Russian Revolution Centenary: Part One

I got a call from Tanya, an employee of the Russian consulate in Bombay, this morning.

“We’re happy to invite you next Saturday, the 4^th of November, for lunch and a concert.”

“Thank you.” I said. “I was wondering when the centenary celebrations would be announced.”

“Centenary?” Tanya sounded puzzled. “We are celebrating the Day of People’s Unity.”

“The Day of People’s Unity?” Despite my thirty-five years’ association with Russia, I could not recall any such day. Which Russian people were in need of uniting and why? When I lived in Moscow, every year we celebrated the 7^th of November, the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. The atmosphere was festive, Russian government used special planes to forcefully send clouds away. As a result, on 7^th November, it never rained or snowed on the red square. Brezhnev and later Gorbachev stood on the balcony of Lenin’s tomb with uniformed commanders and watched the red square parade displaying the Soviet military might. Hundreds of thousands of Russians who pretended to work every day got a welcome one-day relief. 

“You don’t know the Day of People’s Unity?” Tanya asked. “President Putin has established that holiday a few years ago.”

“And the October revolution day? The 7^th November?”

This year is the 100^th anniversary of the October revolution. Since Russia is synonymous with grandness, I expected celebrations the kind of which mankind has never seen.

“No, the October revolution day is gone. We don’t celebrate it at all. For many years now. In fact, the Day of People’s Unity replaced it.”

Since Tanya was on the consulate’s phone line, I decided not to probe any further. Who would have thought the 100^th anniversary of the great Russian revolution would be ignored and forgotten? Like the clouds on top of the red square, the centenary has been swept away into oblivion. 

*****

The 1917 revolution appeared to be jinxed from the start. In 1918, Russia adopted the Gregorian instead of Julian calendar. Consequently, it turned out that the October revolution had, in fact, happened in November. (Equally confusing for the foreigners is the “Old New Year” celebrated by Russians on 14 January.) 

I can write the story of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the execution of his entire family. Or about the Bloody Sunday in January 1905 when the imperial guards ruthlessly killed unarmed, peaceful protesters. Bloody Sunday could have been the starting point of the revolution that took place twelve years later. It would be interesting to write the life story of the mad monk, Grigori Rasputin, a peasant whose influence on the Tsar’s wife made him a threat to the empire. His murder still remains a mystery after 100 years. I could probably write an essay explaining the difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the Red army and the White army. But I don’t plan to write any of it now. In the coming weeks, I prefer to analyze why the impact of the revolution didn’t last even for 100 years, why communism failed, why the Soviet Union collapsed, and what lessons we can learn from that failure.

In doing so, I will offer my personal perspective, based on my years of stay in Russia. The USA and Europe have many outstanding experts on Russia and communism. However, most of them have never lived in Russia. Their analysis is usually tainted with their own agendas. The versatile historian and activist Noam Chomsky calls the Russian revolution a “coup”, and considers that Lenin and Stalin had killed socialism in the initial years itself. I am a Chomsky fan, but I think he is wrong (a) because his diehard left-wing thinking blinds him at times and (b) he has never lived in the Soviet Union.   

The surviving communists in the world still maintain communism to be the only political system capable of saving the mankind. They argue that in the USSR, communism died because it wasn’t rightly implemented. That is also untrue. Soviet Union tried to enforce the Marxist philosophy in many ways.

*****

The world, as a matter of fact, should be grateful to the October revolution. That revolution gave birth to the world’s first Communist State. The massive experiment used the Soviet people as guinea pigs. Soviet Union bore the burden, it became the biggest lab to test communism, and millions of its citizens suffered as a result for over seventy years. Russia and the other fourteen sovereign off-shoots of the former USSR are still paying the price for their communist past. By running that experiment, and failing miserably in it, the USSR saved many other nations from failing in the future.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world had 32 communist countries. Today, only five: China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea. (Would you like to settle in any of them?)

The USSR-USA cold war was projected as the war between communism and capitalism, authoritarian system and democracy, planned economy and markets. But USSR and USA were not equivalent samples. Their history, geography, economies and people were not comparable. In a scientific experiment, you take two similar rats (scientific term: probabilistically equivalent), one becomes the experimental sample and the other a control sample. Since USSR and USA were vastly different, the failure of communism is not proven by the collapse of Soviet Union.

The failure was, curiously enough, proven in two other nations where historical accidents had created two pairs of identical rats.

After the Second World War, Germany and Korea were both split into two nations each, one rat given the dose of communism and the other rat vaccinated with capitalism. East Germany collapsed, its currency and political system vanished, and it had to be absorbed by West Germany. This was one scientific proof of the failure of communism.

The experiment, unfortunately, still continues in North Korea. South Korea is an Asian Tiger, its economy putting it among the world’s elite, its brands Samsung, LG or Hyundai part of our households. North Korea, a military regime, subservient to a whimsical dynasty, is poor beyond imagination. Availability of electricity and water is sporadic. Torture, public executions, slave labour, forced abortions and infanticides in prison are common. A comparable child in North Korea weighs 20 pounds less and is 8 inches shorter than its Southern counterpart. If this is not the proof of failure of communism, I don’t know what is.

Private vs public ownership

I don’t know if you have ever felt what I feel when I look at infants. They look so terribly helpless that I wonder how all of us survived our infancy and childhood. The answer lies in private ownership. The procreating parents take enormous care of their child; feeding, cleaning, teaching and caring and worrying about it till the time the child becomes independent.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, children are supposed to be given at birth to the State for the State to raise them. I am glad that book remains a fiction. It is impossible that the State, the faceless State, can raise children with the same degree of care and love as the parents. The same is true of private property versus government property.

In the Soviet Union, all means of production had to be owned by the government. Every working Soviet citizen was a government employee. Even writers and painters were expected to be employed by the Writers’ guild and Painters’ guild which were government organisations. A music composer was an employee of the Union of Composers.

At the time of the revolution, the Russian empire was primarily agricultural. Kulaks privately owned large agricultural farms. Stalin decided to get rid of them – a process termed dekulakisation. Many were arrested, deported and executed. This was followed by the process of “Collectivisation”. Collective farms (Kolkhoz) and state-owned farms (Sovkhoz) were both wonderfully fantasy concepts. Farmers began killing their own cattle. Ukraine, known as the bread basket of the world became an importer of wheat. In the man-made famine of 1932-33, some 10 million people died of starvation (holodomor).  This is now considered as genocide by Ukraine and some other nations.

The farmers had no incentive to put in their best efforts when their farms, their cattle, their property was taken over by the government. That killed Soviet agriculture.

Making a large pool

What is a government? It is the summation of the people who are part of the geography which that government controls. Since government is a legal fiction (in the sense we can’t see or touch it), what is owned by the government is actually controlled by people who run the government. Governments can own property (open spaces, parks, lands, bridges), cash (taxes collected from the citizens), natural resources (oil, diamonds), banks, airlines, hospitals and much else. All that is owned by the government is liable to be looted by those who run the government. That is the reason politicians of all kinds, parties and countries are usually rich far beyond their capabilities.

In the USSR, buying a private car was not easy. Those who could afford to book one, needed to wait for 6-8 years for delivery. Leonid Brezhnev, though, owned a large fleet that included everything from Chevrolet Bel Air, Opel, Chrysler 300 up to Maserati Quattroporte, two Rolls-Royce Silver Shadows and a Lincoln Continental. 

Public versus private

This public versus private debate is not restricted to the governments.

I see many Indian men spitting on the roads. They do it passionately and shamelessly. I don’t think they spit on the floor inside their house (I hope not).

We, the civilised non-spitting people, may change our order in the restaurants depending on who is paying for it. If a large corporation, your employer, is paying for it; you may be tempted to eat more or at least order the most expensive dishes. When you do that, whose money are you spending? The shareholders’. They would get less dividend as a result of your eating expensive dishes.

Looting can happen in private corporations just like it happens in the governments. Government collects taxes from a large number of people. A giant multinational can raise huge amounts of money by issuing shares to the public. The trick is to collect money from a large number. Whoever controls that money can then begin to loot part of it for personal profit. This is how some bankers in the USA manage to earn 100 million dollars a year as their pay package. Then why don’t those banks collapse the way the Soviet Union did? Because of the checks and balances in the system. Private companies and democratic nations have regulations and checks and balances. If not enforced, the banks paying hundreds of millions of dollars to their top directors will go bust as well.

That was the difference between a private company and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, everything belonged to the government, and due to the dictatorship of the communist party, almost no checks and balances existed. At the lower level, ordinary workers had little incentive to work. No farmer is really interested in cultivating land that doesn’t belong to him. At the highest levels, the politburo and the top communist party members were busy plundering the country’s natural resources. Since all power was concentrated in their hands, they were not answerable to anybody.

Soviet Communism experiment: Lesson no. 1: The private owners can take better care of their property whether it is children, farms or businesses. Government, a faceless entity, forcefully owns the country’s resources and collects money from its citizens. That opens the doors for govt representatives to raid the country’s treasury. In the absence of regulations, checks and balances, the same can happen in large public companies.

(Next lesson next week)

Ravi 

An Analysis of the Las Vegas Shooting

On the night of 1 October, a music concert in Las Vegas was interrupted by the discordant sounds of gunshots and screaming. Ten minutes of non-stop bullets fired from the 32^nd floor of a neighbouring hotel left 58 people dead and 546 injured. The mass murderer was identified as one Stephen Paddock. As is typical of spree shooters, the last person Paddock killed was himself, much before the police could approach his hotel room. Three weeks later, the American police, investigators, media and general public are still frantically searching for a motive. Why did Paddock cause what turned out to be the deadliest massacre in American history by a single individual?

This article offers my theory about the motive of this ‘lone wolf’.

Can a white man be called a terrorist?

It would have been much simpler if Paddock had Arabic features or if his name was Mohammed Paddock. The carnage could then be legally and technically called an act of terrorism; the USA could then officially send drones to some Arab geography and bomb a few hundred civilians in retaliation for this imported terror. Unfortunately, Stephen Paddock was white, very American, without any links whatsoever to politics or religion. Though ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, in this case it was an obvious lie. Most ISIS recruits are in their 20s and 3os. Paddock was 64 years old.

A completely different shooter  

Other than his pensionable age, Paddock’s complete absence from social media has left analysts dumbfounded. Paddock didn’t leave a suicide note, emails, video messages, nothing. His not having a Facebook or Twitter account could be partly explained by his age, but he could have still left an explanatory letter or clues.

Paddock had no criminal record in any State or federal data base, except a single minor traffic violation years ago.

He was rich, not in any financial difficulties. Weeks before the shooting, he had sent his girlfriend to her native land-Philippines- and then transferred 100,000 dollars in her name, an act she had interpreted as the break-up of the relationship. It indeed was his parting gift to her, but not in a way she thought.

Ben Paddock, the biological father of Stephen Paddock, was a bank robber and con man. For eight years, he was on the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives’ list. However, he had disappeared when Stephen was seven. Ben’s wife had told the four sons their father was dead. Ben Paddock took no further part in the kids’ upbringing. It’s a moot point whether criminal genes exist and are hereditary. 

Mass murderers are supposed to be depressed or angry or mentally unstable. The investigators conducted detailed autopsy tests on Paddock’s brain to find abnormalities. There were none. Paddock possessed a normal, healthy brain.

In fact, his preparation for the shooting was methodical and systematic.  23 rifles and a handgun were found in his hotel room. Over a period of six days, he had secretly brought them in ten large suitcases. Twelve rifles were fitted with bump fire stocks, a device that converts semi-automatic into automatic weapons. The same room had tripods for the rifles to rest on, high-tech telescopic sights, a large quantity of ammunition. The entire arsenal was very expensive, top of the range. Paddock had placed baby cameras inside and outside his room for him to monitor all movement in the hotel corridors. His car, parked in the hotel basement, was full of stocks of Ammonium Nitrate (used in bombs), 1600 rounds of ammunition, and 23 kg of Tannerite (another explosive). At his home in Mesquite, police located 19 more firearms, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition. All guns, even the semi-automatic rifles, were bought legally. Nevada gun laws permit the buying and carrying of rifles and shotguns without permits.

The shooting was not impulsive in any way. Paddock had, over the years, systematically built up his gun museum. Six days before the massacre, when he checked in at hotel Mandalay Bay, he knew exactly what he planned to do on the day of the concert. A few months before, he had checked in at various hotels next to music festivals, presumably for reconnaissance.

A successful and rich man

To speculate on his motive, one needs to look at Stephen Paddock’s career. He was an MBA from the California State University. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service as an accountant and auditor for a few years. Disappointed with the kind of money a salaried person makes, he entered the real-estate business. Very successful at that, he was worth more than $2 million by the year 2000. His tax records show he made $6 million profits from selling some of his property in 2015.

His main career for the last 25 years, though, was gambling. He slept during the day, and gambled through the night. Paddock’s speciality was the game of video poker. This is different from the crowded tables in glamorous casinos we see in the James Bond movies. For hours, and for years, Paddock played alone in front of a slot machine. As an accountant, he had developed algorithms, and was a successful gambler. His bets ranged from $10000 to $50000. He was so loyal; most casinos offered him free hotel rooms as a reward for his loyalty. The room he had booked at hotel Mandalay Bay for a week was part of the free promotion.

He lived in various houses, but didn’t socialise with any of his neighbours. In fact, he built barricades to make sure the neighbours couldn’t see anything in his house. Since he slept during the day, his rooms were covered with thick curtains to keep the sun away. Paddock had two divorces, and a current girlfriend.

Boredom and a new challenge

Two things emerge on reading Paddock’s life history. (a) He was not social, almost a misanthrope. (b) He loved gambling and casino games. The two factors are critical when speculating Paddock’s motive.

I think Paddock was bored. Anyone looking at a five-card slot machine for twenty-five years would be. He was looking for a new grand game with much higher stakes. A game worthy of his talents. A challenge that would take him out of the dark casino room, and allow him to do something spectacular out there in the real world. He found such a game – the hunting of humans, a 21^st century sport.

Hunting of humans

The big-game hunting of humans is played on two levels-State and individual.

On the State level, when NATO soldiers use their most sophisticated weaponry in Iraq or Syria, they can fearlessly hunt human beings, most of them civilians. The soldiers are given hunting licences, and they are rewarded for the number of corpses they can produce. Sometimes tragedy strikes and the hunter himself gets killed. His family becomes the gold star family. His widow may get a personal phone call from the president of the USA.

On the individual level, mass murderers try to maximise the number of prey. I call it the “Corpse Ratio”. (Read my open diary Week 43/ 2006: the Ethics of NuclearBombing.)

11 September 2001 set the benchmark for all aspiring mass murderers. Each of the plane hijackers managed to kill 150 people. That corpse ratio statistic, 1:150, remains a record till date.

Last year, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, drove a truck into the crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France. He killed 86 people.

The previous American record was held by Omar Mateen, 29, who single-handedly killed 49 people last year in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Stephen Paddock managed to beat the American record in the individual hunting competition, but he fell short of the 1:150 all time record set by the 9/11 terrorists.

As an accountant, auditor and gambler, Paddock was probably aware of these records. It is possible he died happily thinking (wrongly) he had killed far more people than he actually did.

Getting away with murder

Just like the American soldiers killing human beings in Iraq and Syria, the mass murderers usually escape any statutory punishment. They either kill themselves or are killed by the police (known as Suicide by Cop).

Social researchers have found that many normal people would be inclined to commit crimes, if there was no punishment. In a 2014 study, one third of male students at a US university said they would rape a woman if they could get away with it.

It is plausible Stephen Paddock wished to play the spectacular game of man-hunting, with no fear of jail. It’s much easier for a 64-year man to decide to end his life, than for a 29-year old, I presume. Paddock got bored at 64, but he could have got bored at 84. With his expensive rifles, he could have still managed to take part in the mass murder sport.

The lesson  

Just as in the private sector, 9/11 established a record of 1:150; on the State level, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing had produced the best corpse ratios in the history of warfare.  If you ignore the small number of unfortunate Americans stationed there, the two bombs killed more than 200,000 enemy bodies without losing a single of their own.

As the weapons become more sophisticated and plentiful, the State actors would also aspire to improve the corpse ratio in this game of human hunting.

The current US president is 71 years old. The world’s deadliest weapons are at his fingertips. Using them is his prerogative; no punishment is prescribed for it. If he senses his term coming to an end by law or prematurely, he may be tempted to break the Hiroshima-Nagasaki record.

Just as Paddock wished to end his career and life in a spectacular fashion, so can the president of the United States of America. North Korea has 25 million people. “Totally destroying North Korea” would make the world forget Hiroshima.

Evil old men with sophisticated weapons, fearing no punishment, participating in the 21^st century human hunting sport. That, for me, is the big lesson of the Las Vegas shooting.

Ravi 

Gross National Happiness

To understand the way Bhutan calculates its Gross National Happiness, we should recall the way we were marked and graded in our school and college days. In India, each subject was awarded a maximum of 100 marks, with 35 or 40 as a passing threshold.  Students received a distinction, first, second or third class as grades based on the sum of marks translated in a percent score. Instead of Bachelor of Arts or Science, imagine yourself appearing for a “Bachelor of Happiness” degree with the following nine subjects, all carrying equal weight.

1.       Psychological well being

2.      Health

3.      Time use

4.      Education

5.      Cultural diversity and resilience

6.      Good governance

7.      Community vitality

8.     Ecological diversity and resilience

9.      Living standards

Before describing each, let me explain the concept of thresholds.

Thresholds

The GNH index uses two kinds of thresholds or cut offs: Sufficiency thresholds and a happiness threshold.

Sufficiency thresholds are like passing marks. It asks ‘how much is enough to be happy’. For example, in Bhutan, an income of 1.5 times the poverty line income is considered sufficient for the earner to be happy. In affluent countries, a car and a bedroom of your own may be a sufficiency threshold. (Ownership of twenty cars and a house with fifty bedrooms may not result in exponential happiness. No matter how well you write an exam paper, you will never get more than 100%).  

The second cut off is the happiness threshold. It asks ‘how many domains or in what percentage of indicators must a person achieve sufficiency in order to be understood as happy?’ In other words, you will get your ‘Bachelor of happiness’ if you cross the sufficiency thresholds (receive pass marks) in at least 66% of the indicators. Why is GNH marked at 66%? Because the system is subjective, and people are diverse. For example, spirituality is one of the indicators. An atheist may discard it (not pass in that subject), but still be happy because he has achieved sufficiency in so many other indicators.

Each Bhutanese citizen is interviewed as part of the GNH survey. Based on his or her answers, a score is created. The person gets classified into one of four categories. Following are the results of Bhutan’s 2015 survey.

2015 GNH survey	Score range	% of Bhutanese
Deeply Happy	77%-100%	8.4%
Extensively Happy	66%-76%	35.0%
Narrowly Happy	50%-65%	47.9%
Unhappy	0%-49%	8.8%

Is Bhutan the happiest nation, because it invented GNH? Not at all, and the kingdom doesn’t claim to be. By quantifying happiness in detail, Bhutan can keep reshaping its politics and public policy in order to improve the score. The national index in 2015 was 0.756, an improvement over 0.743 in 2010.

Let me now briefly talk of the nine domains and the 33 indicators that are part of those domains.

Psychological well-being

Indicators: (a) Life satisfaction, (b) emotional balance (positive and negative emotions) and (c) spirituality.

Life satisfaction is a person’s self-assessment based on his health, occupation, family, standard of living and work-life balance, each measured on a scale of 1-5. The highest score is 25, whereas the sufficiency threshold is set at 19.

Compassion, generosity, forgiveness, contentment and calmness are the positive emotions, while selfishness, jealousy, anger, fear and worry are the negative or ‘disturbing’ emotions. Both are rated on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (very much).

Spirituality is self assessed but also asks about the person’s view on karma, his engagement in prayers and meditation. This factor would be less relevant in places like Europe or USA.

Health

Indicators: (a) Self-reported health status (b) Number of healthy days (c) disability (d) mental health

Typically, a Bhutanese individual is said to be well only if heat and pain are absent from the body and sorrow is absent from the mind. The sufficiency threshold for healthy days has been set at 26 days a month. The mental health indicator consists of 12 questions that can decipher depression, anxiety as well as confidence and concentration levels of the respondent.

Health, in my view, is critical for happiness. I know of a couple of multi-millionaires each spending the last decade in a wheelchair constantly shuttling between home and hospital.

Time Use

Indicators: (a) Paid work (b) Unpaid work (c) Sleeping hours

Working hours under GNH include unpaid work such as childcare, household work and voluntary work. Eight hours a day is the legal limit. Those who work longer are identified as ‘time deprived’. Many Bhutanese women, and people in Eastern Bhutan suffer from time deprivation.

Eight hours’ sleep is considered necessary for a well-functioning body. Those sleeping short hours are ‘sleep deprived’.

Shortage of sleep due to overwork is a double whammy. It deprives a person of free time as well as sleep.

Education

Indicators: (a) Literacy (b) schooling (c) knowledge (d) value

The holistic approach values deep foundation in traditional knowledge, common values and skills. The primary task of education, formal or otherwise, is the creation of good human beings. That’s why the indicator includes the cultivation and transmission of values.

Reading/writing in one language and six years of schooling are sufficiency thresholds.

The five knowledge variables are interesting. Knowledge of (1) local legends and folk stories, (2) local festivals, (3) traditional songs, (4) HIV-AIDS transmission and (5) constitution.

In values, respondents are asked how justifiable the five destructive actions are: killing, stealing, lying, creating disharmony in relationships and sexual misconduct.

Cultural diversity and resilience

Indicators: (a) Speak native language (b) artisan skills (c) socio-cultural activities (d) Driglam Namzha (the way of harmony)

In Bhutan, the sufficiency threshold is very high for speaking the native language, since almost everyone is fluent in his/her mother tongue. (Not the case in elite or elitist India).

The 13 arts and crafts include weaving, embroidery, painting, carpentry, carving, sculpture, casting, blacksmithing, bamboo works, gold/silver- smithing, masonry, leather works and papermaking. (This is one indicator where I fail miserably).

Respondents are asked the number of days they participated in socio-cultural activities in the past 12 months. The sufficiency threshold is 6-12 days a year.

Driglam Namzha is the expected behaviour on formal occasions. For example, at Indian weddings, Indian women wear colourful, silk sarees. If respondents perceive this as important, they score higher. The assumption is that valuing traditions grows happiness.

Good Governance

Indicators: (a) Political participation (b) Fundamental rights (c) Service delivery (d) Government performance

Political participation is assessed based on your inclination to vote in the next election, and the frequency of your attending the community meetings.

Fundamental rights include freedom of speech and opinion, to vote, to form or join any political party, equal access to join public service, equal pay for work of equal value, non-discrimination based on race or gender.

Service delivery is measured by your access to the nearest health care centre, waste disposal method, access to electricity and clean water supply. If you dispose trash by composting/burning/ municipal garbage pickup, you are doing fine. If your answer is to dump in forests/dump in rivers, then you are deprived.

You assess your government’s efficiency by rating their performance in the last 12 months on seven objectives: employment, equality, education, health, anti-corruption, environment and culture. Each is rated on a scale of 1 to 5; the maximum value for this indicator is 35. A sufficiency threshold is set at 28; meaning a ‘good’ or ‘very good’ rating is needed in at least five objectives.

It is noteworthy that your method of waste disposal or your government’s performance affect not only the nation’s happiness but your individual happiness as well.

Community Vitality

Indicators: (a) Donating time and money (b) Community relationships (c) Family

GNH philosophy expects strong relationships among the community members and within families, socially constructive values, volunteering and donating time and money, and safety from violence and crime. These are considered fundamental to community development.

For donation, (1) donating 10% of your income and volunteering 3 days a year or (2) donating 20% of your income or (3) volunteering for more than 6 days a year are the sufficiency thresholds.

Community relationships are judged by your ‘sense of belonging’ and ‘trust in neighbours’.

For assessing safety, respondents are asked whether they have been a victim of crime in the past 12 months. The question requires a yes or no, and the threshold is set at “no”.

Ecological Diversity and Resilience

Indicators: (a) Wildlife damage (b) Urban issues (c) Environmental responsibility (d) Pollution

This domain explains why Bhutan doesn’t welcome tourists. Tourism can be a grand business for Bhutan, the GDP would grow dramatically, but the pollution would go up and wildlife may get damaged. Happiness will fall just as GDP grows. (Indian tourists are reluctantly allowed because India takes care of Bhutan’s defence. China swallowing Bhutan like it did with Tibet is an existential threat. Execution of that threat would turn Bhutan into a very unhappy nation, perhaps no longer a kingdom.).  

The Constitution of Bhutan expects every Bhutanese citizen “to contribute to the protection of the natural environment, conservation of the rich biodiversity of Bhutan and prevention of all forms of ecological degradation including noise, visual and physical pollution.” (Article 5)

The wildlife indicator asks for information on damage to crops.

Respondents are asked to report their worries on four urban issues: traffic congestion, inadequate green spaces, lack of pedestrian streets and urban sprawl. This indicator acts as a substitute for sustainable urban development.

Living Standards

Indicators: (a) Household income (b) Assets (c) Housing quality

This area refers to the material wellbeing of the Bhutanese people.

While we may think of a mobile phone, TV, computer, refrigerator or bicycle as assets, for many Bhutanese, livestock and farming land are the primary assets. Focus group discussions in rural districts concluded that five acres was the sufficiency threshold for a rural family of five people.

The quality of housing is composed of three indicators: the type of roofing, type of toilet and room ratio. Corrugated galvanised iron (CGI) or concrete brick or stone for roofing, pit latrine with septic tank for toilet and two persons per room are the thresholds and all three must be met.

Deeply happy

Having looked at the nine domains and the thirty-three indicators, let us look at the profile of the “Deeply Happy” people in Bhutan, 8.3% of the Bhutanese population. Two thirds of them are male, one third female. 70% live in rural areas, 30% in urban areas. 60% of them are aged 40 or less. 84% are married, and 12% are never married. (Meaning you are unlikely to be deeply happy if you are divorced, separated or widowed. If any of the three, please remarry as soon as possible for deep happiness). 

Of course, the Bhutanese GNH structure is not perfect. A creative person, despite meeting all other indicators, may be unhappy if he is not creating enough. Such instances don’t seem to be covered. However, What GNH does is to try to quantify happiness. In India, as children, we were told that happiness is a state of mind. Now fifty years later, I will dispute that. A terminally ill cancer patient in pain, a worker perennially harassed by his boss, a man wrongfully sent to jail, a chronically hungry person, a flying executive with no time to sleep are all people who can’t be happy. GNH, however subjective, tries to systematically measure happiness so that the individual and the nation can take steps to enhance it.

In a hypothetical survey to measure my own happiness, I found myself not reaching the threshold in artisan skills, not happy with the government performance, living in excessively damaged and polluted environment, and without assets worth talking about. On the other hand, I am doing fine with mental and physical health, time use, education, human interaction, donating time and money and fundamental freedoms. Overall, I score about 80% and can count myself as deeply happy. What about you?

Ravi

Further reading for those interested

(1)             http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/SurveyFindings/Summaryof2015GNHIndex.pdf

This eight page summary offers the results of the GNH research of 2015.

(2)              http://www.oecd.org/site/ssfc2011/48920513.pdf

A 35-slide presentation by Sabina Alkire from Oxford University, made in 2011.

(3)              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jf9xrnUjpI

a 12 minute film on GNH

(4)              http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf

World happiness report. Excellent case study on Bhutan’s GNH between pages 108- 146. The primary source of this article.

(5)           http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/7th-international-conference-on-gnh-gnh-of-business-7-9-november-2017/

The dates for the next GNH conference in Bhutan next month.

(6)              http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Short-GNH-Index-edited.pdf

Another 100-page authoritative guide.

(7)              http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/

The world happiness report inspired originally by Bhutan’s GNH is now produced annually. It is also holistic, but uses different indicators. In 2017, Norway is the happiest country, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland. The headlines include ‘Chinese people not happier than 25 years ago’, ‘Africa struggling’, and ‘happiness falling in America’. America, ranked 3^rd ten years ago, was 19^th  in 2016. India fell from 118^th to 122^nd position.

R.