So do Bumrungrad and the Skytrain represent an incomplete makeover or a profound change of direction? Economists and fund managers would dearly like to know the answer to that question, but in Asia the either/or mindset (good/evil; with-us-or-against-us) is usually seen as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind which has been forced to cultivate them.
For example, many young Thai women dye their hair every colour under the sun, sport tattoos and may even pierce their bodies in private places with silver jewellery; but, watch more closely and you will see them dutifully raising palms to their foreheads when they pass one of the Buddha shrines which appear every hundred yards or so throughout the city; get to know them and you will find that they belong to a traditional extended family, are extremely obedient to their parents and very conservative in many of their views (even the bar girls usually hold to a Buddhist code which they partially suspend during working hours).
Can such a wildly disparate society possess any sense of direction? Does history provide a guide to the future?
It was India, not the West, which first brought both international trade and prostitution to Thailand, as well as Buddhism. The Thais took what they wanted from those Buddhist and Hindu traders and gave it their own earthy, superstitious and good-natured twist. Similarly, successive Thai kings managed - through subtlety, concessions and cunning - to resist the land-grabbing gambits of the British and French during the colonial period, whilst taking those bits of the new age that suited them (like India, they loved the railway but rejected the muscular Christianity).

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