The Wi-Fi password at the hotel was “happiness.”
But of course. What else would it be in Bhutan, the country that gave us the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH)?
I was invited to visit Bhutan earlier this month as part of the Bhutan Echoes, an annual literature and arts festival. Though Paro is barely an hour’s flight from Kolkata, my exposure to Bhutan was limited to Druk marmalade and orange squash. Bhutan existed on the peripheries of my imagination as a mysterious Shangri-La where men wore skirts, and placid takin, a strange animal that looks like a hybrid between a sheep and a musk ox, roamed the slopes. And of course everything came with a side of Gross National Happiness which promised good governance and sustainable development alongside environmental conservation and cultural preservation.
To be honest, the idea of Gross National Happiness made me a bit wary. It sounded too picture-postcard perfect. The well-known Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden had told me once that it was tiring to have people coming to Bhutan looking for the happiest country. “I think this has been to our advantage because it gets people to come here,” she said. “But it’s also to our disadvantage because they think there is nothing more for Bhutan that everyone is so happy there. But happiness is such a relative term.”
In fact, Bhutan is grappling these days with a brain drain crisis as more and more young people leave the country for places like Australia and Canada. According to a 2025 article in Newsreel Asia, an estimated 66,000 Bhutanese now live abroad. For a country of barely 765,000 people, that’s a sizeable chunk—almost 1 in 10. “We cannot ask civil servants not to resign or stop people from leaving the country,” Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay told the Bhutan parliament in 2025. “If (income) is the sole reason for leaving, then we need to explore ways to create jobs in the country that offer earnings comparable to those abroad.”
All this to say I was not sure what to expect when I landed in Bhutan. I thought it might be like an eco-bubble where the well-heeled tourist could enjoy a few days of peace and quiet before returning to their frenetic lives in Mumbai and New York and London. I expected a paradise curated for tourists like me.
The quiet of Bhutan
What I didn’t expect was the quiet. As soon as we stepped out of Paro Airport, as we drove past the rushing river, green hills and prayer flags, the quiet surrounded me like a warm hug. I don’t know about Gross National Happiness but there was certainly plenty of Gross National Peace and Quiet. Except at night, a Bhutanese friend grumbled, that’s when all the street dogs howl.
Slowly the little roadside stores selling strings of churpi cheese and oranges gave way to Thimphu with apartment buildings lining the highway into town. It looked like a modern city, neon lights and car dealerships, not a quaint tourism brochure town. But there was not a horn to be heard. Or a traffic light to be seen. My driver said one traffic light had been installed but it had proven so unpopular that the government eventually got rid of it. Instead there are white-gloved traffic police gracefully guiding traffic along.
At one point we got stuck in a little traffic jam. No one honked. No one tried to nose their way into the first little opening. My driver cheerily waved at the car to our right, telling it to go on ahead. In my hometown Kolkata (or for that matter any other metro in India), the whole intersection would have been beeping, hooting and shouting. My driver shrugged and said, “But would it make anyone get wherever they were going any faster?”
Making space for others
I had never been to a country where people were more amiable to perfect strangers. This was not just about the hotel staff, that was their job. One day I sat waiting for a bowl of ramen at a Japanese restaurant. An older lady asked if she could sit at my table while she waited for a table.
Within minutes she had struck up a conversation, given me farmers’ market advice, asked for the literary festival schedule and inquired after my book. At one point, she leaned over and said, “You should have that ramen before it gets cold.” I will probably never meet her again but I will remember her friendliness.
When I told Sonam, my driver, that I wanted to visit the Memorial chorten and light a butter lamp for my mother, he nodded. He not only accompanied me, he chose a lamp and recited the prayers. “Go around three times,” he said. “Now close your eyes and pray.”
In Paro, I wanted to buy some local cheese with which to make ema datshi. It was the middle of the week and the weekend farmer’s market was not on. The taxi driver drove me to a little hole-in-the-wall general store, asked the aunty there if there was some cheese, and chose the best packet for me. The solicitousness was genuine. People made time for other people, drivers made space for other cars in a way I was not used to. The rupee and the ngultrum have a 1:1 exchange rate, but in many ways this felt really like a foreign country.
This was not just about taxi drivers and guides catering to a tourist economy. It extended all the way up to the royals. The Queen Mother is the patron of the literary festival. She came to the opening dinner hosted by the Indian ambassador. We were gently briefed on royal etiquette. One must stand when she stands. One does not take selfies with her. But no one told me that she would circle the room and greet almost every single person there.
She didn’t just inaugurate the literary festival, she attended sessions, asked questions and kept telling everyone to sit down. “You can relax now, Elvis has left the building,” she joked as she got into her car and headed out.
Another night, the Prime Minister hosted a dinner. The Queen Mother was in attendance as well. Suddenly there was a stir. The King had shown up too. The real surprise came later. The King did not stay for dinner but before he left, he came to every table and chatted with every guest, asking them what they did, their impressions of Bhutan, and invited them to visit again. An Indian guest at my table shook her head and said, “Can you imagine any Indian politician doing that? Even a municipal commissioner?” I could not.
In Bhutan, people I met, important or not so important, just went about their daily lives without much ado or fuss. They wore everything lightly, whether royalty or enlightenment. As the Venerable Lungtaen Gyatso, a Buddhist scholar, said at a session during the literary meet, before enlightenment, one needed to chop wood and carry water. And after enlightenment one needed to chop wood and carry water.
It was by no means perfect but somehow at peace with its imperfections. Kunzang Choden gave me a novel, Dawa, that she had written about one of the scruffy street dogs of Thimphu. Dawa, the stray dog, looks at the moon and “realised that the moon was flawless while he himself was the personification of everything flawed and blemished, an orphan with a dirty-looking coat.” But instead of being broken-hearted, he decides to call him self “Dawa Koto, or the Crooked Moon, the fusion of the perfect with the imperfect.” That was the magic of the place.
I came back from Bhutan with far more than I had intended—fresh cheese, large green chillies, small dark potatoes, ezay chilli paste, yellow chanterelle mushrooms and a bottle of Raven duty-free vodka. But transporting the essence of Bhutan back is not easy. Fresh mushrooms go bad. Cheese has to be refrigerated. The tree tomatoes get squishy. And the bottle of vodka leaked all through the flight, leaving me with a sodden bag and barely four pegs. At first I was annoyed and then I thought perhaps there was a lesson in there.
Not everything memorable can be packaged, sealed and brought back. Some things are just to be experienced and then let go. Like a wish borne on a butter lamp.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.