Thawing Out

That's happening to this tiny mountain-wrapped nation? A hermit kingdom frozen in time, which got telephones just nine years ago, is racing on the infobahn. In a historic seven days, Bhutan got television, logged on to the Internet, and phew, even got its first 100-page colour newspaper. Last year-end, the government pumped in $150 million for digital phone systems, using jelly-filled overhead copper wires. "The moment I speak about TV and the Net, everybody starts clapping," jested King Jigme to a 15,000-strong audience that thronged the Changlingmethang football ground to celebrate 25 years of his coronation last week.

In a kingdom where owning dish antennae was illegal till recently, the changes have been abrupt. Last June, the king indicated that telly was no longer taboo: colleges were allowed to install dishes for students to watch the soccer World Cup. People have been allowed to buy TVs and rent videos for a few years now. Underground cable operators also sprung up in the past year, hooking homes to the forbidden pleasures of mtv. "We're excited. I can't wait to watch TV," says 13-year-old schoolgirl Tashi Choden Thinley.

The excitement is palpable in the cramped Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) studio in a nook of Thimphu, where a gaggle of young radio professionals now pilot Bhutan's foray into the world of TV. The place is littered with computers, vcrs, cables and scripts. The walls are plastered with instructional posters. Tshewang Dendup, a sprightly 29-year-old, will be producing, reading, editing and reporting news. His only brush with TV: as a child growing up in south Bhutan, he saw black-and-white Bangladesh TV and even picked up a smattering of Bengali. "Television in Bhutan," says the pony-tailed Dendup, "will wake up radio and newspapers."

In a place where people have to turn out in traditional attire and buildings must conform to the classic style of wood facades, arched windows and sloping roofs, a mindstorm is gathering. Last Tuesday, the state-owned DrukNet opened another window to the world for $250,000, the Net. "The King says Bhutan should have the best communications networks," says Sangey Tenzing, director, telecom.

Opening up the world's last remaining Shangri-La is a part of a decentralisation exercise the basketball-loving king has been pushing for the past year. Last summer, after 25 years as ruler, the 43-year-old monarch relinquished some of his sovereign powers and decided that royal appointees to the cabinet had to face elections. "These are watershed years," says Kurma Ura, an Oxford philosophy/economics major who heads the Thimphu-based Centre for Bhutanese Studies. "The monarchy is getting detached from the day-to-day management of the country."

One example is the evolution of Kuensel (Clarity), a four-language, 32-year-old tabloid which began as a boring four-page government bulletin and is today a 20-page weekly compendium of local news, views, stocks and even a Beau Peep strip. Circulation, at 15,000 copies, has trebled since '86. Seven years ago, a royal edict delinked the newspaper and the state-run bbs from the government to make them more professional. Today, the 85-employee newspaper has been corporatised and has begun commercial printing of books to fund the flagship. Earlier this year, Kuensel eschewed government subsidy. Last week, the tabloid came out with its first colour edition which was also its thickest, 100 pages crammed with ads. "We are changing because Bhutanese society is changing," says editor Kinley Dorji, who has a masters in journalism from New York.

Even the hidebound aid-dependent economy-some 70 per cent of the capital expenditure is aid from India and some other countries-is changing. Two years ago, the powerful finance ministry devolved its powers to the Royal Monetary Authority, which now fixes interest rates and works with global financial institutions. Shares of half-a-dozen public sector undertakings were sold to the public two years ago to introduce a modicum of privatisation. The tightly-controlled tourism industry-the kingdom received just 6,207 tourists last year, earning $7.8 million-is also being liberalised. The government handed out 30 new operators' licenses this year, augmenting the 33 operators who'd controlled the business in the kingdom for seven years. Most importantly, income tax will be introduced for the first time later this year-tax rates range from 10 to 30 per cent. And in a primarily agrarian country of farmers and yak herders, 14 companies trade their scrips in a fledgling stockmarket in Thimphu. "You need a healthy gnp for Gross National Happiness," says Namgyal Lhendup, deputy director of the Planning Commission. He's alluding to the pet phrase the king coined in the '70s to give his kingdom its social raison d'etre.

Clearly, the hermit kingdom is no longer falling off the map. In an eatery in remote Chukha, Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet posters are plastered on the walls, and beer-drinkers discuss the latest Shah Rukh and Kajol hit from across the border. There is more neon at night and more crowds on the once deserted Thimphu streets, flanked by traditional homes with remarkable woodwork and paintings. Musty shops sell anything from Indian noodles and paint to Korean kerosene heaters, tacky Taiwan-made hand-phones to Vidal Sassoon hair kits. There's a flowering of business individuality: increasingly, shops get zany names like 'Hasty Tasty Restaurant' and 'Midas Touch Electric Agency' instead of sticking to the traditional shop numbers. "It's a good time to grow up in Bhutan," exults 20-year-old college-goer Dawa Gyeltshen. "There's more entertainment, and we play basketball, love Michael Jordan and go to picnics with our partners."

He is right. At Lugar, Thimphu's oldest and only movie theatre, fans crowd to see Jackie Chan's Rumble In The Bronx and B-grade Mithun Chakraborty flicks. There's a pricey Sony centre to fuel the recent craze for television and music systems, and the first card gallery came up two years ago. Shakespeare In Love and Elizabeth are the biggest bootleg rental hits of the season in the two-dozen video parlours that have sprung up in the past few years, and Cher's new album is moving fast at the poky music stores that dot the town. At X, a frowsy discotheque tucked away inside a sooty tenement, a dozen tipsy teenagers dance to beat-fuelled rhythms on weekend nights. And on a windswept ridge near Thimphu, young boys and girls shed their traditional kilt-like gho and kira for Tommy Hilfiger caps and Nike tees. There they kill time, chatting and shooting from gleaming fibreglass bows. "Society is getting modernised very fast," says Karma Tshering, the kingdom's first career film director. "The way young people are talking, behaving and dressing now is very global, very American."

Tshering himself is an exemplar of the rapid changes. A high-schooler who ran a foreign goods shop in Thimphu for three years, he decided to drop it all to travel to India for a three-month crash course in video filming. "I just wanted to make Bhutan's first film," he says. He returned to make Jigdrel (Not Afraid To Die), a treacly two-hour video feature shot in six months on a Rs 9-lakh budget. Then Tshering and his producers lugged a video projection camera to the 888-seater Lugar theatre where the film ran fullhouse for a fortnight, a box office hit by any standards in a small city. Emboldened, Tshering is making three films this year-a comedy, a Bhutanese rework of Romeo and Juliet and a thriller based on a real-life picnic tragedy-as well as a documentary on farming. Says Tshering, who counts Steven Spielberg, Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai as his inspirations, "It's a good time to do something new, like making films."

Or sing and act and become a teen icon like Nirup Dorji. The soft-spoken 28-year-old Buddhist philosophy major is an unlikely pin-up idol. An announcer with bbs, Dorji has also cut some 40 songs fusing traditional zhungda tunes with catchy rigsar (pop) rhythms using guitars, keyboards and flutes. He's also topped the charts consistently in the last three years. With his boyish good looks, Dorji also became the kingdom's first actor, playing the lead in Tshering's film. "I enjoy singing and enjoy acting, but I'm still not sure whether they will give me a steady career," says the unusual icon.

With half-a-dozen music and video production shacks coming up in the past few years, Bhutan's also throwing up its homegrown entertainment entrepreneurs. Like Ugyen Dorji, a ruddy-cheeked 40-something hotelier, who saw it coming and opened a small studio in '87 to record local singers on tape imported from India. Today, Norling Sound and Vision has sold some 50,000 tapes of its 73 albums, all recorded by locals. Last year, he plunged into video film production with Jigdrel and plans to produce three more films this year, each costing Rs 10 lakh to Rs 15 lakh. "I'm not in film production to make money yet," says Dorji. "I am here to get a headstart and capture the market." Or take Ugyen Wangdi, an ftii graduate who made a 90-minute folksy love story, possibly the kingdom's first and unsung feature. He then dropped out of features, started a communications company, and has now completed 57 documentaries. Wangdi's now scouring for funds to make Bhutan's first 16-mm full-length feature. "There are a lot of changes here. And we will have to lose something because of these changes, especially external cultural influences," he says.

But change in Bhutan is tempered with caution. In Thsering's films, the actors speak Dzongkha and wear the traditional goh and kiro. DrukNet promises to put filters to block porn sites or those "against national security". Further, the government insists on controlling Net access in its offices because, says telecom chief Tenzing, it's a "waste of time". And when dish antennae began dotting the low Thimphu skyline this year to prepare for the coming of TV, Kuensel regretted that their "visual impact" on the Bhutanese architectural landscape had been "tragic". "In a way", says editor Dorji, "I can't help feeling that we are being wrenched and forced open by the information age."

In a way, it often ends up looking like a nation in some confusion about how to reconcile materialism with the hermetic way of life, modernity with tradition and economic growth with 'gross national happiness'. So bothered is the Bhutanese elite on the issue of whether the gnp and the king's vision of 'gnh' can co-exist that Planning Commission economists are holding workshops to find an answer to the conundrum. At one such brainstorming session, says a participant, economists tried to "measure gnh" and find out the "level of contentment" in Bhutanese society using empirical data and utilitarian economic theories. "We're still grappling with the proper definition of gnh in these fast-changing times," says deputy director Lhendup. "It is difficult to put a cap on aspirations."

More so in a society where 44 per cent of its 6.38 lakh people are between 15 and 49 years of age. Literacy is improving (54 per cent officially, though a lot of people believe that it's lower), infrastructure is skimpy and expensive to build. The economy grows at about 6 per cent and inflation at 12. Under 50,000 people in Thimphu can afford TVs, only 5,000 people have phone connections, a third of whom will possibly have an Internet connection by the end of the year, and there are just 16,000 vehicles. "What's important to ensure is equity," says Kuensel's Dorji, "so there are fewer disparities between the rich and poor." That is possibly the most immediate challenge for the kingdom. But the winds of change have never blown faster in the frosty Land of the Thunder Dragon.