Laos

I have just watched a program on the BBC depicting Sue Perkins (not one of my favourite TV personalities) who has also joined the growing list of minor celebs wandering the world with camera crew in tow giving their peculiar take on distant exotic places like Luang Prabang in Laos.

"Laos is a state of mind" with its communities tied to the river and the harvest which the river brings, it has its own pulse its own rhythm. 
With the advent of billions of Yuan sloshing around the Chinese are building a series of Hydro Electric Dams on the Mekong to electrify the countries circling Laos.  Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Electricity will change and consumerise the region but who are we to deny others what we take for granted.Of course it will destroy the simplicity even the integrity of life there but the "march of progress" can enhance and at the same time, destroy much of the social fabric developed over millennia. Whilst the young adapt to the opportunities offered, the old practices which determined the identity of a people are lost and to a large extent the people with them.
As these delicate tribal communities become consumers they join the Global community and become slaves, as we are, to a set of values based on money and on what money buys.
They loose the rhythm of a different way of life where it was sufficient to put food on the table whilst respecting the natural world around them of which they, and their lives were an integral part.
It's a debatable point whether anyone, other than the employer gains in this acquisitive, never enough hours in the day, two and three jobs, credit fuelled environment we call 'normality' has been an advance from the homespun village environment I grew up in.
Not having something was "normal" and therefore we were 'not' continually comparing ourselves with others. To be poor was not a social affliction and amongst the poorest communities (at least outside the cities) the social glue was very strong and resilient.
The film traced the lifeblood of the Mekong and the communities living on its shores. It was another reminder of the fast disappearing world that the jet plane has propelled into our gaze and like the sub atomic world of the "quark" the moment we set eyes on it we start to contaminate it !