Great Buddha

High on a hillside overlooking the capital, a statue of the Buddha, the "Great Buddha" contesting for the world title largest ever, but inevitably to be overtaken by the next pointless extravaganza...

Suddenly you realise what all those biblical admonitions against graven images are all about. It is not just that their acolytes' devotions are misdirected to an inanimate and impotent lump of concrete, bronze or plaster, it is the obscene waste of their pitiful assets which might be better spent on sewers, roads and other basic essentials of a civilised society.

Admittedly they claim to have renounced material wealth in favour of some spurious and intangible metric of GNH, but for a country with a GDP of about 50 pence a year it is a sad indictment that they choose to squander what little they have on erecting pointless excesses like this. I seem to recall that when some tin pot African dictator built a cathedral to God's glory the Pope wisely chose not to consecrate it on the basis that such a poor country should not waste what little resources they had on self indulgent expressions of self aggrandisement.

Certainly impressive in scale (just look at the tiny trucks and even tinier people at the foot of the monument), but the prosaic concrete mixers and other inelegant construction machinery do rather remind me of the "feet of clay" parable...