A Highlander in London

I first traveled to England a few years back to do the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Expedition. I will always treasure dearly those fun five days of hiking up and down the fells with some of the most wonderful folks in the world. My favorite memory will be of climbing down a cliff-like slope strewn with loose boulders and scree just before reaching our encampment at Angle Tarn – I know – not very safe! But it was after a grueling hike up and down Scafell Pike and we all wanted a break. There was much camaraderie during the climb down, and much merrymaking on reaching campsite to cook a well-deserved pasta dinner with pesto. And then the sweet, sweet feeling of tucking in the tired body into the soft sleeping bag for a good night’s sleep.

However, I have always wished to experience a bit more of England than in the Lake District. Fortunately, the chance came this year when I visited England again – this time, to attend the One Young World (OYW) 2019 summit in London. Often called the Junior Davos, OYW is a mind-boggling conference where many incredible change-makers from all over the world represent their organizations and companies with people with years of experience and results in their fields of action – from climate justice to humanitarianism to AI. To say the least, it was a truly inspiring event. It made me realize that yes, the world is full of issues to be solved, but together we are a part of the process – a process in which our strife for betterment leaves this place a better home for the future.

During and after the summit, I had some time to go around and explore a bit of London. Doing so, I was stuck by the level of development and growth the country, and London in particular, has achieved. Walking around the Tower of London while reading its rich history going back to the Conquest of England by William of Normandy, strolling around in Hyde Park while contemplating its history as a place where free speech was nurtured, visiting the House of Parliament where Brexit is very much happening, and looking around in the public galleries and museums, I was reminded that that is the place where a lot of history was made – in science, technology, politics, and literature. Charles Dickens stared at me from his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery while generals, kings and queens looked on from their public pedestals surrounded by such modern skyscrapers as the Shard and the Gherkin, and of course, London’s ubiquitous doubledeckers.

It was quite easy for me to see that London and Bhutan are starkly different development stages. For one thing, the English infrastructures are advanced and sophisticated – their roads seem well maintained and pot-hole free. Public buildings are well-built, well-equipped and well-maintained. And consider the Tube – a giant crawling network of high-tech subterranean conduits moving millions of people every day across the city. Even the last miles are connected by buses. Its brilliant, and it left me wondering – How can Bhutan ever reach a stage where our public transport system gets this good? In our country, public transport is still poor although the technology to make it user-friendly, efficient and green is already there.

In addition, a lasting impression is of the quality craftsmanship of not only the infrastructure but also the cars on the road, the windows in the wall, the furniture in the room, the electrical fixtures, etc… For many, sound worksmanship and quality implements may be taken for granted, but having seen and experienced first-hand the unsatisfying feeling of accessing and/or buying things of poor craftmanship, I really took in the quality of the street-scapes, the level roads, the well-insulated rooms and many other things. In Bhutan, the construction sector is still miles away in terms of adopting quality materials and good craftsmanship, and a walk along any town street is sufficient to remind one of the miles we have to cover to get there. Of course, significant strides are being made by people who, unlike me, don’t just complain but also do!

Talking of doing, I am very glad that I DID do one thing that I have always wanted to do while I was in England: visit Thirsk in the Yorkshire Dales!

Now, for the most part, I know that a lot of people would not know where, or what Thirsk is. Let me answer: it is a small market town in North Yorkshire, and for the few (a significant many) outsiders (non-English, I guess) who do know about it, is all thanks to one country vet who lived and worked there from 1940 to 1995, treating the cattle and droughts animals of the many small farmers who lived there during a time of great technological and economic changes. His real name was James Alfred Wight – a Glascow-educated veterinary surgeon who found his home in the bracken-laden dales of Yorkshire. Coincidentally, he also penned a massively famous series of semi-autobiographical books in which he shares the many encounters and incidents involving no-nonsense but hospitable and generous dales farmers using the pen-name James Herriot. If you haven’t read his works, I highly recommend you do so!

Having grown up reading his books, I have come to be enamored with the idea of an old Yorkshire strewn with smallholder farmers bedecked with their few but diverse (as in all kinds of farm animals) livestock, and very much the warm-hearted, self-reliant and hardworking pictures of many a rural farmers in my own country today. What James Herriot and the farmers went through in terms of technological, social and economic upheavals in the 40’s to the 90’s, the farmers of Bhutan are living through right now. As such, it was a very special experience to visit the World of James Herriot – the museum located at Herriot’s initial workplace where the curators have done a pretty good job of preserving the place as it was back in his times. After having read his books from cover to cover, and over again, I felt elated to see the oven where his wife cooked the delicious Yorkshire puddings, the jackets he wore to events and other personal effects of much significance to us his fanatic readers. I hope that because I really enjoy the candor and humor in his writing, my being, ostensibly, the first Bhutanese to visit the World of James Herriot will, in some humble ways, be a way for my to honor his legacy.

Now that I am finally back home, some farmers around here remark that I go abroad quicker than they go to Thimphu. I joke that I am the modern rebirth of Garp Lungi Khorlo – a legendary messenger in medieval Bhutan who could run at the speed of the wind. But I think that like in Herriot’s Yorkshire in the 40’s, 50’s and the 60’s, change is in store for all of us here. And in a sense, I am excited to be living through it because right now we are the ones to shape the direction in which these changes ultimately take us – to a prosperous, vibrant, green and beautiful Phobjikha. My trip to England brought home the message that I can play a constructive part in this grand journey too.