You are on your usual morning walk. At one end of the park, the tender coconut vendor is already attracting a few ‘walk-in’ customers. Not far from his cart is a temporary plastic booth manned by two ‘executives’ — look at their colourful neckties(!) — with a demo water purifier. Jog another 100 metres; you will not miss the mini-truck loaded with fresh vegetables and fruits.
You have just completed the second of the three-round routine when a sprightly young girl suddenly springs in your way. With a hurried but cheery ‘good morning’, she presses a small pamphlet into your palm and moves on as quickly as she came in. You glance at the pamphlet presuming that it is all about opening a new CET tutorial or yoga class or play school in the locality. But no! This is something special. It is announcing a ‘Happiness workshop’ — conducted by a new age guru in white robes and with a fake smile! You wonder how on earth — like the tender coconut, water purifier, vegetables and fruits — happiness too has become a commodity. But why not? After all, isn’t it a low-risk, low-investment but high-return, high-prospect business proposition?
Oh, come on, isn’t everyone talking about happiness these days? Even the United Nations is concerned about it. In fact, the third edition of World Happiness Report (WHR) was released not so long ago (April 23, 2015). Sponsored by the UN, and published by Sustainable Development Solutions Network, it had revealed the state of global happiness through a survey of 158 countries. Based on collated data and scores assigned for several variable factors, Switzerland had come right on top of the global happiness list, followed closely by Iceland, Denmark and Norway; the bottom five nations were Rwanda, Benin, Syria, Burundi and Togo.
“We are at an early stage in the new science of happiness and life satisfaction, and at an even earlier stage in thinking about the implications for public policy,” conceded Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the report and Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Yet the ancient sages and the latest research both tell us to keep moving forward, to put happiness back at the centre of our public concerns, and to place money-making as just one among many objectives. Governments around the world are taking note and seem ready to make happiness (or life satisfaction) one of the important indicators for the new Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted at the United Nations this fall.”
Sadly, the findings of the report did not bring any cheer to India. The country which was ranked a dismal 111 in 2013 had slipped six places further to 117 in the WHR 2015 list. As if adding insult to injury, nations like Pakistan (81), Palestine (108), Bangladesh (109), Ukraine (111) and Iraq (112) had fared better in the happiness race.
Unsurprisingly, the WHR 2015 failed to provoke any serious response, leave alone discussion among the political class or the policymakers of the country. While a majority of print media banished it to some inconsequential corners, television anchors did not seem to care a dime about the unhappy story.
In any case, the country is not new to such embarrassing reports and surveys. Back in 2011, the World Health Organisation (WHO) report stated that India had the highest rate of major depression in the world; and 10% of the Indian population suffered from mental disorders such as stress, anxiety and depression. Another survey conducted by Transparency International during 2013 had revealed that a large majority of the respondents chose to bracket political parties (86%), parliament / legislature (65%), police (75%) and public officials and servants (65%) as corrupt / extremely corrupt. A recent World Bank report on Ease of Doing Business (2015) has placed India in a deplorable 142nd position (out of 189 economies).
With such an unenviable track record, findings of WHR 2015 surprised none. Reactions, if any, came from bloggers whose comments were, in turns, sublime and ridiculous. One of them messaged: “It is a good sign for India on two counts: a) if neighbours are happy, your risks are cut to half; b) discontent comes out of yearning for more, which is a sign of progress.”
The Bhutan initiative
Incidentally, the World Happiness Report had actually grown out of a project from Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas. In 2011, its then prime minister, Jigmi Y Thinley, had prompted the United Nations to adopt a resolution inviting member nations to measure their happiness as a guide to improving public policies. Consequently, the first WHR was released in 2012; the second in 2013.
The real story had begun even earlier. Way back in 1972, the fourth king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck (born 1955), had found out that conventional development indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP) focused too much on materialistic needs; and even those countries which had achieved high economic growth and prosperity were not really happy and contented. He suggested that a more holistic approach for development and progress be realised, factoring therein non-economic aspects of well-being as well. His model sought to place the human individual in the centre of the development process; and recognise that besides material comforts, human individuals also needed comforts which were mental, emotional, spiritual, and psychological in nature. With this background, Wangchuck had coined the term “gross national happiness (GNH) index.” When a happiness poll was conducted in 2005, only 3 per cent of the Bhutanese population had identified themselves as unhappy, with 52 per cent saying they were happy, and the rest, very happy.
Paradoxically, the current political leadership in Bhutan seems rather cold of the GNH model. According to The New York Times (Index of Happiness? Bhutan’s New Leader Prefers More Concrete Goals/ Oct 4, 2013), Bhutan’s current Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay had “largely abandoned the country’s signature gross national happiness measure.” The article goes on to recall that “Tobgay’s catalog of modest promises during the election campaign included a motorised rototiller for every village and a utility vehicle for each district. Happiness was not on his list.”
Incidentally, the WHR 2015 lists Bhutan in 79th place, slightly ahead of Pakistan (81) and China (84), but far behind Singapore (24), Thailand (34) and Japan (46).
Not a holy cow
The United Nations and its periodical surveys/ reports like the WHR have had their own share of critics from all around the world. While some question the methodology adopted, others criticise that UN surveys are costly, unnecessary and useless.
A couple of months before WHR 2015 got released, The New Yorker published a rather tongue-in-cheek story. “In 2012, Denmark took first place in the United Nations’ inaugural World Happiness Report, having topped similar surveys for decades,” wrote Nathan Heller (Northern Lights/ Feb 16, 2015). “By the numbers, there is very little rotten in the state of Denmark, and its neighbours aren’t far behind. Bliss of this kind is startling from a group of countries that are frozen half the year, subsist substantially on preserved fish, and charge among the highest tax rates in the modern world.”
Observers also often thumb their nose at Switzerland, the happiest country as per WHR 2015. They question how the country which has 15,000 - 25,000 of its people attempting to kill themselves every year could claim to be happy. They also smirk at the Swiss banks which are alleged to assist dictators, drug lords and the mafia to store their ill-gotten money.
But report or no report, happiness seems to be the ‘in thing’, going by the mammoth proportions that the pursuit of happiness has reached globally. New age gurus seem to be springing up in every other street corner and competing with traditional ones to dispense magical formulae and mantras for happiness — all for a price, of course! The list of books published every year on how to find happiness, create happiness and resurrect happiness seems endless. Theories and papers on happiness are published, debated and discussed in universities and scientific institutions. Newspapers, magazines and the internet are awash with happiness experts, doctors, astrologers, agony aunts and uncles who dish out universal remedies for pain and suffering.
What is happiness?
But what exactly is this thing called happiness? How is it important to an individual or nation’s existence? “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence,” pronounced ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (384 – 322 BC). Many centuries later, German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) seemed to confirm it: “Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings.” Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), father of psychoanalysis, studied many patients before concluding that the pursuit of happiness was the intention of all people: “What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy, and to remain so.”
Over time, the subject of happiness has attracted the attention of not only scholars of philosophy or religion, but other disciplines like sociology, psychology, politics and economics too. The modern scientific community seems to be particularly gung-ho about it. “People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved,” says Matt Killingsworth. “As with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. In fact, in the last few years, there’s been an explosion in research on happiness.” Killingsworth, incidentally, has (as part of his doctoral research at Harvard University) built an app, Track Your Happiness, that lets people report their feelings in real time.
Pathological researchers in recent times have also tried to prove that “people who describe themselves as happy are less likely to catch a cold than those who say they are unhappy.” According to an article in New Scientist (Happiness syndrome/ March 21, 2012), “a study of people after flu vaccinations showed happier folk generated more antibodies; another study showed that the smiles on photographs of novice nuns were good predictors of their longevity.”
There have been several contrarian views on happiness as well. More than two decades ago, Richard P Bentall, senior lecturer in the Department of Clinical Psychology, Liverpool University published a paper (Journal of Medical Ethics/ June 1992) tantalisingly titled: ‘A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder’! Finding similarities between happiness and depression, Bentall argued that happiness be included in the future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the name Major Affective Disorder: Pleasant Type.
In India, sociologist and clinical psychologist Ashis Nandy has held singularly original views about the notions of happiness and its uneven contours. In his essay titled ‘The pursuit of happiness and other absurd ideas’ (Tehelka/ November 12, 2011), Nandy explained how happiness, like school uniforms, had become compulsory; and how the idea of happiness had gradually transformed from a mental state to an objectified, measurable quality of life that can be attained. “Today, the determined pursuit of happiness is a response to a new disease called unhappiness,” explained Nandy. “To acquire normal happiness one now requires therapy, counselling or expert guidance from a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst or professional counsellor or, alternatively, from a personal philosopher, wise man or woman, or a guru.”
Nandy is one with Japanese cultural anthropologist Tamotsu Aoki who pleaded that “we give up the grand idea and opt for small ideas of happiness, the kinds that one finds strewn about in everyday life.” He also concurs with philosopher K J Shah who opined that “the strength of a human relationship should be measured not by the absence of quarrels, but by how much quarrelling the relationship can take.” Nandy says that this argument, too, had a parallel definition of happiness built into it: “a happy person should be able to bear larger doses of unhappiness.” In conclusion, Nandy’s simple prescription is that we need to be practical and reconcile to live in this imperfect world with our normal unhappiness. “No matter what, I definitely do not believe in this obsession of finding happiness,” he says. “Similarly, I find tremendously tiresome all those gurus vending instant happiness. I suspect that as they talk so much about it, they actually are not happy themselves.”
That brings you back to the big, existential question: what to do with the pamphlet with the guy in white robe? I have a simple suggestion. Think of The Beatles. And get back to where you once belonged! Think of the days as a child when you would find a piece of paper, fold it here and there, and make an airplane. Do that again today with this pamphlet. And then, take a deep breath and just let the paper plane fly to that pretty girl still prancing at the far end of the park!
...happy by choice
The guy who holds the title of the happiest man in the world is not a whiz kid, business tycoon, wily politician or rockstar. He is the Buddhist monk, photographer and author Matthieu Ricard, the 69-year-old Frenchman, an erstwhile molecular biologist at Institute Pasteur, who abandoned a distinguished career and opted to don the saffron robe.
How did he get the ‘happiest man’ tag? It was Anthony Barnes, Independent on Sunday’s arts and media correspondent, who first reported on the intensive clinical tests by Ricard at the University of Wisconsin. The tests had shown that brain training in the form of meditation could cause an overwhelming change in the levels of happiness.
“MRI scans showed that Ricard and other long-term meditators — who had completed more than 10,000 hours each — experienced a huge level of ‘positive emotions’ in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which is associated with happiness,” explained Barnes (The Happiest Man on Earth?/ The Independent, UK/ Jan 21, 2007). “Further studies have shown that even novices who have done only a little meditation have increased levels of happiness. But Ricard’s abilities were head and shoulders above the others involved in the trials.”
Today, Ricard is a close associate and French interpreter of the Dalai Lama. He tours the world, participating in global conferences and seminars, and making a robust and passionate case for altruism. His deep and scientifically tinged reflections on happiness, altruism, meditation and Buddhism have resulted in several bestselling books. His popularity can be gauged by watching TED talks on the internet. His talk on ‘How to let altruism be your guide’ has nearly 1.3 million views. His speech about ‘The habits of happiness’ (TED/ Feb 2004) attracted more than 5 million views!
Ricard is also the founder of Karuna-Shechen, a charitable non-profit organisation rooted in the ideal of compassion in action. Since 2000, Karuna-Shechen has been developing and managing programmes in primary health care, education, and social services for the under-served populations of India, Nepal and Tibet.
For further details, visit www.matthieuricard.org