Materialism forces us to make quick money. Young men want fast cars. Even some monks want to get rich. It wasn't like this before. Squeezed between India and China, the world's two most populous countries, Bhutan has chosen a path divergent from most of its Asian neighbors, placing environmental protection above commercial interests, spiritual wealth above worldly gains and most of all, clinging fiercely to its cultural identity while globalization eats away at cultures much larger than its own.
Foreigners view it as the epitome of all that is right about Bhutan.
But as the nation strives for a happiness that cannot be measured in monetary terms, some of the country's 600,000 people are finding they need a lot more than what they have to be content. For centuries, Bhutan, about twice the size of Vermont, was a feudal society that had seen few 20th-Century conveniences and even fewer foreigners. In the 1960s, it started modernizing, putting in basic infrastructure such as roads, electricity and telephones. The first batch of students was sent abroad for higher education. Today, an unusually high number of civil servants have Ivy League degrees, possibly the most of any country made up mostly of yak-herders and consistently ranked by the United Nations as one of the world's least developed.