How happy is your country?

A new article in the BBC shows what they call the "The First Published Map of World Happiness" (pdf alert). Denmark is supposed to be the happiest place in the world, while Burundi is the unhappiest coming in at 178th. So where does India stand? Pretty poorly at 125th, which brings me to my next question. Does this mean that when I moved from India to the US (which is 23rd on the happiness scale) I went from being unhappy to happy, and that will I be unhappy when I go back.

To be clear, I get that these are measures that represent whole countries, but come on... how realistic are these estimates and do they mean anything wrt. real people?

So, to make this a bit more realistic, I searched the net for a measure of unhappiness and I found a chart of the suicide rates across the world. Turns out Denmark is 27rd in terms of suicide rates (higher is worse), well ahead of India (44th) and the US (45th). I thought happy people didn't kill themselves!

Anyway, thats my $0.02 on this.

Youtube

I don't know how many of the folk who read my blog have come across YouTube, a video sharing website, where users can upload their videos and share them. While the majority of vidoes on youtube are crap and worse, occasionally one comes across gems like this one - where the hell is matt?.

A Goose that eats French fries and Chicken

Originally uploaded by sharathbs.

This was one of the geese roaming the Philly zoo, it ate everything people offered including fries dipped in ketchup and a strip of chicken, there's something almost cannibalistic about the latter...

The Philadelphia Zoo

We visited the Philly zoo yesterday, long walks for the 3 of us but all in all a day of fun :)

The Philadelphia Zoo is America's first zoo, and its a pretty good one too. While their collection probably isn't the biggest or most extensive, their animals look happy and well looked after. Also, I really liked what they had done for their monkeys, their primates looked really happy and occupied, unlike other zoos where they typically looked bored to death.

All in all we had a lot of fun and we hope to go back there soon and maybe we will see all the animals next time... We even got a zoo membership that lets us visit the zoo free for a whole year :) Hope T appreciates it.

The last place where I saw so many peacocks running free was Delhi

Mouse Rides Frog in Indian Monsoon

(from the National Geographic online)

Tuk tuks in Brighton

It seems the humble ricky has made it to England, and its being touted as a "a safe, economical and environmentally friendly means of getting around congested cities" ;) Obviously the bloke who wrote this has never been in an Indian ricky..

I'm back

After a fairly long break from blogging for various reasons, I'm back better than ever and certainly more happy than ever thanks to having R, T and A with me again.

The last few weeks have been fairly hectic with my moving into a new place and getting stuff ready for the threesome to arrive. Then 2 weeks in Mumbai, that extended to 3, thanks to the dreaded mumbai monsoon viral fever (I like calling it that) that we all caught just before we left for Philly. Anyways, we are all here now and the kids have settled in really well, all things considered.

T seems to be really happy to have his Papa back, A has really settled down well both to the new place, new routine and a father hadn't seen... R on the other hand is pleased with the house and its location (we're very close to most amenities). So all is good in mad-scientist land, and if anyone wants to know, work is going well, albeit slowly.