One of the biggest issues with writing about King Charles is accidentally calling him Prince Charles. King Charles is like the stock of Wipro acquired at its peak price during the dotcom bubble. Many years later, the stock is yet to achieve its former glory as shareholders who bought at that price still hope it will someday be coronated as a multi-bagger.
The event will see Sonam Kapoor perform spoken-word poetry. I say this unironically because I was not invited to perform standup comedy at the event. Sonam Kapoor is a stock that thinks it is a blue chip simply because everyone on Quora says so. But it's hard to pay regular dividends when your foot is always in your mouth.
One feels for Charles who had to wait longer than Sachin Tendulkar’s replacements had to wait for his retirement. It's like finally ascending to Chairman Emeritus in a listed firm where your only job is to rubberstamp the CEO’s decisions. But enough about Rishi Sunak’s swimming pool expenses.
The coronation is pretty much like the IPL for the commonwealth nations. The detailed process of the coronation sounds about as exciting as reading the full red herring prospectus of an IPO before the days of digitization. I attribute the squint in my left eye to my desperate attempts to read the extremely fine print in those old IPO forms. In some cases, the font was tinier than Jerome Powell’s pauses.
Charles has chosen an interesting time to become King, given the state of the UK economy. It is said that eggs have become far more expensive for the average Briton which also means the ceremony will be safe from any airborne representatives of the Egg Co-ordination committee. It is further said the UK economy will experience a mild recession because of the one-day holiday for the event. That’s like firing half your employees so you can afford the fees of the motivational speaker for the other half.
Camilla Parker Bowles, King Charles’s wife, has received the title of queen consort and has also been crowned. It is understandable of course when the chairman’s wife is hired as the diversity & equity consultant for the company. The procession started from Buckingham palace and will end at Westminster Abbey. In India, the processions of kings and kingmakers are usually between Tihar Jail and Arthur Road Jail.
There is criticism in the former colonies that their head of state is so, simply because of biology. But India’s family-owned businesses would just call that succession planning.
In these volatile geopolitical and economic conditions, many have criticized the wasteful spend on this ceremony - including NRIs. The same NRIs have also praised the new Parliament building in India in the middle of a pandemic.
But perhaps coronation is nothing new in the world of startups where every other day we are declaring someone as a unicorn to indicate that they are now startup royalty. And their valuation is only as high as their vanity.
Today the business model of many such startups is being questioned just like the relevance of the monarchy in a 21st-century free world.
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