Is Bhutan the happiest place in the world?
Andrew Buncombe visits Bhutan to find out if its people really are as content as they claim to be.
By Andrew Buncombe
Within a stone’s throw of Bhutan’s legendary Tiger’s Nest, with lungs burning and heart pounding, misery descends. Smug, grinning hikers are making their way along the narrow, vertiginous path as they return from the monastery set on the side of the cliff, but with vertigo having turned legs and spirit to mush, it appears I am going nowhere.
A little while later, with the encouragement of a patient partner and the hand-holding of the tour guide, we are across the gap, beguiled by the majesty of the monastery’s location and stunned by the ambition of its architect. I start to feel content, even happy. And then comes the realisation: we have to make it back the very same way.
It is hard not to think about happiness in Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom set high in the Himalayas between India and China. As the country has gradually opened itself to the West and its tourists’ dollars, so it has projected and exported its philosophy of ‘gross national happiness’ (GNH), a belief that a society should be measured not simply by its material indicators but by the health, education and the contentedness of its people. Such is the pervasiveness of the idea that last year, the UN adopted a non-binding resolution that ‘happiness’ should be included among development indicators. The notion sounds fantastic – genuinely radical, even – but is it anything more than a clever piece of global marketing by the Bhutanese, looking to secure their own unique brand amid the multitude of nations?
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