The word ‘serendipity’ was coined by Horace Walpole in the 1750s after he read a fairy tale, ‘The Three Princes of Serendip,’ itself an adaptation of Amir Khusro’s 14th century Persian poem, ‘Hasht-Bihisht’ (The Eight Paradises), Serendip being the archaic name for Sri Lanka.
The word, meaning happy happenstances, arose because of my geographical circumstance. ‘Eudaimonia,’ supposedly referred to by Aristotle, means overal life satisfaction. Which is what the World Happiness Report considers for its survey-based ranking.
Finland’s six-year run as the world’s happiest nation has intrigued many. There have been many theories: excellent social welfare system; abundance of nature; and the preponderance of ‘sisu’, a Finnish word that when roughly translated means stoic determination in the face of any adversity.
Most Finns I know are bemused by the ranking. Some groan in disbelief. Others explain it with ‘We are less unhappy than the rest of the world.’ Still others feel the survey is bunkum. At Cannes earlier this year, Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki said tourists visiting Finland should limit their stay to two days because more than that would be ‘unbearable’. But then, Finns have a sense of humour that matches the darkness of the country’s cold and prolonged winters.
Some, though, have found an opportunity. Visit Finland, the official tourism department, is offering ‘a four-day crash course for a happy lifestyle in the world’s happiest nation’. Fourteen selected people are offered an immersive experience of life in this small country of around 5.5 million people.Even as Bing and I were chatting, cracks appeared in the bliss that normally surrounds Finland. After early April’s parliamentary elections, for the first time, a coalition of right-wing parties has formed the new government. What is more, the second largest party in that grouping happens to be the Finns Party – Perussuomalaiset, which in Finnish means ‘Basic Finns’ (read: ultranationalistic and xenophobic.Finns Party leader and new deputy prime minister, Riikka Purra, was embroiled in a controversy only last week, when it was outed that in 2008 she had made racist comments on a party colleague’s blog.
‘If they gave me a gun, there’d be bodies on a commuter train,’ she had written about young Finns of immigrant origin on a train. She had also referred to ‘Turkish monkeys’.
It’s not been a month since Vilhelm Junnila, the new economic affairs minister, had to resign because of alleged links to neo-Nazi groups in the past. When a leading Finnish newspaper, Iltalehti, published a column underscoring the snafus made by some Finns Party leaders, right-wing trolls, including MPs, tore into the writer, even threatening her with violence.
Finland may be a country with a tiny population – less than 12% of NCR’s – but it has a 1,340 km-long border with Russia. Earlier this year, Finland joined Nato in a preemptive move. Last week, in a show of support, Joe Biden visited Finland.
Meanwhile, discontent is growing. Earlier this month, a Finns Party MP was ejected from a music festival because of his letter to a newspaper in which he opposed the National Education Board’s policy on gender education. In Helsinki, protests by opposition supporters against the new government have become frequent.
‘Will Finland be the happiest country again next year?’ I asked Bing. They replied with the usual spiel about what makes a country happy, and then concluded, ‘I think Finland has a good chance of staying at the top of the happiness rankings, or at least close to it. What do you think?’ Well, Bing, I don’t think so.
(The writer lives in Helsinki)
