Yesterday evening I found myself an accidental tourist at ThePema by Realm - attending a presentation by the Himalayan Future Forum, titled “A Conversation with Himalayan Citizens”. Moderated by our own Technology Thought Leader Dr. Cigay Tshering Dorji, the speaker was the very able and respected Sujeev Shakya, author and Chair of Nepal Economic Forum.
The talk was lively and full of interesting anecdotal accounts of the speaker’s journey of self-discovery - the extreme grit and determination with which he applied himself in the conviction that nothing could prevent him from being the very best he wanted to be - to be counted as equal among the very best in the world. He told us that the mountain people were among the most resilient - like the slithering mountain rivulet that will seek out every nook and cranny, every crack and cleft there is to find - in its relentless quest to complete its escape towards the wide open ocean.
He told us of the life lessons he learnt from his many intercourses with multiple governments around the world - the power of self-assertion. His message to us was clear - smallness does not matter - we still have our place among the stars: louder we assert - greater the respect!
During the Q&A session, one among the participants was Mr. Karma, the incumbent CEO of RICBL - a person of outstanding intelligence and gut – one who never stepped with any doubt in his mind. I believe that he is the one person who single handedly shaped the course of the successful journey of Bhutan National Bank. Without him at the helm of things during its formative years, the BNB would not be where it is today. His courage to depart from the conventional and the cautious - that is what managed to rankle the behemoth - even as it gnawed away, chunk by small chunk, at the prude’s business empire.
In Karma’s rejoinder to Sujeev’s viewpoints, he said two words that triggered a chain of thoughts in my mind – one was “CRISIS” and the other being “PEAKING POINT”.
Long after the event, I was sitting with 3-4 friends at my favorite bar - Paday Bistro - sipping honey-lemon tea. I began to speak my thoughts:
CRISIS
Most Bhutanese believe that we are about to enter a crisis phase. Really? Who among the supposedly 800,000 odd Bhutanese has really faced crisis in their lives? Has any one among us seen the true face of crisis? What does it look like? How does it feel to be in the middle of a crushing crisis?
From what I know - the Bhutanese society has been so pampered by kidu from our successive monarchs and governments that there has never been a single occasion where we have had to face a crisis. Even during the thick of COVID-19 pandemic, food, medicine, essential services - even alcohol and tobacco, were delivered to stranded and isolated citizens with clockwork precision.
Crisis is when you have to start to chew your shoelaces in place of food - it is when you have no energy left in your body to rise up from the puddle of your own excreta.
Therefore, it is unwise to propagate CRISIS - if we do, we will surely get one.
There is only one person in the whole of this country who lives and breaths crisis on a daily basis - let us hope and pray that He does not give up hope, caused by our incorrigible ways and mindlessness and, above all, our self-centeredness.
PEAKING POINT
Today, in my view, the biggest calamity facing Bhutan is the whole-scale exodus of human capital from out of the country. And yet, during the entire ongoing National Assembly session, not a single word has been spoken about the malaise. Regardless, the rule of law is that everything will eventually arrive at the point of peaking. So will ours - the exodus will peak at some point. Sadly, unlike in other situations when the peaking is said to bring stability and order and an end to a malaise, in our case the reverse will be true.
When we do arrive at our Peking Point – our apocalypse would be TOTAL!
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