Pico makes an ass of himself
In a reversal of roles, Pico Iyer goes from hero travel writer to zero commentator
KUNAL LAMA

Nepali Times
From Issue #288 (03 March 06 - 09 March 06)

“…one of the most revered travel writers… Born in England, raised in California, educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, his essays and other writings have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, the New Yorker… His books include Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map…”

Google Pico Iyer and this is what comes up: an immediate applause for his worldliness, erudition and accomplishments. So it was no surprise that when I saw his article Tale of Two Kingdoms in Time I thought, at last, someone who can put an intelligent handle on this silly Bhutan vs Nepal thing into proper perspective. I should have paid more attention to the sub-title. Reading it, I got into one of those situations where one feels so insulted, invectives and murderous thoughts flow senselessly.

Iyer has obviously cobbled together one of his periodic essays for Time, his former employer of four years, with little respect for history or reality. His puerile attempt at comparing Nepal and Bhutan was irritating; the destruction of his usual clever language bemusing, his commentary clichéd and the conclusions specious.

Let’s get one thing straight: Himalayan Kingdoms both might be but that is where the similarity ends. He regurgitated the oft-quoted litany of quirks that is supposed to confirm Bhutan as the new Shangri-La. All sentient souls this corner of the Indian sub-continent know that Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness sags with sadness when 100,000 of its ethnically-cleansed population languishing in the eastern plains of Nepal for the last 15 years are taken into account.

A few boutique hotels and a promise to relinquish the throne in 2008 make not a magic kingdom or a noble king. The Bhutani subjects’ attachment to their medieval costumes rapidly wears off in the shopping malls of Delhi, go-go bars of Bangkok and, one might add, Casino Tara of Boudha. And, pray, why drag in religion? The practice of Christianity is now constitutionally allowed in Nepal, but it is a recent import largely spread by unspiritual promises of economic advancement.

Nepal is slowly coming to terms with the implications of democracy, instituted as recently as 1990. The going has not been comfortable or even certain, compounded by the 10-year-long Maoist insurgency. However, Nepal continues to remain a vibrant country full of appealing anomalies. Nepal may have welcomed tourists in the 70s with the easy promise of hashish and hedonism but the natural beauty and the curious charm of its pluralistic peoples have always been the real attractions. Even Bhutani citizens are welcome here but it has always puzzled
me why we are not allowed to enter Bhutan freely.

We have never closed our doors on visitors: western governments have with their alarmist travel advisories. Its foreign, defence and economic policies all but governed by India, Bhutan can ill-afford to sneer at Nepal’s present misfortunes with righteous sniggering. My suspicion is that Bhutan’s widely-advertised disdain for Nepal is actually a perfectly-pitched but delusional ploy to mask fear and envy. Nepal represents all that Bhutan can’t be due to its geographical and international insignificance, its myopic vision that confuses self-preservation with seclusion and the ruling clutch’s realisation that its hold on powe (royal and political chicanery notwithstanding) is finite.

To quote Iyer ‘…the first law of modern life is that everything is as impermanent as an image on a screen; the only form of continuity is change’. Deep within, Bhutan knows that it can’t stop the clock from ticking and controlling the time it will inevitably tell.

Finally, by coining linguistically-challenged words such as ‘Nepalmed’ with its non-Nepal connotations, clumsy stabs at promiscuous semantics and scurrilous second-hand comments about Nepal and, especially, Nepali women, Iyer has made an utter ass of himself. By criticising Nepal while romanticising Bhutan, he has merely followed trend, missing a chance to correct it. He once said that the most important challenge in the writing process for him was clarity. Since clarity was clearly lacking in his article, perhaps it is he who should be listening to the King of Bhutan, deposing himself of all literary and analytical responsibilities in 2008. Or, better, sooner.

Original

A Tale of Two Kingdoms
In a reversal of roles, Bhutan welcomes the world as Nepal closes up
BY PICO IYER

Monday, Feb. 13, 2006
When I first set foot in Bhutan 16 years ago, the "Land of Hidden Treasures" defined its relation to development very simply: it was not, and would never become, Nepal. "Women who will have sex with anyone. Pot, marijuana. People sleeping in the street"—I can still remember a Bhutanese official's voice shaking as he described the "low-class" foreigners his nation had watched streaming into its Himalayan neighbor. Nepalmed by what had come in through its open doors, a Kathmandu that had, up till 1955, barely seen a road was cluttered with Nirvana Tours agencies, 50-cents-a-night flophouses and restaurants promiscuously serving "lasagna, tacos, chow mein, borscht and mousaka a La Greece."

Bhutan, by contrast, had no television then, no daily newspapers, only medieval buildings. Its capital, Thimphu, basked in a stainless quiet in which everyone wore traditional, medieval clothing (as they still do), and fewer tourists arrived in a year than pile into Disneyland in an hour. The young King Jigme Singye Wangchuk was pursuing a policy of "Gross National Happiness" which said that peace was as important as plenty, and immaterial needs were at least as important as material. There is a point of diminishing returns in development, he was suggesting (in terms that more and more people now heed), and he would gladly give up hard currency if he could thus preserve cultural integrity and continuity. The absence of television meant that there were more video-rental shops along Thimphu's single main street than I see in my hometown in California. And yet there was a sense of stillness, even unfallenness in the country that made me believe the teenagers who offered, unsolicited, "Why need discos? We have monk dances here."

But the first law of modern life is that everything is as impermanent as an image on a screen; the only form of continuity (the Buddhist monks in Thimphu or Kathmandu might have told us) is change. Suddenly, Nepal, haunted by violent Maoist insurgents on the one hand and an autocratic King on the other, is the country that is difficult for tourists to enjoy, its streets silent after dark, its character less free and easy than stuck and stricken. As for Bhutan, its citizens can now take in Sex and the City on TV, watch foreigners check into Aman luxury hotels for $700 a night, and hear about the local incarnate lama who is fêted in Hollywood for his movie The Cup. Thimphu is the place on which foreign sights are set (even though fewer than 10,000 official tourists still visit every year), not Kathmandu. "You know anything about motorbiking across Bhutan?" a snaggle-toothed hippie asked me as he let me into a Californian hot-springs compound at 1 a.m. on a recent night.

Yet neither Bhutan nor Nepal were ever quite so transparent as outsiders liked to suppose. Kathmandu might have boasted an Old Etonian King, the finest apple pies this side of Iowa and all the mongrel props of what could be called Peace Corps imperialism, but it is still technically illegal to proselytize in Nepal, and as recently as 1990, up to 175 people were languishing in prison for spreading their Christianity. Freedom was always more in the eye of the foreign beholder than in the heart of the beheld. As for Bhutan's purity, it was to some extent imposed from above. No citizen was allowed to hold foreign currency, no school trips could be taken out of the country, and Bhutanese women who married foreigners lost rights. Behind the sound of clashing cultures on Freak Street in Kathmandu, beyond the carless emptiness of Bhutan's Paro Valley, both countries have long been dealing with the same problems of severe illiteracy, deep poverty and centuries-old regional divisions.

It is almost as if the two remote and transporting Himalayan kingdoms have been playing out a fairy tale in which one woman opens her doors to everyone and the other lives like a nun inside a convent. King Gyanendra of Nepal and his Maoist enemies now seem to believe that what Nepalis most need is an infusion of discipline and authority. The people of Bhutan, meanwhile, peer shyly out at a world that fascinates them, in part, through its very chaos. And even as the people of Nepal loudly protest their King's taking of all power into his own hands, the citizens of Bhutan are mourning their own monarch's announcement two months ago that he plans to depose himself in 2008. Thus the final irony is that Nepalis are clamoring for the very political freedom that many Bhutanese don't want. Perhaps the King in Nepal should listen to his counterpart in Bhutan and acknowledge that real power should lie with the people.

—Pico Iyer is the author of many travel books on Asia, including Video Night in Kathmandu and, most recently, Sun After Dark


From the Feb. 20, 2006 issue of TIME Asia Magazine


http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501060220-1159010,00.html