Are Mondays extra blue for you lately? Have you stopped using happy emojis in your Instagram captions? If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative, don’t despair. It’s probably because we’ve fallen down from our mighty rank of 118 to 122 on the World Happiness Index. Now that we think about it, it’s a perfectly good reason to despair.
The news that we rank so low on the United Nation’s measurement of happiness comes as a surprise. What have we got to be unhappy about? It’s not like women can’t go out at night without being subjected to sexual violence. And everything is A-OK as far as our money and taxes are concerned. Demonetization rules, you guys. Clearly the people over at the United Nations did not factor in the overwhelming support we show to people who try and express any opinion that is slightly different from ours.
Out of the 155 countries that were placed on the index, we’re placed at 122, preceded by countries like Pakistan (80), Nepal (99), Bhutan (97) and Bangladesh (110) amongst the 121 countries.
So how do they measure happiness? One explanation is that they’re secretly monitoring the number of Friends episodes we watch every day. The other, marginally more scientific, explanation is that they calculated the results on the basis of GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy along with the results from their global survey that asked people to rate, between 1-10, on four factors — the social support they feel if something goes wrong, freedom to make their own life choices, the sense of how corrupt the society is and how generous they are.
Norway is the happiest country in the world, followed by Denmark. We were not really surprised to see it at no 2. Their hygge lifestyle made sure that they’ll rank high.
Whether we need to change our social taboos or distract everybody with movies that manage to be blatantly sexist and homophobic at the same time, Indians must figure it out and get happy fast before the next survey rolls out.
