Of Bruised Egos & Erased Edifice

Three days back I caught up with a friend and struck up a conversation, which unfailingly, centered around the disastrous post-pandemic tourism policy and its devastating impact on Bhutanese society and the chain of reactions set off by it. The friend said something intriguing:

“By now the government ought to have realized that their tourism policy was a colossal blunder - so why aren’t they doing something about it? What will it cost them, other than a bruised ego and loss of face? Isn’t that better than to continue to endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of Bhutanese? Where is their sense of responsibility and ownership?”

I had no answer - because I am myself totally bewildered.

After the troubled talk with the friend, I had to drive past the barricaded ruins of the dismantled Hotel Jumolhari - one of Thimphu’s oldest hotels. I stopped to gaze at the rubbles that now littered the grounds over which the hotel had once stood.

At close to 40 years old, Hotel Jumolhari was among Thimphu's earliest hotels. It is no more 💔

I was sad - during my initial days as a private sector entrepreneur, I had set up my first ever office inside one of the rooms in this hotel - it was from this place that I had launched the country’s pioneering IT business during early 1980s. But I wasn’t reminiscing about my formative days as a businessman - I was looking with sadness at the dust-filled void - at the iconic edifice that has now been raised to the ground - and erased forever - a direct fallout of a policy gone horribly wrong.

But at the end of many conflicting thoughts that ran through my mind, I was comforted by the realization that the owners of Hotel Jumolhari had exhibited lot more common sense and astuteness, than most other hotel owners. They were quick to grasp that there was simply no hope for the hotel industry, given how things were panning out.

Thus they did the smartest thing under the circumstances: within months of the announcement of the new tourism policy, they opted to pull down the hotel - rather than continue to pursue an untenable fantasy.