It is difficult to understand how a very abstract thing like “happiness” is determined. The main game is played by numerology. As a measure of happiness, the survey raises some questions that are characteristically related to materialistic and modern welfare state systems. Things like family, fulfilment of personal expectations or sexuality remain implicit.
The last question of the goat-like Yaksha was towards Yudhisthira was, “Who is happy in this world?” Yudhisthira replied that the person who eats vegetables daily in a state of indebtedness is the one who is truly happy.
Who And What Determines Happiness?
20 March is International Happiness Day. If this topic of Mahabharata comes to anyone’s mind on this day, they will surely laugh in their mind. Debt-ridden EMI people work 12–14 hours a day, eat tasty preservative coated food in the microwave and are no longer “happy”.
On the eve of this special day, however, an organisation working on behalf of the United Nations publishes a list in which the countries of the world are sorted in order of happiness.
This year too, India is one of the countries at the bottom of the list of happiness. India ranks 136 out of 146 countries. In 2021 India was ranked 139, 140 in 2019. Pakistan also tops the list. This year their place is at 105.
The question may arise, on what basis is the matter determined? And who made this list? The report is presented by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which works for the United Nations. In the process of making the report, the citizens of different countries are called and asked whether they are happy or not.
As well as accounting for the economic growth rate of the countries under study, the average life expectancy of the people, social assistance, freedom to work, corruption, etc., are measured. Several Western research institutes are involved in this study.
It is difficult to understand from the above account how a very abstract subject like happiness is determined. How do we give a collective look to a very personal feeling like happiness? The main game played here is numerology. It is noteworthy that the survey, as a measure of happiness, raises some questions which are characteristically related to the materialistic and modern welfare states.
Total peace, bread, clothing, housing, as well as government support — all of these are the criteria for happiness. As such, the issue of statehood seems to be very important. Things like family, fulfilment of personal expectations or sexuality remain implicit.
Anyone can understand that in the World Happiness Report, India or countries like it will not perform well. Poverty, lack of employment or pseudo-employment are not new in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, etc. The same applies to countries in Africa or Latin America.
The Unhappiness In Literature
Surprisingly, most of the countries at the top of the list are in Northern Europe. The countries at the top of the 2022 happiness list are Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, etc. Undoubtedly, these less populous countries are more likely to have access to public services. But even after that, some problems remain.
If the criteria of the happiness list, i.e. coming out of the table of mass surveys, can be explored in some cultural sphere, then a very confusing picture emerges. A happiness list has been presented for the last 10 years. And for some time before this decade, the countries of Northern Europe, known as the Nordic Countries, which have been at the top of the happiness list, have seen a special kind of literary practice.
This literature is basically a mystery. But it lacks the familiar formula of mystery studied in England or America. The characters in these narratives, known as the Nordic Nair, are extremely dark. Individuals are under state and administrative pressure.
In addition, there are a number of problems that have arisen as a result of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which has led to the catastrophe of the people of those countries. More notably, the narrative structure of the Nordic Nair has gradually entered the literature of England, Scotland and Ireland. There, too, people began to meet face to face, unhappily torn apart.
Henning Mankel, a Swedish writer, began writing his Kurt Wallander series in the 1990s. There are both mystics and criminals victims of everything from loneliness to drug use, extinction due to depression, and so on. But he fails to meet the expectations of his art-loving father or lover.
On the other hand, it cannot be said that those who chase after Wallander also commit crimes out of sheer self-interest. In a short story, Wallander confronts an Afro-ethnic murderer at a grocery store in retaliation for the state’s injustice to the murderer. Mankel leaves the question of how criminal he is to the reader.
In the same way, in his Millennium Trilogy, Stig Larson portrays a girl named Lisbeth Salander who has been miserable since childhood. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, government-backed mafias (mainly drug traffickers and traffickers) sought refuge in various northern European countries and continued their activities with the help of the corrupt bureaucracies of the host countries.
In his The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, Larson portrayed state corruption, the shadow of the corporate world and, finally, domestic and sexual violence. This stunned the whole world. This trilogy of a girl’s solo flight with a vast vicious circle has sold millions of copies and continues to this day.
At the same time, Larson cited the Swedish media and its subsequent story of violence and revenge. The loneliness and exhausting life of Michael Blomkvist, the protagonist of this trilogy, speaks volumes about what happiness is.
Icelandic writer Arnoldur Indridason has caught the eye of readers around the world right now. In his Detective Erlandur series, both detectives and criminals suffer from severe depression. The background is sometimes so dark that the reader is drowning in all that unhappiness. Countless readers have experienced the trauma of reading his critically acclaimed novel, Tsar City.
The same is true of Norwegian writer Joe Nesbo. Australia is the setting for The Bat, the first novel in Nesbor’s Harry Hole series. In this novel, he brings to light the great deprivation and humiliation of the Australian people, known as the Aborigines.
Detective Harry Hole is not a happy or satisfied man either. Time and time again, he encounters the shattering of an abstract concept called humanity. All this writing does not give relief. The warmth and comfort of Sherlock Holmes or Ercul Poirot’s novels are not in these writings. Not even in Nesbo’s non-series novels.
Nesbo has recently remade Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth, written during the English Renaissance, was only here. The Cold War-era criminal world and its esoteric chemistry in the 1960s reveal the background to Norway’s disease today.
Another veteran of the Swedish mystery story, Hakan Nesser’s detective Van Veteran is also a lone retired police officer; divorced. She lost her son in a complete coincidence.
And at the root of all the mysteries, he is involved in is the story of countless unhappy people. Someone comes out of a long prison without reason, or someone commits a crime by seeking revenge for being a victim of sexual perversion. There is no relief in Nesser’s novels either. The object called ‘happiness’ is completely missing.
The list goes on and on. Peter Hoeg of Denmark, Camilla Lacburg of Sweden and others have been writing about the uninterrupted flow of unhappiness.
When Harry Potter-writer JK Rowling wrote the Cormoran Strike series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, it became clear that the address of non-happiness extends to England. He is a Strike Detective, but he is a very depressed man.
Turning your eyes to the other side, is it clear that Rowling’s Harry is happy? Isn’t Voldemort, the villain of that story, also a character suffering from intense unhappiness?
In 2015, English writer Paula Hawkins, in her mystery novel The Girl on the Train, brought the self-deprecating, intoxicated Amathanakh sad girl, a resident of which city of happiness?
Literature is the mirror of the masses. Statistics are in the hands of the state and the organisation. These two objects rarely meet. The notion of happiness of Indians has changed from time to time. However, the Indians who are constantly posting pictures and emojis on the net seem to have grasped a confusion in the name of happiness.
The Happiness Report does not address this confusion. It just goes silent showing some numbers. The Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi people who are trapped in this silence post more and more smiling faces on social media to cover the wounds of their daily life.