OLDEN DAYS

Today I am going to write about how my Bhutan was in the olden day. It will be more like a tour towards the gone days of the country. Since I was born in 1988, I won’t go too far…I ll stay in my era. When I was a kid, even some part of the capital of the country (Thimphu) didn’t have electricity. My family has a traditional house in Olakha, its few kilometres away from the main town. And as a kid I still remember staring through the window at night towards the glowing Thimphu town.

It used to look like a fire work at a distant. I used to be in awe and thought that whoever created electricity was a total genius. There were of course vehicle roads by then but not in my locality…we had to walk through the paddy fields for about half an hour to get to the main road…mind you, not to the town but to the road that could take us to the town. There used to me a line of tiny shops and it used to be so much fun to shop there. If we had Nu. 5, we used to feel so rich.

Back then the value of money was really high and we had very less access to entertainment. And yet we used to be so content and were busy having fun. I think we derived happiness out of the regular life, going for walks, making soil cakes and celebrating fake birthdays with it at the back of our house, working in the kitchen garden with the family, climbing the trees and going bananas. We didn’t need high tech toys to be happy…we were just happy the way we were.

With time Bhutan developed, electricity, roads, changes in the life style and so many other changes came our way with the changing time. It was so much fun with the home filled with the electrical appliances, we used to rent videos all the time and watch it over and over again…and surprising it was never a bore to watch a movie repeatedly. I guess we were just so excited to see tiny people inside a tiny metallic box.

But I should admit, Bhutan moved really fast toward development. As I grew older, roads turned into highways, things moved from rented videos to cables, lonely roads to heavy traffics, single line of shop to clusters of shopping malls, climbing tress to play grounds, soil cakes to pizzas, rolling stones to remote toy cars…can’t even finish naming all the developments that has taken place in my country.

Even though its fun that our country is developed so much and we have a very comfortable life now, life back then wasn’t bad as well…it was quite fun. I wish more of us had seen those days because for some reason I feel more innocent in those olden days, we knew how to derive fun and happiness out of nothing and that’s pretty amazing, at least to me.