Do you think the pictures from India are racist?

[SerenadeOfTheSchoolRun]

The pictures published are so shocking and of course reflect reality but the press would never show bodies of British people in coffins, in the crematoriums, in ambulances or in their graves. There are pictures today of corpses with no wrapping being transported. They wouldn’t show a British person after death with no covering. Maybe all the pictures of funeral pyres reflect Indian culture and the fact that this is shown is in fact somehow the opposite of racism like an acceptance of a different culture without applying our taboos?

Although actually there was a bbc report from a hospital mortuary early this year with wrapped bodies so maybe it isn’t racism but it doesn’t sit right. It feels like maybe they think we can see this because the people are ‘other’.

It was very widely commented upon that the UK media were not reporting from NHS hospitals for a very long time at the height of the pandemic

Hang on - unless I imagined it, I'm pretty sure the BBC were visiting a different hospital each day at one point, and that there was a lot of comment at the time about "what if they get in the way / catch it themselves?"

I'll try to find it, but am worried it'll have been displaced by other, more recent stories ...

I think we've become desensitised during covid, when TV often shows UK hospital patients in extremis.

Just this week I was watching a (UK) "real paramedics" program and was appalled at one segment. They arrived at the home of a bedbound terminally ill man who was struggling to breathe and repeatedly asked him, on camera, to make a decision; should they take him to hospital or a hospice. IMO he was far beyond competence for consent to filming ; his dignity and privacy at home was being pitifully invaded . It was obvious that he was very, very close to death.

@zoemum2006

Wasn’t there a media blackout around Covid deaths in the U.K.? Wasn’t there a van on medics speaking out?

This is to protect the government from criticism if we could see how bad Covid was here? Numbers are much harder to process the scale of the failure.

I'm in the UK. No, there was no UK media blackout on UK covid deaths and no UK ban on NHS medics/ speaking out.

The UK numbers are there on record, just like the loud and frequent public criticism of the UK govt.

[quote MercyBooth]@TruelyWonder YES. it is strange. There are things about this virus that cant be explained and we are all still learning about.[/quote]
I'm sure the University of Life are on the case...

I'm in the south of Italy and know hundreds of people who have had Covid.
Perhaps I'm lying.

However, to get back to India (Christ knows how Italy got shoehorned in, other than to infer footage coming from here has been staged which is so fucking insulting I'm left speechless) I think, as others have said, it's the shock of seeing what you're seeing, the cremation of what is clearly a human body, rather than the sanitised version we see generally.

@Geamhradh

I'm in the south of Italy and know hundreds of people who have had Covid. Perhaps I'm lying.

However, to get back to India (Christ knows how Italy got shoehorned in, other than to infer footage coming from here has been staged which is so fucking insulting I'm left speechless) I think, as others have said, it's the shock of seeing what you're seeing, the cremation of what is clearly a human body, rather than the sanitised version we see generally.

My friend’s in Milan and he cried when he saw the footage of the brothers transporting their mum for a funeral on a motorbike because he and his brother did the same with their aunt for part of the way. Thankfully nobody filmed them. He said things were that awful for a long time but overall the press behaved humanely.

What we’re seeing from India is footage captured in India by Indian journalists. Even the BBC footage is actually from BBC India. Over there journalists don’t always act humanely as we all know from reading the graphic rape descriptions that’s become commonplace now.

No footage equals no international aid/support. India’s numbers would not of sparked aid as there are many countries with large numbers, it the nature of the deaths that’s been shocking. Unfortunately it’s been proven too many times, it can take graphic images to force others to help. Had these images not been shared there wouldn’t be other countries leaders bragging about what they are doing.

@Boulshired

No footage equals no international aid/support. India’s numbers would not of sparked aid as there are many countries with large numbers, it the nature of the deaths that’s been shocking. Unfortunately it’s been proven too many times, it can take graphic images to force others to help. Had these images not been shared there wouldn’t be other countries leaders bragging about what they are doing.

Yes good point. Bob Geldof did that with live aid too.

@RoseWineTime

I think there were some pretty harrowing images broadcast from U.K. hospitals earlier this year. But what I’d happening in India is more horrific.

Yes, Clive Myrie’s staged special reports back in winter on BBC News at ten, which had my widowed elderly mother weeping each night as the cameras went into hospital morgues. Part of an attempt to shock us into adhering to lockdown while failing to appreciate that most of their viewers probably fell into a law-abiding group who were already very worried about COVID. Not the people the BBC should have been targeting and I can’t see what showing trolleys of bodies going through mortuary doors actually added to the ‘news’. We already knew that people died in hospitals.

We have such a distanced-view of death, in general. Witness the thread after thread bewailing the fact that old people might DIE! Well, yes...

And it is cultural to see dead people after death. A local lady (Indian) died recently, and her funeral was 'attended' by hundreds over Zoom. There was an open coffin, which caused no end of upset and consternation, to lots of viewers.

We could do with a more pragmatic approach to death in this country, and accept that people die. We certainly could have let people visit/hold/be with their elderly loved ones during all this, rather than let them die alone.

I'm avoiding the news mostly but it seems likely given general othering British attitudes.

As @btwwhichonespink said, photos of the pyres are being displayed without context (or perhaps without knowledge). Things aren't so terrible that they have no choice but to burn bodies on fires. My friend messaged me to accuse India of being in the dark ages still due to this. I pointed out that is how Hindus do it.

I have seen online a reaction of 'look what is happening it could be us and that dirty brown double mutant could come!'. When its mainly our Kent variant causing the havoc.

It's been mismanged by Modi. As if he would cancel Kumbh with elections coming up. What a mess. I can only watch and wait in frozen fear and hope my loved ones there stay safe.

I don't think it's racist and I agree with someone up thread who said that it is humanising. I see it like this too. I am human and one day I will die, just like those I see in the pictures. It is sad and tragic, and family members will be devastated, bit this is the reality of life. It's not a race issue for me. It is reality.

Well it certainly very uncomfortable viewing but I actually find it is showing the suffering of people and humanising what is happening. I think in the UK we have a weird attitude towards death in that we have become so detached from it that the reality of it is something we rarely have to confront- a loved one "passes away" in hospital and is then not seen again until the coffin is wheeled into the crematorium.

Actually what I do find dehumanising is the way the Guardian newspaper count how many people died of covid the day before with a helpful little arrow so you can see if it is more or fewer than the week before. They've kept it up for a year now, presumably they will stop at some point

How many of you have seen these distressing images in newspapers and how many on the internet (albeit from a news source)? Once the genie's out of the bottle... There's no way we can/should censor these images.

The thing is people have always died on the streets of India, it’s only now it’s news worthy, which is even more sad.

@Geamhradh My relatives are in Molise. They are very rural I dont think you are lying. It would be nice to have that reciprocated on here though!!

As more and more research is done i would love to know why some are more susceptible to the virus than others.

"The role of chance in pandemics was well illustrated in controlled epidemic studies of mice by William Topley and Major Greenwood between 1920 and 1940. The pair admitted that "hundreds of thousands of mice were sacrificed" in their meticulous process of controlling myriad variables, type of infection, type of mouse , degree of overcrowding, "mousehold" size, the level of pre existing immunity, nutrition, genetic variations etc.
The overriding conclusion is that even when you control as much as you possibly can, chance events contribute greatly to the patterns and speed of spread in epidemics. This is not surprising given that viruses mutate at random. Alas "some shit happens by chance" is the excuse history never forgives and the media never accepts"

MD Private Eye.

The photos are sold by second companies. No photography co would sell photos like that in the U.K. if they did they would use them.

The images are distasteful yes, racist no.

I think you're right @Puzzledandpissedoff. I remember seeing footage from hospitals and telling DH that, if I was seriously ill or died from Covid under no circumstances was he to allow my name or photo to be public, let alone a bloody camera crew turn up beside my hospital bed.

At least we hear what is happening in India. I have family in South America in a country with a corrupt government and with dreadful rates of infection. The stories we've heard from family there are shocking. The rich are travelling abroad to be vaccinated, they are ejecting their servants from the house who then end up jobless in their home villages with no financial support. Bodies have to be cremated within 24 hours, as a result one elderly family member found out her husband had died when she was given his ashes the day she got home from hospital herself, her son died a few days later.

It's not racism as such..... It's a distraction. Remember watching COVID sweeping across Europe in early 2020. That was reported across all our media channels. Italy and Spain in particular were graphically, rightly so, reported.

It was obvious it would end up here unless proper control measures were put in place at the right time. They weren't. It came here. Our news channels did not report it in the same way. It felt very much 'Nothing to see here'. Why? Because it wasn't in the interest of the British media. Why wasn't it it in the interests of the British media?

Because our media is controlled by a small number of very wealthy people that don't want us, the voters to know what is really going on because if we did, we might not vote for the conservatives, the party they control to benefit themselves. Whilst some members of the other other parties will jump on a passing gravy train our current Government of 10 years is something else - they are the gravy train.

Sadly, whilst I can't deny that racism is absolutely an issue in this country of exceptionalism, in my view the footage of India is less about racism and more about distraction.

More importantly I am truly saddened for everyone in Indian who is currently suffering the devastating impact of covid as I am here in the UK and rest of the world xxx

I haven't read the 123 comments before mine. But just came to say that it's not racist. I am an Indian in UK. The situation in India is frightening. Just yesterday, a college friend's dad died because he couldn't get oxygen. I can't sleep a lot of nights because I am scared for everyone there. I have multiple family members who are covid positive.

The situation doesn't need to be hushed up. The reality needs to be visible. Anyways, the numbers are highly underreported. People are struggling to get covid tests.
If it wasn't for the media coverage, India wouldn't have got the foreign aid that it's getting right now. The current government failed India and the world needs to see it.

Of course it’s racist. It’s unbelievably intrusive and de-humanising, which is why the Brits are doing it: it makes the shitshow in this country look good by comparison and creates a fee-good factor for the public.

^I agree with this.

But most of the footage is from Indians desperate for other people to know how much their government have let them down...