Finding middle ground in a high place | Condé Nast Traveller India

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2023-04-22 13:30:00

In my head, visiting Bhutan was akin to swallowing a happiness pill. I was travelling to the country with my 10-year-old daughter Anika. Although we travel often as a family, this was the first mother-daughter trip for us. I wanted to show my city-born and -bred daughter that a simpler life, one rooted in spirituality and in tune with nature’s rhythm—things close to my heart, were indeed possible. Having spent a decade of her life split between Mumbai and Dubai, life as she knew it was rushed, full of sensory overload of every kind and one, where nature existed only in pockets.

Being at the cusp of teenage-hood, she and I often get into arguments on simplicity, materialism and rootedness. As far-fetched as it may sound, in Bhutan, I expected both of us to have a collective a-ha moment sitting in a monastery high up on the mountaintop wrapped in clouds, our disagreements melting away into complete harmony.

As we drove to the capital Thimphu from Paro, the only pill my daughter hoped I had given her was an Avomine. Our young driver Tandin with his radiant smile and twinkling eyes stuck to the speed limit of 50km per hour although the butter smooth roads were devoid of traffic or speed cameras. To help my daughter, he slowed down even further. What was meant to be a journey of an hour and fifteen minutes stretched to a nearly two hour one. But our guide Sonam and he were unfazed by the delay or the fading light. Here I was rushing to find happiness in a country where clearly no one or nothing ever feels rushed.

We were in Thimphu on the day of the FIFA World Cup finals and my sport loving daughter was overjoyed that our sprawling room at the Druk Hotel, one of the oldest in the country, gave us vantage views of the floodlit Changlimithang stadium. We found out later that had we come on the previous day from our balcony we would have been privy to the fifth king Druk Gyalpo Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck addressing the nation on the occasion of the 115th National Day. It was on this day on 17 December 1907, that the first king of Bhutan was crowned.

For years, Bhutan remained shrouded in mystery, secluded and closed from the outside world. It was only in 1999 that television and the Internet were allowed into the country. In less than 25 years, the Bhutanese way of life had considerably altered and there were signs of change all around. In Thimphu’s main market ,stretching along the arterial Norzin Lam street, we walked past stores selling the latest styles of Converse, Adidas and North Face, and trendy vegan cafes serving everything from bagels to belly filling sundaes. I had hoped to take Anika as far away as possible from the consumerist tentacles of Dubai, but here we were confronted with them, although in far muted tones. If I was secretly a little taken aback she was delighted and even said that the stores were better stocked than the ones in Dubai. 


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