The eulogies are already being written. A young Indian sailor, his eyes fixed on a horizon marred by smoke and fire, sends a final message to his mother: ‘I will come home safely.’ Hours later, a US strike ensures he never will. The tragedy is real, the grief profound. But so is the hypocrisy. This is not a story of a lone misstep, but of a systematic collapse—a failing empire thrashing in its death throes, dragging the innocent with it.
Let us, for a moment, step back from the raw emotion and examine the architecture of this disaster. The United Kingdom, that former master of the seas now reduced to a whisper in the concert of nations, calls for ‘de-escalation’. The irony is thick enough to choke a Victorian statesman. De-escalation? When your allies rain down steel from drones? When the very concept of ‘safe return’ becomes a cruel joke?
The Indian sailor’s words echo a sentiment that has been the epitaph of every empire from Rome to Britain: the belief in one’s own safety, one’s own exceptional invulnerability. ‘I will come home safely.’ How many Roman legionaries said the same on the Rhine frontier? How many British Tommies in the trenches of the Somme? The empire promises protection, but only so long as you serve its ends. When you become a liability, a statistic, a footnote in a congressional budget debate, the empire discards you.
What we are witnessing is not a crisis of authority but a crisis of civilisation. The West, bloated on its own sense of moral superiority, now cannot even protect the very people it claims to liberate. The sailor’s death is not an accident of war. It is a deliberate outcome of a policy that treats non-Western lives as negotiable variables in a geopolitical equation. The UK’s call for de-escalation is not a plea for peace but a public relations exercise, a desperate attempt to appear responsible while the machine of destruction churns on.
And what of India? The nation that once gave the world the concept of ‘Ahimsa’, non-violence, now watches its sons die in foreign conflicts it had no part in creating. We have become mercenaries of the new world order, our labour and our lives exported to fuel the engines of American hegemony. The sailor’s last words are a cry from the periphery, a reminder that in the game of empires, the pawns are always expendable.
The parallels with the late Roman Empire are too stark to ignore. Then, as now, the centre could no longer control its periphery. Mercenaries from the fringes—Goths, Vandals, now Indians, Filipinos, Nepalese—were recruited to fight the empire’s battles. And when the empire faltered, these mercenaries were the first to be sacrificed. The sailor’s death is not an anomaly; it is a pattern. The only question is when the periphery will realise that its safety lies not in serving the empire but in dismantling it.
So let the UK call for de-escalation. Let the US issue condolences. The sailor’s mother will still weep. And we, the intellectual class, will wring our hands and write elegant columns. But let us not pretend that this is a tragedy of circumstance. It is a tragedy of choice. The empire has chosen its path: to continue its descent into decadence and violence, dragging the world with it. The Indian sailor’s last words should be a warning, not a comfort. For if we do not learn from history, we will be forced to relive it—again and again and again.
