Reflections

In spite of being in the news business herself, Lisa Napoli was tired of its noisy, incessant, over simplified sound bites, so when offered a six month volunteer position at a startup radio station in faraway Bhutan she put her job at NPR on hold and jumped at the chance. Bhutan, a tiny landlocked Buddhist kingdom surrounded by India and China and full of gorgeous alpine vistas, is famous for having a king who prefers promoting Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Mass communication is still relatively new in Bhutan and Napoli’s young coworkers at Radio Kuzoo FM, Bhutan’s first nongovernmental broadcast radio station, are excited and enthusiastic and just a little naïve. Radio Kuzoo is a modern version of the old fashioned community radio stations that we don’t have much of in the US anymore. Kuzoo played youth music--whatever they could download--from around the world, read the test scores of students waiting to hear if they had passed the national exam, and held an American Idol inspired Valentine’s Day contest where listeners called in and sang. Other times listeners called to chat with the staff, or dedicated songs, or send greeting to other listeners who had called in earlier. For Napoli, Bhutan is as much a state of mind as a place on a map—it’s an antidote to her NY/LA world where people pay more attention to their smart phones than each other—and her trip is as much a journey of self-discovery as it is a trek to a beautiful, unique country halfway around the world. I greatly enjoyed reading about both aspects of her journey. Radio Shangri-La is a thoughtful, colorful, informative account of a visit to a part of the world most of us will never get to see for ourselves.