Book Fair and Halving Budget

As an all-time avid reader and bibliophile—someone who considers a stack of books a perfectly reasonable piece of furniture—I am genuinely thankful for the organization of book fairs in Mongar and Punakha. Truly. Clap if you must.

To promote readers, to promote reading habits, to promote knowledge, and to build a knowledge-based society, there is a desperate need for frequent book exhibitions in different places across the country. And not just in fancy towns. I feel books should be made available everywhere: in every small town, on the highways (rest areas, not the middle of the road), in hotels, in homes, and in every classroom. If Bhutan is to weigh itself against other countries, then books are our weapons—the main windows in the walls. Dramatic? Yes. Untrue? Absolutely not.

We must therefore read books and value books to understand, evaluate, and foster knowledge and information. Our people must read and access changing ideas and expressions. Otherwise, we risk being a nation of people who know everything about archery and nothing about astrophysics. (No offence to archery.)

Now, I feel this book fair is not only a good chance for book enterprises to make money—because let's be honest, capitalism finds its way everywhere—but it also provides different choices of books to our readers at a concession rate. That part is genuinely nice. Thank you, book sellers, for your mercy.

The government of Bhutan is kind enough to give a certain budget to purchase books for school libraries to all schools in the country. The books are bought from the book fair by the respective school. So far, so good.

But this year, the budget has been slashed by more than half in the case of Chukha Dzongkhag. More than half. Let that sink in. This slashing of the budget is not a good decision. It's good to save for the future—which Bhutan does, admirably—but saving for books is not a good idea. Books are not a luxury. Books are not fancy curtains. Books are the thing that stops children from growing into adults who think knowledge comes only from TikTok.

This year, the budget to buy books has been more than halved. For example, a school that previously received Nu. 100,000 now gets less than Nu. 40,000. Sometimes even less. The reason why the Dzongkhag has chopped the budget is not very clear. It must be tax deductions. Or saving for the years to come. Or perhaps someone decided that half a library is enough for half a child. Who knows? Certainly not us.

In addition—and here is the real kicker—this year is the Reading Year. Yes. The year we are supposed to celebrate reading. And yet, the budget to buy more new books and read more new books has been... reduced. The contradiction is so beautiful it could be a poem. A tragicomedy in one act.

I would be genuinely grateful if schools could spend as much money to buy books as they currently spend hoarding money in the closet. Let the books flow. Let the budgets grow. And let next year's Reading Year actually mean something.

Until then, I'll be here, hugging my old books and crying into their dusty pages.

Google Guru

My Small Oeuvre

I am a self-taught man of words. And therefore, I am also a self-acclaimed writer.

Let me be honest: no university taught me how to string sentences together. No professor sat me down and explained the difference between a metaphor and a simile. I learned by reading, by imitating, by failing, and by trying again. My classroom was whatever book I could borrow, and my only degree is the stack of old exercise books gathering dust in my cupboard.

My world exists somewhere between fantasies and the real me. I am not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins. And honestly? I like it that way.



I have been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But mostly, I write for my own satisfaction. There is a peculiar kind of joy—a quiet, private fireworks display—that happens when I complete a little idea and see it sitting there on paper, finished. Done. Born.

That satisfaction is my reward. No paycheck. No fame. Just the small, warm glow of having shaped something out of nothing.

I have been maintaining my creations since Class VIII. That makes it nearly two decades of scribbling, scratching out, and starting over. As of today, I have seven or eight exercise books filled with stories, poems, letters, songs, and things I cannot easily categorize. They have been my solace. My true friend. The one that listens without interrupting and never judges—well, until I judge myself later.





Some of those early writings are quite shameful to read now.

They are tender in the worst way. Substandard. Shoddy. The ideas falter like a newborn deer learning to walk. The language wobbles. The grammar weeps. Everything is immature—infants dressed up as adults.

I flip through those pages sometimes, and I cringe. I laugh. I groan. I want to reach back through time and whisper to my younger self: Slow down. Read more. And please, for the love of all that is holy, learn what a comma does.

But then I stop myself. Because those awkward, clumsy pages were necessary. They were the practice swings before the real hit. The ugly first drafts of a writer who hadn't yet learned to walk.

And truth be told? I am no better now. Just older. Perhaps a little wiser. But still learning. Still failing. Still trying.



Despite my fears, I gathered some courage and sent a few of those articles to our newspapers. To my astonishment and lasting gratitude, they were kind enough to publish them.

Kind enough—those are the right words. Editors looked past my rough edges and gave me space. They printed my name. They made me real.

I was also awarded several times for my creations. Those small trophies and certificates meant more to me than any gold. They were proof that someone out there—someone other than my mother—thought I had something worth saying. That encouragement lit a fire under my timid writer's soul.

I also wrote many anonymous articles. Most of them were complaint letters—the kind you write when frustration boils over and you cannot keep quiet any longer. A few were other things I cannot quite remember now. There is something liberating about writing without a name. You can be braver. Sharper. More honest. Sometimes too honest.


I have photographed a few of those published articles and placed them on this blog. Many articles, unfortunately, were misplaced over the years. Lost to shifting houses, careless hands, and the general chaos of a life not well organized.

The photographs themselves are dark. Unforgivably dark. I shot them recently in a room with poor light—no flash, no patience, no proper setup. The shadows hide half the words. The images look like crime scene evidence from a very minor literary crime.

But they are mine. And I am keeping them anyway.



So here I stand: a self-taught, self-acclaimed, semi-embarrassed, perpetually learning man of words. My exercise books are my biography. My published clippings are my medals. My dark photographs are my confession.

I write because I must. Because the words pile up inside me like unsent letters. Because when I finish a piece—even a bad one—I feel, for a moment, whole.

Thank you for reading this far. And if you write too, keep your old exercise books. Keep your shameful poems. Keep your blurry photographs. One day, they will be the truest map of who you used to be.


From my dark room to your light—
A self-taught man of words

One Book to Read Before You Die

Many of us have read countless books over the years—some truly transformative, others so forgettable they could double as sleeping pills. I’m no exception. A few books have left such a deep mark on me that I still carry their lessons around like emotional luggage (the carry-on kind, not the lost-at-the-airport kind). Among my all-time favorites are The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma, a fable about chasing your dreams and finding your true purpose—ideally before your knees give out, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, an exhilarating novel dripping with optimism. The latter gently insists that anything is possible if you want it badly enough: just follow your dreams, listen to your heart, and apparently ignore logistics, budgets, and common sense. Then there are timeless masterpieces like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations—each a brilliant, essential read for anyone trying to navigate life’s glorious mess.

Most of these I’ve read once or twice, but one book keeps calling me back like an old friend who knows all my flaws and doesn’t judge. That book is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. At first, the title didn’t grab me—it sounded vaguely like a farming manual for depressed guardians. But once I dove into the first few lines, I found myself laughing out loud at its raw, goddam cynical expressions. Now, whenever I feel blue, I reach for this book. It keeps me company. It helps me forget—especially that embarrassing thing I said in 2007.

The Catcher in the Rye is a goddam must-read before you die. The language is vulgar, crude, yet strangely humorous—like a grumpy uncle who somehow makes you feel better about your own failures. Set in the 1950s, the story is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield, a character many believe mirrors aspects of Salinger’s own life. Holden is a complex figure—seemingly a failure, a restless outsider who struggles with alienation, loneliness, and a distinct lack of a GPS for life. At times, he’s disaffected, disgruntled, and deeply sarcastic, retreating into a world of his own making—one he calls full of “phony” people and ideas. (Spoiler: according to Holden, almost everyone is phony. Including, possibly, the guy who invented sliced bread.)

The book was admired by former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who called it “a marvelous book.” I couldn’t agree more, and let’s be honest—any book that gets a president to say “goddam” in his head is doing something right. I love its voice, its raw honesty, and how Holden’s frustration spills out in unforgettable phrases: “goddam,” “it kills me,” “how I hate this,” “he’s a moron,” “pain in the ass,” “bastard,” “crazy”—expressions that keep you laughing, even through the sadness. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s absolutely worth reading. Just don’t expect Holden to like you. He doesn’t like anyone. But somehow, that’s exactly why you’ll love him.

Derrida and I

Jacques Derrida—I like this man. He says something like this: there is nothing meaningful as such. No logos, no center, no origin, no presence, no absence, no beginning, no end—and so on. Things exist in a buoyant state. The word "love" is not loved. It doesn't signify anything. It can mean hate, kill, dark, murder, etc. And the word "hate" could mean love—just as Gandhiji treated hate as love. There is no meaning as such. Everyone can deconstruct it. Free play is what I like.

This inquisitive Derrida says, "The center is not the center." Then where is the center? It is beyond—what he calls the "transcendental signified." Who knows if nothing lies beyond the hills? But something does lie there.

This seemingly crazy Frenchman was once asked in a philosophical discourse, "Where does authority lie?" His answer was a toddler's answer: "Authority always lies." Any talking baby could have answered that way. It's like asking him, "Where do baggy testicles lie?" You wouldn't be surprised to get the answer, "They always lie there." Not on your head, not on your cheeks—and you wouldn't like it if they lay there. So they always lie there. Warm and fit. Philosophy, at last, made comfortable.

But Derrida's metaphysical philosophy of absence and presence is not originally his own. Funnily enough, he admits that he created it himself. Yet it is there, and it is not there. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. I bluntly argue with Derrida and say he actually took it from my father. My father's philosophy of no logos, no eminent presence—same thing. The concept of no meaning, the transcendental, etc., was already there. My father's religious canons taught me, and my father got it from his father, my grandfather, and my grandfather got it from my great-grandparents, and so on back to time immemorial—no one knows exactly. If you want to know, you must go back to the origin of the world. But there's no question of going backward when we are living forward. So I will pass the same information—"the center is not the center"—without understanding much of it, to my son. And he will do the same to his son. That's what I call a tradition.

I like Derrida's free play, and I like free playing with words. Last time, I played with a girl after reading Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." "Big boobs," is what I said when she was crouching under a chair. She free-played the meaning and didn't talk to me for two days—just because of those two words. That almost killed me. Women always perform chemical analysis on what they hear. If you say "beautiful" to them, they think about "ugly." If you say "my god," they think they are goats. They are stupidly sensitive. They are the real Derridas. That is why I talk very little with women. They misunderstand and disrupt every golden droplet of a word and treat it as ironic.

Derrida's deconstructions have led me into many problems. A few days ago, I told an auto driver that the right is left and the left is right. "So where shall we go? To the center?" the driver asked. "No, there is no center. There is no right, no left, man," I joked. The auto driver looked at me curiously. "Are you kind of out of your senses?" "No, I'm saying, if there is no right, there is no left." That auto driver was blunt-headed. He shook his head, quite puzzled. "Even I am puzzled," I said to him at last. "Let's live simply," the good driver said. "Let's say it is right, and there is left. Why break your head over something without meaning?" "If you find the meaning, there is no meaning in it," I said. The good driver laughed and said, "What's that again? I think you need some medication very soon."

Hearing his remarks, a chilled feeling ran inside my heart. I lowered my head and ran toward my room, cursing Derrida under my breath. I was in a kind of aporia—unable to decide whether I was really mad or sane. I realized after two days of thinking that there was no reality in anything; it was all just construction. That auto driver would never be able to say whether I was sane or insane, because of the free play of meaning that I had taught him during our brief encounter. Or maybe he just went home, told his wife about the crazy passenger, and forgot me entirely. That meaning, too, is free to play.