Vinay Lal is a Professor of History. Yet he thinks that the emblem of the Red Cross, which everybody knows to be the inverse of the Swiss Flag and which represents neutrality, is actually the sign that a house has been visited by the plague! This crazy fellow thinks that the inhabitants of such a house have 'inviolable sanctity'! The truth is they die like flies.

Lal does not seem to understand that Seventeenth Century bureaucrats were versed in 'Political Arithmetic'- they were responsible for the compilation of National Statistics. The reason the Parish registers weren't keeping reliable track of the number of dead was because many of the poor had come from outside London and were not registered with a particular Church. Furthermore London had a large population of Dissenters. Still, bureaucrats were making estimates of the death toll because Mercantilist states considered larger populations to be a source of greater wealth and revenue.

Why does Lal write 'Should we be surprised that, in Wuhan and New York City alike, the number of those dead from the virus has been revised upwards, and that the bell will not toll for the poor when they drop off like fleas?' The suggestio falsi here is that we are not concerned with the death of the poor. But, even if we are rich, we can get infected by the poor. We need to know the 'R' or reproduction rate of the virus. The reason mortality rates get revised upwards in the early months of a pandemic is because of misidentification of cause of death especially amongst aged or infirm sections of the population with multiple health issues.

Lal thinks reading Peyps is helpful. It may be if the thing is done intelligently. But Lal is not intelligent. The fact is seeing one coronavirus epidemic- e.g. Kerala's experience with Nipah a couple of years ago- means much greater alacrity in response to a different outbreak of a similar disease. Lal repeats the misconception that the Spanish Flu hit the young harder. Actually, this depended on which class of virus had been circulating during a particular cohort's infancy. This varied much more by continent then. In India more women died than men- probably because they were malnourished.

Why does Lal keep talking about 'herd community'? Does he mean 'herd immunity'? Why is he taking offense at BoJo's joke about free-born Englishmen? Nobody in this country does that- probably because we have a sense of humor. The fact is BoJo thought, as many of us did, that the threat was overblown. He boasted of shaking hands with COVID patients. Then he became very very ill. It was a graphic illustration of the lethality of the virus. One may blame British epidemiologists for having faulty models. But that has nothing to do with National culture or notions of identity or what Peyps observed or Defoe wrote. Stupid Historians can add no value here. Instead they can only burble fatuously about 'herd community'.

What can we say about Professors of History who don't know any History but go in for a puerile type of politics? In a crisis, they add noise to signal by talking fatuous nonsense about 'Political Epidemiology'. One might as well speak of 'Fashion Epidemiology' and seek to correlate what the supermodels are wearing to the progress of the pandemic.

A medical problem must be handled by Doctors and Public Health Professionals. If you let stupid Politicized History Professors talk all that happens is that those Professors come across as utter cretins. We feel contempt for their disciplines. This article demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the Left. There was a time when Marxist economic historians had better Mathematical tools at their disposal. Now we have Vinay Lal talking of 'herd community'.

Windbag: You're worse than a troll slumped over a laptop because you don't have any original idea whatsoever, let alone a defensible critique. Your singular talent is to write with the inertness of a deadly virus looking for fertile cells to infect. Let me guess—you're a nasty leech lustily waiting to attach yourself to every stimulating conversation, the more intelligent the better to latch onto. And after you've had your fill of blood, you drop to the floor, delirious as lesser leeches cheer, wishing you had the ability to strut s(h)itting down.

Have you never crawled out of your dark, dank jungle? Oh, wait, the light would kill you, wouldn't it?

Dear Readers,

The comments section of this article has been hijacked by a mad, bad and dangerous troll, a gaslighting resident of Indian origin in the United Kingdom. His handle is “windwheel” but let me tell you right away that he’s the biggest windbag since Winston Churchill, whose vile, racist legacy is continued today by Boris Johnson.

On or around April 26, Windbag inaugurated this thread with a 627-word diatribe against Professor Lal, a widely respected scholar on Mahatma Gandhi and an authority on the civilization of India. Employing typically provocative terms such as “stupid Historians” and “stupid Politicized History Professors,” Windbag trolled Professor Lal as “unintelligent,” a symbol of the “utter bankruptcy of the left.”

“A medical problem must be handled by Doctors and Public Health Professionals," Scumbag continued, exposing his fixation about titles. "If you let stupid Politicized History Professors talk all that happens is that those Professors come across as utter cretins. We feel contempt for their disciplines.”

Without identifying who he is, let alone indicate any professional expertise that he might have in any of the subjects he was windbagging about, the soddingrotter called Professor Lal a “crazy fellow.” At one point, he wrote, “We need to know the 'R' or reproduction rate of the virus”—as if to suggest he is a something of an epidemiology expert. And yet Windbag appeared not to know a fundamental feature of viruses—that they are essentially lifeless and can only reproduce in a living cell by latching onto a host.

It’s no coincidence that trolls thrive on that very biosocial “strategy” of viruses—they attach themselves to other people’s ideas, without providing anything original, stimulating or even remotely intelligent in return. When I pointed this out to Windbag (I later called him Badwind, a prime-cut Tesco jackass and a jelly-boned swine), he responded with the same mindless hostility he had leveled against Professor Lal:

“Every single sentence you have written contains a non sequitur or a malapropism,” wrote Windbag, providing but one laughable example: “A person 'slumped' over a laptop would not be able to type. The word you are looking for is 'slouched'.” And then, incredibly, he defended his trolling thus: “Why do you believe that trolls must have 'original ideas'? Nobody else does.” And, finally, desperately, this: “You are being original in this respect. But you are a cretin.”

So far, I have tried to highlight just how “mad” Windbag is. Here’s the “bad” part: Last night, he and I had a long back-and-forth on this thread—an exercise I intentionally invited after I realized that my initial hunch about this man was correct: he is, as he eventually himself admitted after finding himself trapped by his own poisonous rhetoric, a chaddiwallah—a foot soldier for the neofascist, homophobic and Islamophobic ideology that has slowly eaten into the inner vitals of one of the world’s most ancient civilizations. In one of those cognitively dissonant perversions of linguistics, that ideology has come to be known as Hindutva—and everyone except for its most ardent supporters knows well that it is fast destroying the last bastion of humanity on our planet.

In my back and forth with this chaddiwallah, a trail that Open Magazine moderators have wiped out because it was so filled with filth, one particular exchange with this abomination of a human being stands out in my mind. I mention it largely in the public interest, as a warning to every reader who, on some level, loves India but feels alienated from that ancient bhoomi, whether as a reluctant resident there or as an immigrant to a growing number of foreign countries where there’s no dearth of Hindutva termite hills guarded by serpents such as Windbag.

Flailing for anything to attack me with, Windbag globbed onto my profile photo, where I can be seen at the famous Lodi Gardens in “New” Delhi, hugging my only child in the relatively happy days before Hindutva’s full-scale assault on India, in concert with racist and bigoted forces in a dozen countries. The most notable of them are of course the United States and the United Kingdom, the latter being the Brexit dystopia where the Turkish Ottoman Empire got its ultimate revenge when half-a-Turk Boris weaseled into 10 Downing, evidently without the aid of any performance-enhancing drugs. Hindutvavaadis in the U.K. voted for him in large numbers, according to Windbag, clearly unmindful that Johnson gives not a phuk about anyone who's not at least half albino.

It was the first time I’ve been called a pedophile, but trolls will be trolls and the slur was clearly one of Windbag’s many perverted projections—just as his knee-jerk reaction that it was I who was being Islamophobic in referring to Boris Johnson’s Turkish ancestry. I knew well that this is what trolls do—bait commentators into contrived confrontations by deflecting from the social and spiritual disease infecting them. I didn’t take the bait—and nor should anyone else who is reading this ever do so. But I couldn’t help ask Windbag why his own profile image resembles that of a sated leech perched on a mountain of doo.

After all, does Windbag, who fancies himself as a blogger, lack the nerve to make his mugshot public? Could it be because his ears, after years of tuning into Hindutva’s dholakbeat, make him look like a taxicab with both doors open—spaces for virus-infested bats to breed in? Or perhaps he’s just afraid that facial recognition technologies will someday expose him as a talent scout for the thousands of innocent people whose lives ended in कब्रिस्तानs not just all over India but everywhere in the post-9/11 killing fields of the Empire's war against the Muslim Other.

But I have another theory. I think it’s more likely that Windbag resembles a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban English garden, looking like he has just returned from spending another uncomfortable night in a very dark cave teeming with virus-infested bats waiting lustily to mate with one of their own.

It sounds cruel, I know. But WWII wasn’t won by appeasing Hitler—although Britain's cigar-chomping bulldog certainly tried. Nor should the current battle against Hindutva be any different.

Ajay, I am fascinated by you. You genuinely think being called a member of the RSS a worse insult than being called an incestuous paedophile pimp. What is your background?

I'm supposed to be good at literary detective work- but I can't quite make you out. Are you a wannabe bhadralok? But Bengalis wouldn't write 'soddingrotter'. Perhaps you went to a second class Public School up in the Hills. Or perhaps you are a Telugu speaker. Let me forensically examine your cri de coeur for evidence-

You first appeal to 'Dear Readers'- but you must know nobody will willingly read you. You trolled me and I slapped you down but then you displayed a bizarre mental pathology featuring leeches- which suggests you are from Darjeeling or Sikkim or some other such place. Of course, you may be a logorrheic Telugu who went to school in a second rate 'Convent School' up in the hills.

The next clue to your origin arises out of your comparison of me with, first Lord Byron, and then his fellow Harrovian, Winston Churchill. You then equate me with the Etonian Boris Johnson who, far from being Racist, has appointed Hindus to the two most senior Cabinet posts.

I must tell you, all this is very flattering to me. The truth is I write like shit because I'm a Grammar School oik wot went to the LSE. Incidentally Prof Krishen Kumar, who has written books on Englishness, went to my old school. Vinay Lal, by contrast, knows shit about England. He also knows nothing about Gandhi or Hindu theology. The guy is a light weight. I'm not saying Raghavan Iyer wasn't equally vacuous but his wife was Gujerati and quite a good scholar.

Like most people who did Mathematical Econ at LSE, I know about R0 and am following the technical details about why different countries are pursuing different strategies. But anyone with a modicum of IT skills can follow this and use Wolfram or whatever to model the thing.

I must correct you on one point. There are indeed 'inert viruses'- but inertness means non evolvability. They get captured for a purpose the opposite of parasitic. COVID is not inert. Still, this gives me a clue as to your education. You must have gone to a shite School using outdated textbooks. No doubt, you had teachers who said 'soddingrotter'. This made you feel like the equal of Harrovians and Etonians. Good for you. I see you developing into a Graham Greene character for my fertile pen.

You say you trapped me into admitting I was a member of the RSS. But, anyone who reads my books will know I'm no such thing. However, if I had my life to live over again, I'd definitely have spent more time at the Shaka and less at the Pub.

You speak of 'cognitively dissonant perversions of linguistics'. This is what you engage in. Either you are a Hindu or you are not. If you are and have some fixed objection to those who subscribe to Hindutva ideology, why not battle them openly? They are not hiding. I suppose, the answer to this question is that Hindutvadis would ignore you because you are a foul mouthed abortion incapable of making a coherent argument. But the question for me remains, are you Telugu or some crazy type of second rate Boarding School wannabe Bhadralok?

The reason I don't think you can be Bhadralok is because your 'uchvaas' runs in certain narrow, psycho-sexually repugnant, circles. But there are 'anti-Brahman' Telugus who do write like you. There is a frontal lobe disinhibition characteristic of the fouler sort of spawn of the 'Andhrapreneur' which, it may be, has its doppelgangers in other provincial milieus.

I have added a profile pic so you can jack off to it to your heart's content. But please don't offer me your diseased daughter. Refusal, as the small shopkeepers say of demands for credit, often offends.

I think I now understand your pathology. It concerns intense nostalgia for an incestuous idyll in a public park. You now fear to engage in paedophilia- at least in public places in Delhi because 'chaddiwallahs' may call the police.

Why haven't you clicked on the link to my blog and gorged your gaze upon my hot bod? I suppose it is because you are simply too stupid.

BTW, when did Churchill try to appease Hitler? Not even Vinay Lal, who thinks the word 'quarantine' derives from Christ's 40 days in the desert, has ever suggested anything so bizarre.

Your stupidity causes you to write badly. Every single sentence you have written contains a non sequitur or a malapropism. A person 'slumped' over a laptop would not be able to type. The word you are looking for is 'slouched'. Why do you believe that trolls must have 'original ideas'? Nobody else does. You are being original in this respect. But you are a cretin.

An 'inert virus' can't infect anything precisely because it is inert. Why are you so obsessed with leeches? I suppose you write about what you know. But you do it badly because you are as stupid as shit.

Hey, windbag, your chaddiwallah shit scared the moderators. They wiped all your tatti trail. But thanks for the ride—and for revealing yourself, like a snake shedding skin after skin.

I wish you a slow death but a quick ride to जहन्नुम. Remember, you are living in interesting times. Good night. Now go phuk yourself.

I have a great hatred of pedophilies. It appears you are within the ambit of American law enforcement. If you are innocent you have nothing to fear. If not, you have only yourself to blame. I do not apologize for my part in this. You wrote in a filthy manner. This is the result.

You have been immortalized now as 'Vinay Lal's biggest fan'. Congratulations. Vide https://socioproctology.blo...

No one cares about the RSS. It is your pedophile antics which scare moderators. Confine your erotic attentions to leeches you disgusting little man.