Last night in sweden

Last night in sweden

Trump is not alone in leveraging political pessimism and a dystopian (relating to or denoting an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.) (खराब) worldview.
In a charming parable (दृष्टांत/नीतिकथा) that many Indians hear in their childhood, the divine couple Shiva and Parvati settle a row over a heavenly fruit between their sons Ganesha and Kartikeya by telling them the first one to circle the world three times will get it. Kartikeya sets off (शुरू करना/आरंभ करना) instantly on his peacock and gets a head start in the race. The slow-moving Ganesha, the God of intelligence and wisdom, ponders (विचारना/सोचना) over the challenge awhile. He then walks around his parents three times, and declares the job done; he has won.
The allegory (रूपक कथा/दृष्टान्त) establishes in an enchanting way the centrality of parents in our lives and our love for them. In a less obvious way, it also demonstrates that metaphorically (लाक्षणिक रूप से) , the world can be whatever we decide in our mind, in whatever way and form we see it. This has been celebrated in song and idiom. From “you are my world“ to “this is my world“, to the world being one's oyster(the world is your oyster (phrase of oyster) you are in a position to take the opportunities that life has to offer.) or one's playground, to the world being in one's hands or in one's pocket, we have many didactic (उपदेशात्मक/प्रबोधक) ways of reducing our eminent domain to suit our needs, our vision, or our agenda.
Politicians and leaders across the globe are constantly promising a better world, telling people how bleak (निराशाजनक) their current situation is and how they will take them to a better place. President Donald Trump is not alone in painting a dismal (खराब/शोकमय), dystopian view of the planet, one wracked (कष्ट देना) by violence, terrorism, hunger, pollution, lack of opportunity, ill health, disappearing wealth, etc. Across the globe, it is a politician's treasure trope (Language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense).
But the reality is the world is a better place than most people believe it to be. Several major studies, based on empirical evidence and exacting data, show that the world has never been so good ¬ better fed and clothed, better educated, freer, healthier, wealthier, and yes, more peaceful than at any time in history.
If it appears otherwise, embracing the Hobbesian thesis that the life of man, beset by “continuall feare and danger of violent death,” is “solitary, poor, nasty , brutish and short,“ it's because the human mind is genetically programmed to be pessimistic. Vast improvements in the human condition in the nearly 350 years since those words appeared in Leviathan have not registered among the Cassandras who form the majority. A tonsil-like brain part called amygdala has apparently been fine-tuned for human early warning functions, so we're hard wired to look out for negative signals, for danger.
Earlier this week, the US president went so far as to invoke this danger in distant Sweden, one of the healthier, wealthier, happier countries on the planet, referring apparently to a non-existent terror attack in the Scandinavian country, just as his associates had cited fictional terrorist incidents in the US to justify their demonization (Demonization is the reinterpretation of polytheistic deities as evil, lying demons by other religions, generally monotheistic and henotheistic ones. The term has since been expanded to refer to any characterization of individuals, groups, or political bodies as evil.) of migrants and minorities. Called out on the fake news, he then explained he was referring to a broadcast on FoxNews concerning migrants and Sweden, and conflated (मिलाना) it to insist that large scale immigration is not working out for Sweden, notwithstanding protests from the country's prime minister and other public intellectuals that they are doing just fine, thanks for the concern.
As the hashtag #LastNightInSweden began to trend on Twitter, ridiculing the sweeping and ad hoc (विशेष/तदर्थ) assumptions about their country from 6,000 km away, the president's troll patrol struck back, challenging the Swedes' own insistence, backed by data, that crime had fallen, murder rates had dropped, and immigration had not turned Sweden into hell overrun by murderous migrants (just as it has not in the US too). How then, asked the president's supporters (including Brexit nativist Nigel Farage), does one explain Sweden being the “rape capital of the West” ¬ based on one study ¬ which they attributed to migrants?
Hot emotion (even when it is laced with selective data), rather than cold analysis, informs raw politics. The fact that Sweden has a wider legal definition of rape (it need not amount to intercourse to be considered rape), with its police recording each instance of sexual violence in every case separately, easily explains the rape statistic. There is also greater awareness and a shifting attitude towards sexual crimes in a country that is also ranked #1in gender equality.
But wait: the #1 position in rape (and blaming it on immigration) fits in so blaming it on immigration) fits in so much easier in humankind's gloomy (अंधकारपूर्ण/विषादपूर्ण) outlook (and the headlines) than cheery appreciation of gender advancement or integration. Ergo: “Sweden ¬ the rape capital of the world.”
As it turned out, it was a Swede who spent a lifetime heroically trying to tell us how the world is a better place than we believe it to be and is getting better all the time. Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic and statistician, who travelled the world (including India, which he loved, having studied public health at St John's Medical College, Bangalore) hammering away at his elegant pollyanna presentations backed by copious data that showed a constant improvement in the human condition across the world.
Like Ganesha, Rosling used unique ways to make his point, once ending his presentation by swallowing a sword (he had learnt the difficult feat of sword-swallowing) to show that the seemingly impossible is possible. “I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist,” he once said. “It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.” He passed away on February 7, just 10 days before Trump tore into his beloved Sweden, a lifetime's striving set about by political pessimism.