A DeLorean and Bhutan

Today I went with a couple of friends to see a documentary film on Bhutan , “the dragon house” (check: http://www.baff-bcn.org/film.php?id_pelicula=92&lang=eng). It wasn’t a typical documentary and there was many more people there than we expected. And the movie was greater than I expected.

The documentary basically depicted life there and the way people felt about the changes taking place in the country. And there was the voice of some scholar, giving a different point of view. I guess the idea people normally have of Bhutan is related to distance, mysticism, mystery and other adjectives of this kind. In fact there’s something true in all those ideas, especially in a traditionally isolated country as Bhutan.

The idea of the Gross National Happiness instead of GNP was something I liked. It makes us wonder, as the westerner in the documentary said, how good the ideas of those westerners trying to export western models are, which aim to make poor countries richer. Some countries are already rich, in many cases richer than wealthy countries. People looked happy out there, happier than most people we meet everyday in most places in the west...and nobody has any right to break their peace, and set conflicts which lead to unhappiness. Why should things that work be changed?. The king wisely tried to preserve Bhutanese culture, with all its traditions, by isolating the land in a very characteristic way, carrying out some isolation from negative influences coming from the west. But in the late 90es internet and TV reached Bhutan. Who can fight against Tv and internet? One of the guys who starred the documentary was a DJ, the first DJ of Bhutan. He wanted to make some revolution in the country, by introducing different music styles, other than commercial pop. He tried to introduce house, techno and trance...aimlessly because at first people didn’t really like such music and preferred dancing to the music they heard on MTV and so on. Is it possible to carry on some selective “modernisation” (I know modernisation is not the word)? It’s like the most commercial side of it found its way easy toward the conquer of Bhutan....but when somebody like that guy tried to introduce something “modern”, “in” in the west, he failed to succeed. His idea seemed to be as strange as a DeLorean nowadays. DeLoreans taking you to the future, like the ideas of that guy, for whom we felt rather sorry. But nowadays DeLoreans also mean something from the past. Bhutan is somehow a bit like a DeLorean: the past and the future meeting. Those three discos in Thimphu: the HQ, the Dragon Club and the Xplode. Men and women dressed in a traditional way and young people wearing jeans. and dancing in the above mentioned discos. Japanese cars, Japanese TVs, blue jeans and soda drinks. I know it’s pretty odd to compare a mythical car (it’s so for me and so it is for many other people) and a beautiful and amazingly interesting country...but I’m prone to do this kind of comparisons. As with Bhutan, not so many people know about DeLoreans. Both have some different beauty and interest and both imply thinking both about past and future, what remains and what will fade away.