underwear, and one pair of shoes that will fit you. Never mind that the shoes are a hideous green metallic: if the shoe fits, you must buy it— and wear it—even if it makes you look like a leprechaun.

Namgay, who grew up in the mountains of the Himalayas herding cows and sheep and being instructed by his Uncle Lama in religious rituals, was a devout Buddhist and an artist of some renown. But in the U.S., he became a devotee of appliances and worshipped on the altar of mass consumption. He

He was stunned that almost every room in the house had a basket for trash tucked discreetly somewhere, lined with a white plastic bag, which was changed at intervals. In Bhutan, the few plastic bags we have are washed and hung out to dry and reused. Some of them have been around for years. He’d take the trash out to the big bins in my parents’ garage every day. But then reality hit and his face went dark. “Where does all this trash go?” he asked me. “To the dump,” I said. I could see he was doing the math: “Half the country must be the dump.” In Bhutan, we compost our vegetable waste and put plastic and paper waste into an ordinary-sized plastic garbage bin in our storeroom. Once every two or three months, when the bin is full, we drive it up to the dump about 20 minutes from our house. In the winter we use it to start fires in our woodstove. That is not to say that more waste isn’t coming to Bhutan. But Bhutan, and the rest of the world for that matter, has a long way to go to catch up with the United States. While

We didn’t have a vacuum or dishwasher. When I told my mother we didn’t have a washing machine, it made her cry. What I didn’t tell her was that we didn’t have a washing machine because half the time we didn’t have running water, and we had to haul our water from outside in buckets. Bhutan,

But for this, we need a new development model. We have designed an economic system that sees no value in any human or natural resource unless it is exploited. A river is unproductive until its catchment is appropriated by some industry or its waters are captured by a dam. An open field and its natural bounty are useless until they are fenced. A community of people have no value unless their life is commercialised, their needs are turned into consumer goods, and their aspirations are driven by competition. In this approach, development equals manipulation. By contrast, we need to understand development as something totally different: development is care. It is through a caring relationship with our natural wealth that we can create value, not through its destruction. It is thanks to a cooperative human-to-human interaction that we can achieve the ultimate objective of development, that is, wellbeing. In this new economy, people will be productive by performing activities that enhance the quality of life of their peers and the natural ecosystems in which they live. If not for moral reasons, they should do so for genuine self-interest: there is nothing more rewarding than creating wellbeing for oneself and society. This is the real utility, the real consumer surplus, not the shortsighted and self-defeating behaviour promoted by the growth ideology. The wellbeing economy is a vision for all countries. There are cultural traces of such a vision in the southern African notion of ‘ubuntu’, which literally means ‘I am because you are’, reminding us that there is no prosperity in isolation and that everything is connected. In Indonesia we find the notion of ‘gotong royong’, a conception of development founded on collaboration and consensus, or the vision of ‘sufficiency economy’ in Thailand, Bhutan and most of Buddhist Asia, which indicates the need for balance, like the Swedish term ‘lagom’, which means ‘just the right amount’. Native Alaskans refer to ‘Nuka’ as the interconnectedness of humans to their ecosystems, while in South America, there has been much debate about the concept of ‘buen vivir’, that is, living well in harmony with others and with nature.

continue polluting while trying to offset the damage through some face-saving corporate philanthropy exercises. We would be fools to assume that we can simply pay our way out of this mess. Nature cannot be bailed out, as if it were a financial market. We need to stop breaking things in the first place. But for this, we need a new development model. We have designed an economic system that sees no value in any human or natural resource unless it is exploited. A river is unproductive until its catchment is appropriated by some industry or its waters are captured by a dam. An open field and its natural bounty are useless until they are fenced. A community of people have no value unless their life is commercialised, their needs are turned into consumer goods, and their aspirations are driven by competition. In this approach, development equals manipulation. By contrast, we need to understand development as something totally different: development is care. It is through a caring relationship with our natural wealth that we can create value, not through its destruction. It is thanks to a cooperative human-to-human interaction that we can achieve the ultimate objective of development, that is, wellbeing. In this new economy, people will be productive by performing activities that enhance the quality of life of their peers and the natural ecosystems in which they live. If not for moral reasons, they should do so for genuine self-interest: there is nothing more rewarding than creating wellbeing for oneself and society. This is the real utility, the real consumer surplus, not the shortsighted and self-defeating behaviour promoted by the growth ideology. The wellbeing economy is a vision for all countries. There are cultural traces of such a vision in the southern African notion of ‘ubuntu’, which literally means ‘I am because you are’, reminding us that there is no prosperity in isolation and that everything is connected. In Indonesia we find the notion of ‘gotong royong’, a conception of development founded on collaboration and consensus, or the vision of ‘sufficiency economy’ in Thailand, Bhutan and most of Buddhist Asia, which indicates the need for balance, like the Swedish term ‘lagom’, which means ‘just the right amount’. Native Alaskans refer to ‘Nuka’ as the interconnectedness of humans to their ecosystems, while in South America, there has been much debate about the concept of ‘buen vivir’, that is, living well in harmony with others and with nature. The most industrialised nations, which we often describe in dubious terms like ‘wealthy’ or ‘developed’, are at a crossroads. The mess they have created is fast outpacing any other gain, even in terms of education and life expectancy. Their economic growth has come at a huge cost for the rest of the world and the planet as a whole. Not only should they commit to realising a wellbeing economy out of self-interest, but also as a moral obligation to the billions of people who had to suffer wars, environmental destruction and other calamities so that a few, mostly white human beings could go on

Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort?

Maybe I was just too young to know how to hold all these balls in the air at once without wanting to cry.

Index: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index9 Monitors: Civil liberties, pluralism, political culture and participation, electoral process Method: Global ranking India 2014 ranking: 27 India 2020 ranking: 53 Result: India fell 26 places. Reasons cited: Classifying India as a ‘flawed democracy’, the report says ‘democratic norms have been under pressure since 2015. India’s score fell from a peak of 7.92 in 2014 to 6.61 in 2020’. This was the ‘result of democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra Modi’ and the ‘increasing influence of religion under Modi, whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife, has damaged the political fabric of the country’. Modi had ‘introduced a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian citizenship, a step that many critics see as undermining the secular basis of the Indian state’. In 2019, India was ranked 51st in the Democracy Index, when the report said, ‘The primary cause of the democratic regression was an erosion of civil liberties in the country.’ It fell two places again in 2020. ‘By contrast,’ The Economist Intelligence Unit noted, ‘the scores for some of India’s regional neighbours, such as Bangladesh, Bhutan and Pakistan, improved marginally.

I wonder where in the world it would be possible to have the ideal, a middle way, a balance between individuality and responsibility to the larger community. Easily named, of course, but I cannot begin to imagine where to achieve it.

body-print at southern Monkha Rock: Mon is an area in southern Tibet and Bhutan. The body-print is an impression of Padmasambhava’s body in the rock.

In October 1947, the Nationalist government in Nanking informed the Indian Embassy of its wish to modify such agreements as were entered into between Great Britain and Tibet, including the Simla Agreement, 1914, that defined India’s frontier with Tibet. In the same month, the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had also addressed a letter to India’s Prime Minister seeking the return of ‘all our indisputable Tibetan territories gradually included into India’, which included parts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan.

A person can be completely right about something but still not have the right to say it.

Respect for the natural world is fundamental to Bhutan’s spiritual identity. More than half the country is off-limits to development or timbering. A whopping 50 percent of Bhutan’s GDP comes from hydropower.

Try this on. What if I didn’t want to have babies because I loved my job too much to compromise it, or because serious travel makes me feel in relation to the world in an utterly essential way? What if I’ve always liked the looks of my own life much better than those of the ones I saw around me? What if, given the option, I would prefer to accept an assignment to go trekking for a month in the kingdom of Bhutan than spend that same month folding onesies? What if I simply like dogs a whole lot better than babies? What if I have become sure that personal freedom is the thing I hold most dear? Some of my closest friends love being mothers, live, to a certain extent, to be mothers. It has been the single most challenging and rewarding endeavor of their lives. Others of my friends don’t like it that much, thought they would like it better than they do, are counting the days till the last kid goes off to college so they can turn their attention to their own dreams. A few friends pretend to love it, but everyone within twelve square miles can hear them grinding their teeth. Still others pretend motherhood is the world’s biggest hassle and yet you can tell they love it deep down. And

Paradise. A paradise it was in its majestic silence of cold wintry conditions. The world is a collection of paradises and my home is a sparkling paradise.

India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will, too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan … and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments, but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal—businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite. We can get our kicks by threatening each other. It’ll be like bungee jumping when you can’t rely on the bungee cord, or playing Russian roulette all day long. An additional perk will be the thrill of Not Knowing What to Believe. We can be victims of the predatory imagination of every green card–seeking charlatan who surfaces in the West with concocted stories of imminent missile attacks. We can delight at the prospect of being held to ransom by every petty troublemaker and rumormonger, the more the merrier if truth be told, anything for an excuse to make more bombs. So you see, even without a war, we have a lot to look forward to.

But it wasn’t our differences that I wanted to focus on. So I parked in one of the visitors’ spots and pulled out the GPS I had taken to carrying in my backpack when I went running. I switched it on so I could pinpoint my coordinates, the longitude and latitude that placed me here and nowhere else in the world. The problem was, inside the car, the device couldn’t locate the satellites, so I unrolled the window, stuck my hand out and held the device to the sun. As soon as it calibrated, I grabbed my notebook from my backpack, ripped out a random page, and wrote my position on the paper. As I folded the sheet in half, I caught sight of my meager notes from the lecture about Fate Maps all those months ago. Genetics might be our first map, imprinted within us from the moment the right sperm meets the right egg. But who knew that all those DNA particles are merely reference points in our own adventures, not dictating our fate but guiding our future? Take Jacob’s cleft lip. If his upper lip had been fused together the way it was supposed to be inside his mother’s belly, he’d probably be living in a village in China right now. Then there was me with my port-wine stain. I lifted my eyes to the rearview mirror, wondering what I would have been like had I never been born with it. My fingers traced the birthmark landlocked on my face, its boundary lines sharing the same shape as Bhutan, the country neighboring Tibetans call the Land of the Dragon. I liked that; the dragons Dad had always cautioned me about had lived on my face all this time. Here be dragons, indeed. I leaned back in my seat now, closing my eyes, relishing the feel of the sun warming my face. No, I wouldn’t trade a single experience — not my dad or my birthmark — to be anyone but me, right here, right now. At last, at 3:10, I open my door. I don’t know how I’ll find Jacob, only that I will. A familiar loping stride ambles out of the library. Not a Goth guy, not a prepster, just Jacob decked in a shirt as unabashedly orange as anything in Elisa’s Beijing boutique. This he wore buttoned to the neck and untucked over jeans, sleeves rolled up to reveal tanned arms. For the first time, I see his aggressively modern glasses, deathly black and rectangular. His hair is the one constant: it’s spiked as usual. What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I’ve ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.

In this collection of essays, you will meet more people like Zakia - golden-hearted souls who come from places like Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Canada, Cuba, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, and Tanzania. People who become the heroes of our stories because they show the way or deliver joy, care for us when we're vulnerable, help us navigate meaning, or propel us when we're stuck. They are custodians of travel; they keep us believing in its magic.

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

Death cannot just be a matter of hospitals and funeral homes and insurance and money transactions,” he said. “You need some sort of pedagogy. In Bhutan we learn that to see yourself as not always a living person, but also a dying person, is a very important pedagogy of life. Death here is part of the culture and communication.

Article 9 of Bhutan’s constitution says: “The State shall strive to promote those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.

Though India has progressed further on per capita income than countries such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan, so far as social indicators are concerned, it is found deficient. This sordid situation has come about primarily due to erroneous prioritization of economic policy. Admittedly,

In America, few people are happy, but everyone talks about happiness constantly. In Bhutan, most people are happy, but no one talks about it. This is a land devoid of introspection, bereft of self-help books, and woefully lacking in existential angst. There is no Bhutanese Dr. Phil. There is, in fact, only one psychiatrist in the entire country. He is not named Phil and, I am sad to report, does not even have his own television show.

But I want to share with you my experiences in six different countries. It was these countries that opened my eyes to the positive humanity and morality of our world. These are the same countries that are degraded the most in American and Western media; they’re the ones that governments have made us fear for decades. The truth is that these countries are actually brimming with natural beauty, humanity, culture, kindness, and allure. North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Colombia, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. These countries are all regarded as among the most dangerous in the world. How about Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Djibouti, Bhutan, Andorra, Brunei, Dominica, and Liechtenstein. Ever heard of those? I hadn’t either.

Bhutan's per capita income is less than a thousand dollars per year and most of its people are Buddhists with no belief in Yahweh, Jesus, or Allah. Nonetheless, the people of this small Himalayan nation rank in the top ten of the world when it comes to happiness.