Heads you win, tails I lose?

At Charles III Coronation @ London

BBC is in the limelight again. All for the wrong reasons.

When the Bersih movement was on a roll in the streets of Kuala Lumpur and painting the town yellow, BBC was on a rampage screening the sea of yellow flood hourly, painting the idea that the whole country is in tatters. In reality, the following day, it was business as usual for Malaysians.

When interest parties protested against the cut in Indian farmer subsidies in Delhi, BBC again had a field day. They were lamenting that the Indian public was prevented from expressing their democratic rights. Even though India's internal politics did not affect the British or the rest of the world one tiny bit, it took itself as the vanguard of the oppressed and the champion of the downtrodden. It did not matter that the protestors were not farmers but middlemen who tended to lose from the Government's move.

Bersih Protest @ Kuala Lumpur

But now, despite all the austerity measures taken in the UK to combat recession following Brexit and Covid, the British Exchequer thought it made perfect economic sense to spend between £50 and £100 million of taxpayers' money to finance the coronation of their next monarch, King Charles III. Buckingham Place says that the events' festivities and tourism would finance themselves.

Many beg to differ. With the hashtag #NotMyKing, many express discontentments through peaceful demonstrations. We are told they had earlier informed the Metropolitan Police of their intentions. Still, the Police arrested them anyway as a threat to public peace and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

Nowhere their rights as citizens of a democracy to express themselves come out, surprisingly.
In the meantime, leaders of their former colonies shamelessly feted the monarch, who is no Prince Charming by any figment of imagination, whose ancestors brutally looted the colonies' national treasures and turned the native into subservient slaves.

Delhi Farmers' Protest

The world has moved on from a feudal system. Even the substitute for an authoritarian rule is found to be deficient, and we are still on the journey in pursuit of an ideological way to rule over humankind. Many empty promises had come their way and made equally quick exits.

 
To imagine that a King is ordained by God Himself with special powers by birth to rule legitimately over a piece of land is laughable. Even God is losing his shine in this increasingly Godless world. So, to accept a King as God's representative on God does not make sense. But we smirk when told that the Egyptian pharaohs were the mediators between the gods and men. Spot any difference?

Points to ponder. @RajivMessage (twitter)
The coronation of King Charles III is:
- a ritual (as distinct from something 'rational'),
- filled with idolatry,
- symbol of supremacy,
- birth-based privilege,
- built on centuries of loot/oppression of 100s of millions worldwide.
Yet, the millions of royal fans in the West have the hypocrisy to accuse my culture of having irrationality, idolatry, birth-based hierarchy, human rights violations, etc.
I respect their right to celebrate their tradition. But they ought to get off their high horses and respect others' traditions. And Wokeists sucking up to the limelight. Money & prestige can buy a lot. (And former colonies are sucking up to their slave owners under the Commonwealth. Err, the wealth is is not common. It is theirs!)

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It does not matter...

This weekend would see meaningless parties and stupifying merrymaking in the name of a monarch who is synonymous with opulence and redundancy. There cannot be a worse time to glorify a family when the rest of the world looks at entitlement as a bad word. The idea of a person, by his birth, being feted up to high heavens despite all the scandals that have linked with the royal family does not make any sense. It is worse when the ruling monarch takes the helm as the head of the Church of England.

Nothing looks pretty when we talk about their predecessors' curriculum vitae or past glory. Her laurels include legitimisation of robbing non-British merchant ships of their gold and silver, giving a royal seal to pirates to loot the Spanish royal armada of their wealth,  allowing famine deaths in their subjects (just because they are brown) to feed their soldiers and brutally murdering millions in the name of civilising the natives. Yes, the Platinum Jubilee of the longest-reigning British monarch is here. 

  

Completed 1903 to mark Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee (1897). At 60 ft tall, it
commemorates each year of her reign.

When the wokes are up in arms questioning the privileged, the errors and omission of the generation past, as well as the blatant widening of the gap between the haves and have not, this is in bad taste. There is no reason for the royal family to flaunt the wealth that they acquired by birth and force others to revel in jubilance. If anything, it only rekindles old festering wounds and re-emphasises the extent of the limit humans are able to dehumanise each other. 

To the aristocrats and plutocrats, it is an opportune time to reinforce their loyalty. In return, the tongue-hanging loyalist would pounce upon the mittens shrewn to them as picturised in the children's folklore 'This Old Man' - give a dog a bone!

In my school days, I remember walking past a clock tower in Penang, erected in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Then from pictures in magazines and museum documents, I realised that Penangites were having a whale of a time during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and King George V's coronation. The million-dollar question is whether the colonial subjects really share the sentiments of their Masters, or there are they there just for the party?

Like the Tamil proverb that says, ராமே ஆண்டாளும் ராவனே ஆண்டாளும் (Whether Rama rules or Ravanaa rules), it does not matter to the Average Joe. The life of the ordinary man hardly changes for the better. Still, like Sisyphus, Average Joe tries to find contentment via these meaningless celebrations despite his seemingly hopeless life. He can pack his troubles and seek a release from his bottled-up emotions for one evening. But come tomorrow, it is back to the same grind mill.

(N.B. The idea of celebrating a Jubilee goes back to the time of the Old Testament. A Jubilee is celebrated in a kingdom every 50 years. At this time, debts are written off, enslaved people are freed, and people take a full year of a break from work. It is a kind of reboot. The land is not planted, and people were expected to fete in ecstasy for the ruler.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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