The Happy Prince (Reproduction)

K.P. Nayar
 
Americans constantly chasing happiness will come face to face with that elusive, but desirable state of mind in the very heart of their national capital from today. And they will find, to their surprise, that happiness has come to them from south Asia. In recent years, south Asia has been associated, in superficial American minds, with the success stories from Incredible India, with terrorism in Pakistan and Musharraf Shining or with Sri Lanka’s fratricidal conflict. Earlier, the whole region had been a mystery to many Americans who were exposed for decades to images of poverty from the subcontinent.

Bhutan will step into this arena of the American mind for the first time today. One of the world’s most sheltered and remote nations that had no roads leading outside its borders until the Sixties, it will do so with great fanfare when Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wangchuck, heir to the throne of Bhutan, initiates the largest and most comprehensive exposition of the Bhutanese way of life ever organized outside the kingdom on Washington’s National Mall. Bhutan’s national goal of pursuing ‘Gross National Happiness’ has been the talk of Washington for days when Americans appear unable not to complain all the time about unaffordable petrol prices, the fall of the Dow, the misery of flooding, rapidly crumbling infrastructure and much more.

The Smithsonian Institution has chosen “Bhutan: Land of the Thunder Dragon” as the theme this year for its highly acclaimed Folklife Festival, which coincides annually with the July 4 American independence day celebrations. The folk-life celebrations featured India during Rajiv Gandhi’s heyday of the Festivals of India, which were held around the world. In 2002, Smithsonian briefly resurrected, for Americans, the culture and traditions of the ancient Silk Road, to which India was integral.

With more than one million visitors expected on the National Mall during the 10-day event and millions more expected to be exposed to Bhutan through TV coverage of the exotic programme (many of them for the first time), there is intense speculation about what such intense international exposure can do to arguably the world’s last Shangri La. The cost of bringing Bhutan to Washington is nearly two million dollars. The Smithsonian and the government of Bhutan have together committed $ 1.2 million towards this cost. According to a latest Smithsonian document made available to this columnist this week, the festival’s kitty is still short of just under half a million dollars. It is tempting to think that if Bhutan had given up its version of Gross National Happiness and opened up the country to the forces of globalization, multinational corporations that want to exploit the kingdom’s resources and set up business would have been more than happy to cover the deficit and probably provide a surplus to the festival budget.

Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wangchuck, who is only 24, causes a sensation wherever he goes to in America. When he addressed the Asia Society in New York last week, it was “a very special event with very special people” for a cross section of intellectuals in the Big Apple, as Vishakha Desai, the president of the Asia Society, put it. The last time an organization like the Asia Society hosted an event on Bhutan was in 2003, as far as this columnist could find out from records of such events. But it is not the mystique of Bhutan or the youthful charisma of its heir to the throne that is making him special for audiences here. The prince’s public persona, of course, has impeccable credentials for an American audience, with his schooling at New England’s 118-year-old Choate Rosemary Hall, where John F. Kennedy, actor Michael Douglas and Chester Bowles, who was the American ambassador to India, are among the long list of famous alumni, and a degree from Oxford’s St Peter’s College last year.

Those Americans who know quite a bit about south Asia or have deep professional interest in the region recall that when the prince was only 19 years old, he abruptly left Oxford to aid the Royal Bhutan Army’s operations against insurgents from India’s North-east who had set up camps on Bhutan’s soil to plot attacks on India. Before joining Oxford, the prince, it later turned out, had secretly, without informing his parents, joined a militia soon after his return home from school in the United States of America and undergone training. For Americans, whose current president is widely believed to have been absent without leave from compulsory military duties at the height of the Vietnam war, a prince who leaves the pleasures and comforts of Oxford to fight terrorists in the Himalayan jungles could be someone to be respected and admired in their midst.

Add to this the unpleasant fact that Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney — whose role in sending young Americans to war is said to be greater than that of the incumbent American president — asked for and received five deferments from military service because he was a student and later a new father. And Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, has been criticized throughout his public life as a draft dodger during the Vietnam war.

By a strange coincidence, Bhutan has been paired along with “Texas: A Celebration of Music, Food and Wine” as the theme of this year’s folk festival. A third theme is “NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond” to honour the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958. The coincidence is strange, because Texas is one state where Bhutan is better known than anywhere else in the US. When the buildings of Texas Western College, now the University of Texas at El Paso, were burned down in 1916, the wife of its dean persuaded her husband to look at Bhutanese architecture as a model for the new campus to be built out of the ashes of the devastating fire.

Kathleen Worrell, the dean’s wife, had seen photographs of Bhutanese dzongs or fortresses in the April 1914 issue of National Geographic, and she convinced her husband that building dzongs in the new campus instead of conventional structures suited El Paso’s landscape around its Franklin Mountains. The main campus building of the university is said to have been inspired by a photograph taken by John Claude White, a British political officer stationed in Bhutan and published in the magazine of a dzong in Paro built in 1646 that now serves as Bhutan’s national museum.

For many years in the past, a major source of foreign exchange for Bhutan was its exotic stamps that were lapped up by philatelists in international markets. These stamps once featured not only popular icons like Elvis Presley and Donald Duck, but also commemorated the lives of leaders like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and John F. Kennedy. NASA, according to Smithsonian officials, is happy to be paired with Bhutan in this year’s folk festival because the kingdom was among the earliest foreign countries to commemorate the US space programme through its postage stamps.

For Bhutan, stepping out into the world has been at a gingerly, albeit steady, pace. A few years ago, it became the 176th member of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which promptly began helping the kingdom in niche areas like tourism and agricultural exports. But showcasing the country along a part of the National Mall that stretches from the Capitol’s steps to the Washington Monument is the boldest overseas adventure that Thimpu has undertaken. In terms of seeking goodwill, it could not have come at a better time for Bhutan, when it is being hailed as the world’s newest democracy.
(Source: Telegraph, Kolkata, June 25, 2008)