As COVID-19 rages on, the world, its media and assorted intellectual necrophiles have descended to feast upon the mortal remains of Indians. Despite the world suffering the pandemic, the white man’s complex has made the USA and its media salivate at the thought of the unwashed masses in India being cremated, but the hundreds. It does somehow make them feel better about themselves. William Dalrymple, one such perfumed elite who is apparently a ‘historian’, who has spent his life telling the unwashed masses of India what to think about themselves, how uncivilised they are and just what the truth about their own history is, fled the country and flaunted his opulent life, in the very face of those who he wanted to “civilise”.
With his tail tucked between his legs, William Dalrymple fled to Sri Lanka and posted a picture from there, of tall coconut trees and the ocean in the distance, to tell the unwashed masses that while he enjoyed the smell of their death, he would rather do it from afar.
He called it ‘The Great Escape”. While I would not accord that level of intelligence to Willy, there is an interesting connotation to the usage of that phrase itself. As if, he was a prisoner of war escaping the great dungeons in which the Nazis threw him. As if India has been led to the path of death by the Nazi forces (Hindus, led by Modi, of course) and he, being a prisoner in an India he hardly recognises anymore (Yes, the damn Hindus asserting themselves), has managed to escape the living hell. Coincidentally, a plot depicted by the 1963 namesake movie.
After talking about escaping ‘Nazis’, Willy talks about how he “fled” to Sri Lanka. And at last, he tells the ‘unwashed masses’ that while they have been held captive by the democratically elected government of India, he has ‘fled’ to a far better place.
The very turn of mind to flee a country ravaged by disease and then dangle opulence in their face points towards a rather deranged disposition. But to do so after decades of teaching those very heathens how to live is a particularly Robert Clive-esque phenomenon.
William Dalrymple himself called Clive an ‘unstable sociopath’ and ‘violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator.’
“He was mentally unwell. He twice tried to commit suicide in his youth. He was suffering from serious depression throughout his stint in India and even after his return, and he ended up cutting his own wrist. He was a very troubled man,” says William Dalrymple in a telephonic conversation with Indianexpress.com. “He was the kind of person one would never want to have dinner with. He was morose and hardly spoke. He was a depressive guy. None of his letters show any kind of interest in India” he adds.
He further told Indian Express, “But he (Clive) was both a sociopath and a racist. He was a sociopath in the sense that he was not good company. He was a racist in the sense that he regarded Indians and particularly Indian Muslims as racially inferior”.
Shekhar Bandhopadhyay says about Clive, who plundered India en masse, “In modern terms, the amount amassed was around £232 million, out of which £22 million was reserved for Clive. “Between 1757 and 1760, the Company received Rs 22.5 million from Mir Jafar, Clive himself got in 1759 a personal jagir worth £34,567”.
And after looting and plundering the people of India, he turned around and spit in their faces. In one of his letters, he called Indians “The Moors” who are “indolent, ignorant and cowardly beyond all conception”.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that, “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you” and Dalrymple perhaps personifies that emotion.
While plundering India, monetarily and culturally, just like Clive, Dalrymple then turns around and tells the heathens that he is far better than then. After justifying the brutal cuff against Bharat by brutes like Aurangzeb, Dalrymple assumes that it is him who can tell us heathens what to feel about our own oppression, while looting our culture blind.
And one can’t really blame Willy. He is from the crop that has been hoping, not-so-secretly, that far more of us die just so they get to tell us that the “civilised world” is far better than us.
Ever since India managed to manage the first wave of the Coronavirus far more effectively than the rest of the world, the west has been pining for blood. They wondered, openly so, how more Indians did not die. They wondered why and how India had managed to not only handle the pandemic as effectively as it could, but also, help the rest of the world in the process. Under Vaccine Maitri, India sent 6.45 crore vaccine doses to 85 countries, earning unprecedented goodwill. That goodwill did come back to help India during this second wave, when the world pulled together to send supplies to India.
But while India was managing the pandemic and saving the world, one dose of vaccine at a time, the western media wondered how India was doing what it was doing. It is often said that the dead cannot fight for justice and therefore, it is the responsibility of the living to do so. But veiled behind the mask of justice being sought, a band of vultures used the dead to further their own agenda.
The British-American media company Getty Images now hosts multiple images depicting multiple Indian funeral pyres lit ablaze on their website. From here, any potential media group around the world can buy these images, in three different sizes, with the largest size priced at about Rs. 23,000. In fact, most of the large versions of the images are priced at Rs. 23,000.
We had recently reported how Reuters had posted 6 articles and 7 pictures of funeral pyres from India in a span of just 2 days, all, on their home page. Photographs of the most horrifying moments of people’s lives being minted for money.
It is quite evident that there are those who are watching the current tragedy unfold with a sadistic glee. The nature of their employment and the civility of public life is preventing some of them from expressing in accurate words the extent of their joy.
But the glee that they feel in their heart watching India suffering a crisis is so abundant that it seeps into their words and actions even when they are unconscious of it. William Dalrymple is only one such person. There are numerous others who are of a similar opinion. They may preach love all they want but their actions betray their vehement proclamations.