Dark clouds hover over the 2016 editions of both these rites of renewal of hope and affirmation of faith. The Rio Olympics have started under a shadow cast by overwhelming evidence of doping (possibly abetted by sponsoring states), the very antithesis of the spirit of the games. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the incomparable Pele, Brazil's most famous son ever, did not throw the flame into the Olympic cauldron, claiming illness. Contrast that with the Parkinson-affected Muhammad Ali taking faltering but proud steps to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996. Hosts put their domestic differences aside for the august occasion signaling national pride, but not Brazilians, who booed the interim president at the Games' opening. The currently suspended president, the pugnacious Dilma Rousseff, and her well-liked predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, both face trials for criminal wrongdoings.
Travel northwards and you will come across an American election campaign the like of which has not been seen since the 1930s. A "congenital b*** s*** artist" (one who believes in his own fantasies, not to be confused with a mere liar), as Fareed Zakaria pithily calls Donald Trump, wages a vituperative, xenophobic, jingoistic campaign, heaping abuse on virtually everyone including his own party colleagues, against a shop-soiled Hillary Clinton, no Ms Propriety and Trustworthy herself. Crowds, comprising mainly white, older, blue-collar men, cheer Mr Trump on, while weary women and minorities plump for Ms Clinton. Come November and the Americans will be choosing between the lesser of two evils. The victorious march of a young freshman senator from Illinois to the White House eight years ago with a lofty "Yes, we can!" invocation of hope and indomitable will is long forgotten in the melee.
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Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom faces not just an economic slowdown but possibly an implosion into its own disunion by rejecting Europe. Theresa May, its new prime minister, she of the extortionate visa fees, could well complete the task begun by the first Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, of converting Great Britain into Little England. Witness her choice of the Europhobe Boris Johnson, ("ignorant" is the best compliment the French pay him) to be her foreign secretary. The ageing Europe, buffeted by economic sluggishness and wave upon wave of unwanted immigrants from Asia and Africa, is clueless to deal with the unpredictable but increasingly frequent small and large jihadist eruptions. A revanchist tide runs from France to the Netherlands to Austria and states in between. That doughty champion of progressive values, Angela Merkel, may not herself be able to withstand the reactionary Germany First opposition. Democracy flickers here and there in the rest of the world, but is constantly threatened by forces of autocracy and militancy, at times even thuggery. China and Russia rattle their sabres all too often to ensure that states, in what they consider their own bailiwick, toe their respective lines. All this is accepted with an air of resignation.
It was not always so. A scant decade ago, the world basked in the warm glow of unprecedented prosperity it attributed to globalisation. It recovered rapidly from the 9/11 catastrophe. The Bush-Blair folly of regime changes was yet to be realised. New ideas - and the minds and bodies that went with them - were welcome. The 2008 subprime meltdown was thought to have been overcome with financial stimuli. The Arab Spring of 2011 kindled the hope that the last bastions of obscurantism and tyranny were about to tumble.
That was not to be. Economies the world over have struggled to post some growth, even as they discovered that the earlier growth meant riches for the top one per cent and crumbs for the rest. The euro zone faced one crisis after another with its PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). Arab Spring turned into Arab chaos, and regime changes meant unending civil strife all across West Asia and North Africa. Our cup of woes ran over with the rise of the monstrous Islamic State and its fatal attraction for the disaffected youth across the world.
Today, globalisation is a bad word. It means cronyism and worse. It means that when the powerhouse China catches a cold, the world gets pneumonia. Economic forecasts are routinely revised, always downwards. Big business, and especially big banks, are the big bad wolves everyone fears and hates. Every country is battening down the hatches to keep out foreigners and worse, foreign ideas. The ill winds of illiberalism and intolerance blow not just across India but the whole world, a sign of perverse globalisation.
In this summer of universal discontent, the worried world is nobody's oyster any longer.
The writer is an economist who comments on current developments