Bhutan wonders if TV really brings happiness

By Simon Denyer

SOBSA, Bhutan (Reuters) - Since cable television first arrived in her tiny village in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan two years ago, 55-year-old Kencho Om keeps getting in trouble with her husband for staying up late watching movies.

"My husband scolds me, he says at this age I should be spending my time saying my prayers," she said, sitting on the bare floorboards of her front room, the walls broken only by a shelf on which her small television set is perched.

"He says that after I die, instead of doing the funeral rituals, he will just put my body next to a television."

Bhutan's citizens first started watching television after then-King Jigme Singye Wangchuck bowed to the inevitable in 1999 and allowed it into his isolated Buddhist realm.

Since then, it has been blamed for destroying family life, bringing crime and juvenile delinquency to this peaceful land and undermining ancient traditions.

This is a country that lived in a mediaeval bubble a generation ago. When the first jeep arrived in the capital Thimpu in the 1960s, locals ran in fear of the fire-breathing dragon. Others brought it cattle feed.

Less than four decades later, Bhutan was suddenly confronted with 45 channels of the outside world.

Wangchuck is famous for proposing that Gross National Happiness was more important than Gross National Product, that traditions, trust and the environment were as important as the ruthless pursuit of material gain.