{"id":313,"date":"2014-11-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/happiness\/"},"modified":"2022-03-03T16:22:01","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T00:22:01","slug":"happiness","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nestled at the eastern end of the Himalayas, the tiny nation of Bhutan is famous for being the one place committed to \u201cGross National Happiness,\u201d with an economy serving a culture based on Buddhist spiritual values.<\/p>\n<p>Over a decade after the King of Bhutan ushered in a new modern era by approving the use of television and the internet \u2014 while expressing concerns about whether they will bring more harm than good \u2014 the remote mountainside village of Laya is still without electricity. Here Peyangki, a dreamy and solitary nine-year old in training to be a monk, yearns for the modern world to come to him in the form of a flickering television screen.<\/p>\n<p>Between studying and prayer, he watches as his world is encroached upon by electrical cables and roads. When he is taken to Thimphu, Bhutan\u2019s largest city, by his uncle, Peyangki gets a glimpse of consumerism as they search for the perfect TV set to bring back to the village.<\/p>\n<p class=\"clear-orphan\">In <i>Happiness<\/i>, Thomas Balm\u00e8s captures the innocent beauty in the faces of his subjects and through the gorgeous shots of the landscape he illuminates a complicated time when a way of life that has been relatively unchanged for hundreds of years meets the seduction of technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Himalayan village in Bhutan, the nearest road a three-day walk away, is connected to electricity for the first time. A 9-year-old monk leaves for the city in search of a TV, in a story of the bittersweet seduction of technology and progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1293],"class_list":["post-313","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-youth-and-family"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Happiness | TV Reaches Bhutan | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Happiness, a 9-year-old monk leaves for the city in search of a TV when his Himalayan village is connected to the electricity grid for the first time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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