The Queen: End of a long-ended era - and new world order

• It was a different world in many ways. The first television sets arrived in the 1950s; hers was the first televised coronation. Many things that would shock the liberal literati today were the standard norm then. Her first prime minister, by most accounts, was a racist and a white supremacist.
• Britain today is a skeleton of its former self. It is at best a regional power in Europe, a steep climb down from the global empire it was.  It is viewed more as an appendix of the American power, than an autonomous entity capable of asserting itself against a commensurate world power

The Queen is dead. With her, the Second Elizabethan era came to an end.  During her Seventy years on the throne, the world has changed beyond recognition; she might well have felt as if she had time travelled. 

At her coronation in 1953, Britain, though it was no longer the predominant world power, was still brandishing the glory of the victory of World War II. Its old hegemonic status had been cut to its size, yet it still returned to the global high table as a Veto-wielding permanent member of the United Nations. The dissolution of the British Empire was in progress, but the colonial hangover reigned supreme even in the countries that were eager to establish themselves as new states. 

The Jewel of the empire, India, where the independent leaders wanted a clean break from the past, became a republic but joined the Commonwealth.

It was a different world in many ways. The first television sets arrived in the 1950s; hers was the first televised coronation. Homosexuality was prawned upon. The World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was forced into chemical castration. Many things that would shock the liberal literati today were the standard norm then. Her first prime minister, by most accounts, was a racist and a white supremacist. 

Since then, the word has moved faster than Jet travel which was first introduced in the 1950s. Even the Queen pondered in 1997 that “the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants.” That was still before the arrival of the internet age in its full throttle. The dawn of a whole new era of social media happened a decade or so later and has since influenced every nook and corner, in a way no monarch could even dream of doing. 

But, at least on one count, the world has stuck in the past.  A protracted period of royal mourning that is punctured by elaborate rituals, customs and fawningly deferential news coverage is an anachronism.  

The last time a world witnessed a nation in mourning of this intensity was probably the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Mao may not be the comparison that monarchists, conservatives and their well-wishers find acceptable, though the Great Helmsman of China could well be deemed far more consequential in the second half of the 20th century than most of the aristocracy and elected leaders, perhaps, only second to his own predecessor. But, when the latter, Deng Xiaoping died in 1997, having brought China out of the woodwork and set in place the economic foundation for the juggernaut it would become in the following decade, there was hardly any pomp. 
If any Third world country resorted to a fraction of ritualistic national mourning now on display in London, to honour a dead leader, many sanctimonious souls would have a thing or two to say. 

Britain today is a skeleton of its former self. It is at best a regional power in Europe, a steep climb down from the global empire it was.  It is viewed more as an appendix of the American power, than an autonomous entity capable of asserting itself against a commensurate world power.  India, a former colony passed Britain in the size of GDP, this year. It still wields outsize influence in world fora, but that inheritance of the colonial and immediate World War II legacy denotes a great disjuncture with the actual distribution of power in the international system. Such clout is not sustainable in the long haul. Yet, the colonial hangover has outlived the decay. Old colonies of the empire have united in grief, real or affected. 

President Ranil Wickremesinghe has announced a day of mourning on September 19 and directed that the national flag be flown at half-mast.

India, where the first independent Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wanted a clean break from the colonial past, and Shashi Tharoor is demanding reparations from Britain for colonial injustice has declared a national day of mourning.  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindutva idealogue who is said to have influenced young Narendra Modi, India’s current prime minister, called Mahatma Gandhi a sissy for being too accommodating of the British.
That conflicting relationship with the old colonial power might still be a strength. The imperialism of the Dutch, Belgians, French and even the Japanese were downright predatory.  Even the harshest critic of imperialism would not lump the British colonial exercise with the rest. From Ghana to old Ceylon and India to Malaya, colonial British built both railroads and institutions. A few former British colonies could blame colonialism for their modern-day ills, though one would find that too much divergence from the colonial model - and overly idealistic effort to re-invent the wheel - had been a cause of the problem.

Thus a heartfelt send-off to the departing monarch is within the realm of the civilized. 

That however should be an extension of the conflicted relationship of the colonies with its former colonial master, and not one that is guided by unabashed sycophancy.  

Sycophancy would not take us anywhere either, perhaps other than a photo for Ranil Wickremesinghe with King Charles - and not even a less partisan approach by the UK at the UN Human Rights Council.

Over the last 70 years, the world changed, but, for the first 50 years, much of the power that was generated was recycled within Americas and the Europe. That changed during the last 20 years.  Since then, global power is in transition en masse to the East - primarily to China, and probably, if it sustains the recent economic success, to India.

They hold the future. Not Britain. That is where any aspiring nation should look for.