The ejaculating erect penises of Bhutan

If the time before the internet were the dark ages, then my formative years in a small industrial town were pre-history because back then we did not even have television.  Heck, we did not even have a refrigerator!

The printed materials, and the few minutes of VOA and BBC provided me a little bit of an idea of the vast world outside the small town.  At home, we subscribed to what I thought then to the best newspaper ever, and to two awesome Tamil magazines.  Father belonged to a magazine club at work,through which we got to read a few leading English-language Indian magazines of those days.  I had enough for critical thinking.

One day, father brought home from his magazine club the tabloid Blitz.  In that there was an article about the Shiva Lingam being a phallic symbol.  A phallic symbol!  It was shocking. And intriguing.

With age, and from a more informed position, I am now the least concerned about whether or not the lingam represents the phallus.  That is immaterial to me.  whatever!  

But, yes, across many cultures, people practically revered the phallus.  Perhaps primarily led by a belief that the meat juice was all that was needed to create a baby.  The periods that women had every month made them "unclean" and inferior, and there was no real understanding of the role that the bloody periods play in creating a baby.  So, of course, the female phallus was beyond the unknown!

Despite the intellectual understanding that I have gained over the years,  I was mildly amused and plenty informed by this NY Times piece on phallus art in Bhutan:

For centuries, Bhutan has celebrated the phallus.
They are painted on homes, or carved in wood, installed above doorways and under eaves to ward off evil, including one of its most insidious human forms, gossip. They are worn on necklaces, installed in granaries and in fields as a kind of scarecrow.

Worn as necklaces, you wonder, right?  Wonder no more:

Caption at the source:
Phallus symbols are worn as necklaces, used as scarecrows and donned by masked jesters in religious festivals.

Unless you are the current president of the United States, you would certainly trust the NY Times, right?

Anyway, back to that NY Times piece:

“Stories of Bhutan’s engagement with the phallus shed light on traditions and lifestyle that make Bhutan one of the happiest places on earth,” Karma Choden wrote in the 2014 book “Phallus: Crazy Wisdom from Bhutan,” which was published here and claims to be the first scholarly effort to document the ubiquity of the phallus.

"The tradition has been widely traced to one lama, Drukpa Kunley, who spread the tenets of Buddhism through Bhutan in the 15th and 16th centuries."

So, "To this day, hopeful couples traverse Bhutan to partake of the monastery’s fertility blessing."

But, it is not only at the monastery:

House after house is painted with phalluses. While highly stylized, they are in some cases graphically detailed: always erect, often ejaculating. One appears with the country’s name, a marketing ploy by the owner of one of the proliferating souvenir shops. The displays in some — rows of colorful wooden carvings — would not seem out of place in a sex shop.

Erect penises. Ejaculating.  On the exterior walls of houses.

Lotay Tshering, a 51-year-old rice farmer, owns a house in Sopsokha that is adorned with two giant penis murals. His wife’s uncle painted them in homage to the Divine Madman, “who has blessed this place,” as he put it. He and his wife have six children.

We construct our own narratives, and believe in them.  We draw artful ejaculating penises on the walls.  We worship shiva lingams.  And there are a gazillion other irrational ways in which we humans make sense of the chaos that this universe is to us.  If only we spent more time sincerely attempting to understand the human condition; instead, being humans, we choose one set of narratives and laugh at other narratives!

Caption at the source:
A family inside the courtyard of a traditional Bhutanese house decorated with elaborate paintings of mythical animals and a phallus.

Don't be obsessed with the GDP

For years, lefties have complained about the preoccupation with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  About how, for instance, how hiring more police officers adds to the GDP, when this is something that should actually warn us that there are some serious problems in society--instead of addressing those problems, we are hiring police officers, with the perverse effect of increasing the GDP!  That is merely one example of what is screwed up with the GDP.

Such thinking, more so when it came to poorer countries that were trying to figure out solutions to a slew of problems, led to alternative measures of how well countries are doing.  Thus was born, for example, the Human Development Report and its Human Development Index.  The king of Bhutan went one step more and called for Gross National Happiness.  I appreciated his idea, but thought it was a contradition of sorts to have the word "gross" in it :-)

Now, we are in a worldwide economic recession that seems to be getting deeper and deeper with every passing day.  A recession is, of course, by definition tied to the GDP--a contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters.  So, now once again people are thinking about whether GDP is a good measure .... Including the Financial Times!  It recognizes some of the shortfalls, such as:

GDP was never meant to be an overall measure of how well a society is doing. It is a measure of production not even designed to capture all economic output. GDP is blind to non-monetised production – it includes care given in crèches and old people’s homes but not the same care given by family members for free. And a country that whittles down its non-renewable resources may record high GDP growth while really just using up its wealth.

And then the paper points out, correctly, that governments have a restricted role in making decisions on tradeoffs:

In spite of this, GDP remains, fetish like, the yardstick for economic performance. Attempts to improve on it must distinguish the technical question of how to measure what we care about from the political question of whatwe (and governments) should care about. We can measure economic production better and Mr Sarkozy has recruited some of the world’s best economists to tackle the technical part.

But we should not pretend to engineer a figure that will tell us how important economic production and wealth are relative to other values. We ought to resist turning “happiness” – which one of the commission’s working groups is looking at – into a new fetish for governments. Instead, elevate other objective indicators of human well-being (such as already existing health, education and environmental sustainability measures) to the status now enjoyed by GDP.

Material wealth remains crucial; most of the world has too little of it. It is governments’ duty to promote growth while securing non-material values voters hold dear. Better statistics can help voters force politicians to make the best trade-offs. They cannot choose on their behalf