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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This is how international relations work!

The Ipcress File (1965)
Director: Sidney J. Furie

We always think that violence, espionage, eavesdropping, intelligence archiving, military building and sabotage are events that only happened in the past. We have confined them in the fiction row of our bookshelves and assume it does not occur in real life. We give humans way too much credence.

This business of international relations began as early as the time Man picked up a weapon to knock down his neighbour.

Just found out recently, of all the people, the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Empire had a good thing going between the two. After being labelled an outcast by the Roman Catholic Church for the shenanigans of King Henry VIII, there was animosity between England and many European superpowers of that time. The Spanish, Italians, French, Russian and Portuguese were all under the thumb of the Vatican.

The English naturally found friendship in 'the enemy of the enemy'. In the eyes of the Ottoman, the Anglicans (i.e. British) were not idolaters. Unlike the Catholics who found pleasure in worshipping the statues of a caring mother or a man on a crucifix, the Anglican houses of worship were pristinely bare. Beyond all that was business. The British wanted to lay their hands on many Muslim traits like raisins and spices. The Moors from Morocco actually had expansion plans. They had, in their mind, a joint venture with the British, a conquest over the Spanish territories in the Americas. By then, the Spanish armadas were scooping gold by the shiploads from ancient civilisations.

Sir Henry Hyde, after whose family Hyde Park is named, lived during this time. He was a royalist during the English Civil War. He worked as an agent for the Levant Company, which became the precursor to the East India Company. He later became a Consul under the Ottoman administration. At the same time, this man also was a spy for the Venetians. After their classic sea battle in Cyprus, the Venetians had a bone to pick with the Ottomans. Hyde informed the political and military secrets to the Venetians.

Working within the crowd of Cromwell supporters, Hyde was captured while fighting for King Charles II and was executed in the Tower of London.

If you think Aurangzeb's planned murder of his brother, Dara Shikoh, was brutal, King Ashoka was no saint. He had his 99 brothers killed before sitting on the throne.

We all grew up reading and listening to the covert operations on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War era. Both ideologies, suffering from extreme delusion and cognitive dissonance, thought the other would annihilate each other. Ultimately, they almost ended up sending the whole planet up in a mushroom cloud twice.

It is during this time that this movie is set. In the swinging sixties, with the background of miniskirts, baby doll dresses and bright colours, it is a joy to watch a young Michael Caine doing his suave 'licence to kill' James Bond manoeuvres.

A point to note is that even though the Americans seem to be on the side of the West, they also keep a tight rein on their subordinates. This is just to make sure that they know how the boss is.

We thought spying and honey trappings were only a legacy of the past. Wrong. Even as late as the 21st century, these are ongoing. The US accused the Chinese of using their goodwill to siphon off sensitive state secrets back home, as the US was the innocent party.

It is just how the world works. We don't hold hands and sing Kumbayah.

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So much for wanting privacy!

Harry & Meghan (Documentary; 2022)
Netflix

Watching this 6-episode documentary about the life and times of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle during their short stint living as a couple in the royal household reminded me of two things. Firstly of skeets from 'Kumars at No. 42' where they sold the idea that everything in this world was Indian - be it Santa Claus, Jesus, Santa's reindeer and even the British royal family. Father Kumar theorised that the royal family were as Indian as Indians can be. The whole family, including adult children, live with their parents. Everyone is involved in the same family business. Even after marriages, they all lived under the same roof, and the weddings were arranged. These veiled comparisons got its audiences in stitches then. 

The second is the good old saying from Indian culture that when one marries another, they also marry the family. The newcomer into the family must immerse into the fabric of the family and act as one of them. The onus is on everyone, related by blood or convention, to protect the sanctity of the family name. It is their divine duty to mould into the idiosyncrasies of the family, good or bad, to attain zen within the family. 

Only in the scriptures do we learn about people like the Pandava brothers. These five brothers collectively married the same woman just because their mother told them to share their find. In reality, history has described just to what lengths siblings and even mothers would go to seize thrones. The amount of backstabbing, bad-mouthing, poisoning, covert plans and trickery is just staggering. 

In modern times, when swords are merely ceremonial and the royalty's powers are clipped, they have mellowed down. At a time when their subjects question the relevance of a God-sanctioned family line to rule them over, the royal family knows its days are numbered. They try to be non-controversial and regularly re-kindle the memory of a glorious past when they used to rule half the world. They clamour for all the positive publicity they can get. They hope to be the British pride their ancestors were. That is not to say that they have not been controversial before.

In comes an outsider. Not that it had not happened before. A divorcee with a living spouse from the USA had shown her face in the royal courtyard some 70 years ago, and a King had to abdicate his throne then. Now things have changed. She was ushered in without much fanfare apparently but on her side, but she seems to demand all the world's attention. But wait, only when she feels like it!

The whole point of the Netflix documentary is to portray Meghan Markle as an innocent outsider who had found the love of her life. The one into whom she could immerse and get lost despite all the chaos around them. Meghan is presented as an affable person who is a darling of the British public. Despite this, or maybe because of this, she is allegedly vilified by the British press and the royal family. Even though she does everything right, getting her hands dirty cooking for fire victims or engaging in Commonwealth charity activities, she is viewed as an outsider. She is even suggesting that perhaps her new family is downright racist. She considers herself another victim of the royal family, much like how Princess Diana was treated and met her untimely death.

The end result is far from that. The show only managed to paint an image of Meghan as a self-centred conniving prima donna who thinks very highly of herself. The series tells her background as a bright student and an independent woman who pulled herself up by her bootstraps. What they conveniently forgot to mention altogether is her previous failed marriage. From her side, animosity is bottled up between her, her father, and his other family.

Prince Harry is pictured as a lone child growing up without a mother during his formative years. It really shows. Meghan may be filling that vacuum.

Every position comes with specific responsibilities and expectations. However, this young couple wants the cake and eat it. They enjoy being in the spotlight but are quick to whine incessantly when their private space is invaded. There is a reason they are called public figures. If the public pays for your existence, the public has every right to know how their money is spent. You are indeed a public servant. You want to cut off from the royal but still want them to finance you to just loaf around doing sweet nothings.

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