An Eight Year Old Bespectacled Guy and Gross National Happiness

This is a repost, a little revamp done though. 

I have this cute little brother-my first cousin who wears glasses at the early age of eight and is in elementary school. He used to come home after school with his class work half done every time. We wondered at this stupidity of his and he was showered with bullets of scolds every time from his mom-my aunt. We never understood this predicament of his until he complained of sore eyes. He was taken to the ophthalmologist and later found that he needed glasses much to our amazement!

He looks so cute with his glasses on. He looks not through it but literarily from above it. This is the fourth pair of glasses in a year and a half’s time. Tired of getting him a new pair of glasses every time he breaks it, the kind ophthalmologist gave him a huge pair of glasses this time, absolutely for free. This one has lasted for quite a while now and my aunt is happy. Friends at school call him Amitabh Bachhan for his large glasses. My friend calls him Donald Duck and lately I see him the replica of Donald Duck: D. 

The last time I saw him was on a stool sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed though with his glasses on and was in a meditation posture as if in deep contemplation. It was stark indigestible. I asked him what he was doing. He answered that he is meditating as taught in school.

What does this eight year old know about meditation? Probably he was taught at school, part of the Royal Government of Bhutan’s policy of inculcating GNH in Bhutan. While I become a GNH graduate, this brother of mine sure is a GNH child.:P. I feel more like being back to Hitler's Germany (I haven’t been there, but I feel like that). Nazism was inculcated in school’s text books and compulsorily made as the state religion.
GNH in Bhutan has also become more or less of that sort.

GNH is the sexiest concept now, its sustainability a big question though. Starting from my assignments, presentations, research works and now this article, my life is revolved around this infamous concept. I did the most daring thing (like blood donation) which I never thought I would do one day in the name of GNH. Every where I turn it is this concept that brags me constantly

Image via Google

Every day, media reports the rampant rise of thefts, suicides, rape, burglaries, frauds, bans after bans...and the recent one, you would be jailed in Bhutan if caught smoking without a license. Interestingly, a caricature in a local newspaper showed that if you befriend an alcoholic you remain as who you are, but if you befriend a smoker than you become a criminal’s friend because smoking in Bhutan is a crime!  And of all the people, a monk was caught in possession of tobacco, hilarious!! and everyone knows what happened to that poor monk. sigh!

The mere mention of this concept makes me nauseous yet I have no alternative. It is the grace for my meals. Will my cousin become a GNH child? How well are we armed with GNH before we preach this so called concept and make it a reality? Is it a bait to attract donors since Bhutan is largely a donor-dependent country?  Or is it a Utopian concept?

Note : The thoughts expressed here are of the writers's solely and is not intented to harm anyone.

Myriad Thoughts and Bizarre dreams II

I had been the most affected with the Bhutanese Inconsistency Syndrome (BIS) because it has been almost six months since i have penned down my thoughts. In these last six months nothing came out of me. I also have no idea as to my whereabouts thus far.

One thing for sure: I haven’t been to Farmville, my crops must have withered and my poultry and piggery must have starved to death. Country life, I have forsaken totally. So where have I been so far?

Motivation comes and goes like a cat as it freaking pleases. My motivation to write is like a cat. :) With the expectation that normalcy would return I have been racing with life but there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. The race goes on and on…without a destination, with no purpose of its own.

Rather than becoming normal people who does and functions like one I have become a zombie literally. It is as if I am physically identical in all respects to a conscious person, but is not conscious. These last five months I haven’t been to bed before 4 am in the morning nor had I had a proper meal in two weeks time. It has become a topsy-turvy routine for me.

All these long days, weeks and months I have been waiting for sanity to come back. I have waited for “it” like a distressed lover, sick with laden love. The feelings are so intense, intense as that of the wife who waits for her husband’s return from the war. Sometimes it’s like waiting for Godot!

The essence of the very life seems distant. The earnest reading of The Words of  My Perfect Teacher transported me to a state of high spiritual ferment momentarily. My objective to read at the first instance was the exploration of the very heart and soul of things, the discovery of the real Power, the inner Being, of which the outward features of Mother Earth’s face and we beings, are mere expression. Dangerously thin and increasingly impulsive, my mind was journeying into the realms of mysticism.

Like Frankestein’s monster, I attempt to rediscover the person in me through the thick abyss of time. The more I attempt the more abstract it became, thus I gave up the labor. It has made me a modern Prometheus now.

“Thou shall not judge thyself”  has become the 11th commandant and I vow to abide by it with no alternatives left.

My intense three months management research on Employee Empowerment in the Bhutanese Workplace thus concluded. Findings show that private sector employees are highly empowered than the civil servants in the Bhutanese workplace. Ironically, I am three weeks old in civil service now. How much more cynical can I be than this?

…to be continued.

Myriad Thoughts and Bizarre Dreams

I wanted to rekindle the writer in me.

Nopkin.com and this blog was created to bring that "fire" in me.

Unfortunately the 'Bhutanese inconsistency syndrome' affected me

And it has been four months since i last blogged in.

Not because i was away to Mars or the Moon

but i was here the four whole months sitting in front of my PC day and night doing nothing useful.

planting and harvesting crops on Farmville and Countrylife virtually, worried so much that my crops would wither!

Cyber world has doomed me. It has made me too lazy to get out of my bed or even to go to the loo.

My faithful and good cultivated habit of writing a diary at the end of the day has been marred. Thankfully i write something in places like this. My reading has slumped down to 3 from 9 on a scale of 10. I hardly read forget about reading the bible or praying before bed.

What did i ever to do deserve something like this? I ask God...or should i ask to myself? I better do that.

I stay up until the wee hours of dawn. I am not insomniac (mind you!). Nor am i working on any project though i am assigned to do one. Yet i can stay up the whole night.

When my mother asked me to stay up for the whole night prayer last New year eve to greet the new year 2010, i could not be reasonable but be annoyed at her.

The idea of completely a new management research was so appealing 6 months then. Not any more, i find it a absolute crap now forget about the interest. God Almighty save me, i am not in mood to waste another of my precious life in doing craps which sounds bullshit to me at the moment.

Perhaps i need to be electrocuted so that my friends could be saved at least.

Grumbled i used to do for the hectic classes and for the loads of assignment. But whats happening to me?? I want to go to the class badly now, i miss it more than ever. I miss the intellectual lectures now. I must be on the wrong medication or i must have skipped it.

This isn't me at all.

The person always on the look out for bunking classes is doing this? Surely my days are counted on this peaceful so called "Shangrila"(for further reference refer my article BHUTAN: The Last Shangri-La on the July issue of Drukpa magazine).

Otherwise this stuffs would never happen to me.

HUH...i am sure these are the signs of my last days on earth. Before the world comes to an end in 2012(lets see!) i have already experienced death. I catch the flu, go sick to bed and close my eyes. For a brief moment i stop breathing,gasps for air and

ah....this is how death must be, peaceful and numb,i think then.

It will be another four years until i face the actual death in 2017(acc to Facebook Death calculator) which so many of us play (bullshit, who the heck believes that,do you?)

Until sanity comes back i will have to live in this virtual world. I wonder if i will miss this life when normalcy returns? What fond memories will i carry before i get back to being me? One last wish do i have before i exit from the earth: Write a book.

Until then adieu!

NOTE: This is completely a work of fiction, an attempt at absurd writing.The thoughts are completely of the writer's and is not intended to resemble nor offend anyone.

Blogging and Me

The seven long years voyage of my love came to a disastrous end. With it passed away the two most important part of me;

1. A part of me died away with it
2. My passion for writing ceased away

My motivating factor, the person I have loved all my life took away with him my motivation to write and now all I am left with is the remains of what I had written. The notes and the pieces I wrote when he was with me are the only pieces I have now. Deep inside me I know I can never write like that again.


After blogging successfully for a year, my passion for writing suddenly lost its ground and I became a zombie overnight. I could neither read nor write and my soul hovered incessantly for days and nights. I tried to find solace in something else but in vain.


It has been some three and half months since we separated and I haven’t had the nerve to read something nor write. Hopefully I am back here again with the zeal not to let go off my passion and be strong instead to move on in life. And I am here to stay this time. Happy Blogging! This is to me. :)