At first, I was a bit surprised when a friend told me that the English admonition, “Good fences make for good neighbours” exists in many other languages. I shouldn’t have been taken aback. A moment’s reflection should have told me that fences and walls to divide people have been going on for millennia. There’s nothing in particular new about the fence between the US and Mexico, the Cold War wall between East and West Germany or the one between Israel and the Palestinian West

The story of Israel’s nuclear bomb is rarely told. But we hear a lot about the possible Iranian bomb and the dangerous bombs of Pakistan that perhaps militant Islamists could grab- although that is unlikely given that the US has supplied state-of-the-art locks to Pakistan.   And then there are India’s, Britain’s, France’s, America’s, China’s and Russia’s. There used to be a South African bomb (Israel worked with South African bomb scientists), and attempts by Sweden, Libya, B

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