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Arnold, pumping iron and hitting the money jackpot many times over, is titillated with life. From luxurious hotels in Santa Monica to shopping malls in Los Angeles, he is an inveterate real-estate shopper.

In America, sure! Elsewhere, who knows? Isn't Arnold Schwarzenegger the happiest man on planet Earth today? He came to this country a pauper with no knowledge of English. Look at him now - loaded enough to buy himself the governorship of the world's fifth largest economy. Never mind if he calls it 'Calee-forn-ia' or is a confirmed groper who fondled women for over two decades. Mr Universe has the moolah - he spent $10 million - to lay claim on the Governor's Mansion. Next: He would have bounded over to the White House, but can't because he ain't America-born.

Arnold, pumping iron, poking women and hitting the money jackpot many times over is titillated with life. You can almost feel it as you count the 32-set of sparkling white teeth when he opens his wide mouth. The grin is as wide as the wide-bodied jets he has acquired or the humongous fuel-guzzling Hummers (six of them in all!). From luxurious hotels in Santa Monica to shopping malls in Los Angeles - the fellow is an inveterate real-estate shopper.

So, the gilded in America have it all? Sure! Ogle inside their pricey estates, or stalk these creatures as they flit from one watering hole to another - it's sheer...what's the word...bliss for them. They are 'happening' people, not the dull old poor Jane and Jo on the street.

Come some notches down, and you have the thousands of Americans whose earnings each year spiral upward in millions, be they the corporate viziers or business moguls. They live in grand homes, drive fancy cars and vacation at the rich and famous reserves. Hoi polloi can go get lost!

Yet the question that dogs most: Are the rich really happy?

"Money" to the 19th century American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, represented the "prose of life." Indeed, with today's economy on a runaway roller-coaster train, the ugliest stain on America's well-heeled elite has been the gargantuan greed by individuals wrecking the fortunes of some 80 million ordinary Americans who put all their earnings in the stock market and went under after losing a heft of it.

Never was the divide between the rich and the poor so sharp as today.

Had President Franklin D. Roosevelt seen this economic carnage, would he still have blithely defined happiness "as not in the mere possession of money" but lying in the "joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."

Americans have always crowed about achieving happiness that springs from personal success, self-expression, pride (I call it arrogance) and a huge sense of self-esteem (I call it egomania) and cutthroat competition.

Our pursuit of happiness is as old as the hills. Did you know that there are "professors of happiness" teaching the subject at major universities in the US, or there exist "quality of life" institutes around the world that publish journals on happiness?

The data on global happiness gives us a comparison of how happiness is measured by people around the world. For example, Japan, the second largest economy after the US, has a happiness mantra totally opposite to the Americans.

In Japan, fulfilling the expectations of one's family, meeting one's social responsibilities, exercising self-discipline and cooperating with others to achieve harmony and peace equals happiness.

Recently Jean Chatzky of NBC Today and Money MagazineYou don't have to be Rich and interviewed a chunk of Americans. Why? Because the reporter wanted to figure out:

1) What influence money has over an individual's overall happiness;

2) What habits, attitudes, behaviours and knowledge separate people who are satisfied with their financial lives from those who are not.

3) What effect changing those habits, attitudes, behaviours, and knowledge might have on a person's life.

"Staggering" were the results, she exclaims. "Of course, money plays a role in the happiness equation. To try to deny that link would be disingenuous, not to mention unbelievable. But it's not as strong a link - as big a contributing factor - in your happiness as you might think...whether its $35,000 or $300,000 a year has little bearing on how happy people are."

She lists other factors like job satisfaction that come into play. One-third of Americans hate their jobs, she tells us. But on the whole, says Chatzky, "People employed full-time are much happier," however more important is a "job you enjoy" which can be a "terrific source of satisfaction and self-esteem. It can be a place to enhance your life well beyond your resume and retirement portfolio...."

You're at peace with things you're unable to confront, like family and friends, if your job fulfills you, she says. Plus long-lasting friendships are forged on the job and many people marry someone they work with (how convenient!).

'Friendship to fill the hour - that is happiness' sums up Emerson.But better still: Don't we all wish we had the money to do our own thing and be our own boss? That indeed is Utopia! Friendships would follow, don't you think?

Marriage, unencumbered with domestic wrangling, and health, free of debilitating disease, are also important ingredients to the happiness goulash. What good is money if your marriage is a nightmare or your health indifferent?

But this keeping up with the Joneses - a term coined in 1913 by a cartoonist Arthur R. Momand - has always held happiness a hostage for most of us who want to compete with our peers in all things materialistic. Lack of money then equals life of misery for such shallow souls.

"If you're having a bad day, if things aren't going right for you, then change your mind. Because that's where your life is. Your life isn't in what other people do to you. You are the one in control. You change your mind."

Ann Richards, the woman whom George Bush displaced as governor of Texas, said the above. Makes a lot of sense - mind over matter kind of stuff. And while money can help in giving that extra kick in life that we lust after, life deals different hands to different people. We all have our crosses to carry and burdens to bear (to put it prosaically). Therefore, to say that someone has actually experienced that overreaching arc of happiness is droll. Maybe in little doses, happiness which is ephemeral, comes, but never to stay.

Till the world and the gurus of happiness hit upon the exact formula, here's what the late film star, John Wayne, said: "Tomorrow's the most important thing in life. When it arrives and puts itself in our hands, we can only hope we learned something from yesterday."

But tomorrow for Nabeel Siddiqui will never come. I wrote about the 24-year-old in my last column. He was in a coma, now he's no more. Three delinquent juveniles robbed him of his life. He had the whole world ahead of him, just having graduated in computer science with honours. He came here in search of the American dream, but left in a coffin on a flight back to Pakistan that was also carrying Prime Minister Jamali.

In this crazy world, Albert Camus' words make more sense: "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."