Happiness, Yet Another Subject?

What makes a child happy? Is the child intrinsically happy, or do family circumstances make him happy? Or a sense of achievement? Or, one period of happiness curriculum, with breathing exercises, closing of eyes and observing of sounds, activities and reading sessions? 

Happiness Class, a film by directed by Samina Mishra, produced by the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, probes this question, while at the same time raising several questions. In their extensive interaction with the filmmaker, students from government schools of Delhi say it quite eloquently that back from the happiness class, they must again get a grip of reality, with homework and exam pressure and scolding of teachers.

Happiness rarely exists in isolation. Economic deprivation, urban squalour, houses tucked in narrow lanes where rooftops with all kinds of scrap strewn around are the only place where you get some breather, along with the pressure of communal tension can’t be congenial to happiness, and the movie depicts this background at length to bring home the point. Students are shown in school settings and then at home, helping parents fill water pitchers or condoling the loss of a grandparent. Anxieties of students from minority communities and a few from Afghanistan who have seen the country at strife, are also depicted. How does a child make sense of the fissures, how do parents assure the child that all will be well, are all questions that have a bearing on the sense of equanimity, leave alone happiness.

Parents’ response to question 'are you happy?' brings out their stoicism. Their silence and a simple shrug says it all. 

Responses of teachers are equally eye-opening: a teacher who gets up at 4.30 each day to cook, does additional administrative work in school besides teaching, takes back copies for checking and doesn’t hit the bed before 11.00, faces her own uphill journey to the state of happiness; another, when faced with pressure from the school to show academic performance, responds by putting happiness activities on the backburner. 

Breathing exercises, closing of eyes, observing sounds will have their beneficial effects. But happiness is a different matter. To an eight-year-old, what gives him more happiness is when his mother cuddles him and calls him 'good boy'.