Sigmund Freud, the great psychiatrist, said that people can never be fully happy. But most people are reasonably happy, according to numerous surveys. Even in the slums of Calcutta a majority are. Read "The City of Joy" by Dominique Lapierre. According to one survey Nigerians are the happiest. (But other surveys say it is Denmark, a country with a cradle to the grave welfare system where one doesn't have to worry so much about one's health or old age.) Being married or having

In Charles Dickens’s novel “A Tale of Two Cities”, set during the French revolution of 1789, he draws the character of Madame Defarge. She along with other members of the Tricoteuse, the knitting women, perch every day next to the guillotine, knitting into hats and socks the names of those to be executed, while watching the upper aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie being dispatched to their death one by one. They were regarded as respected sisters of the revolution.   I trust I

I’m just out of the cinema having seen Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful film, “A House of Dynamite” about a nuclear missile found on the radar to be heading towards America. The film ends with the destruction of Chicago and the US president unsure of what to do.   In the Cold War days, some of us used to say, “Better red than dead”- to rebuff those who believed in nuclear deterrence as a means of giving the West security. We had powerful films about nuclear war exploding the myth