Sunday's Tale: a post from the past
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Bhutan happiness is, no laughing, matter-academics study it,
spreadsheets track it, billboards tout it, conferences debate it, and
every year, foreign intellectuals flock to Thimphu to share their
ideas about what exactly makes a person happy.
Instead
of "Gross National Product" Bhutan uses "Gross
National Happiness" to measure it socio-economic prosperity,
essentially organizing its national agenda around the basic tenets of
Buddhism. Bhutan's fourth king, Jigme Singe Wangchuck, invented the
idea in 1972, to give his tiny country some international guard
against potential future invasion by its two mighty neighbors (India
and Chine).
Given
the seriousness with which this topic is treated, Jonathan Harris
thought it would be fun to do something a little be silly, so in late
2007, he spent two weeks in Bhutan, handing out baloons. He asked people 5 questions pertaining to happiness: what make them happy, what
is their happiest memory, what is their favorite joke, what is their
level of happiness between 1 and 10, and, if they could make one
wish, what would it be. Based on each person's stated level of
happiness, he inflated that number of balloons, so very happy people
would be given 10 balloons and very sad people would be given only
one (but hey, it's still a balloon).
They
wrote each person's wish onto a balloon of their favorite color. He
repeated this process for 117 different people, from all different
ages and backgrounds. On the find night, all wish balloons were
re-inflated and strung up at Dochula, a sacred mountain pass at
10.000 feet, leaving them to bob up and down in the wind, mingling
with thousand of stands of prayer flags..
Jonathan
Harris is an artist and storyteller, he makes projects that reimagine
how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements
of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his
projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule (with
Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic
Ocean.
More
info
website
Balloons of Bhutan
website
Jonathan Harris
Photo
credit © J. Harris
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