An amusing article in today’s Wall Street Journal about what happens when close-knit Indian families who run a business together have serious falling outs:

B. Vivekanandhan, the 51-year-old owner of a popular restaurant called Moonrakers, competes fiercely for customers in this southern Indian holiday town. So fiercely, in fact, that fists have flown.

His chief foes are his own flesh-and-blood. His older brother operates a seafood joint called Moonwalkers right across the street. Just down the same lane, his younger brother runs Moonrocks. The menus are nearly identical.

“Sometimes it’s like a street fight,” Mr. Vivekanandhan said. “People say, ‘This is a complicated family. We just came down to eat.’ ”

India prides itself on close-knit families who often live together and run companies side-by-side. All that togetherness can spawn epic business breakups.

Ninety-one percent of companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange are family controlled, and nearly all small-to-medium-size companies are owned by families, said Kavil Ramachandran, a professor at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. By comparison, about 35% of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled.

In the southern Indian city of Chennai, rival branches of a family run competing versions of a snack chain, both called The Grand Sweets & Snacks. The founder had two daughters, who split the business about a decade ago after their families clashed. They sliced the original shop in half by hanging plastic sheeting down the middle.

Priyanga Madhan, the founder’s 38-year-old granddaughter, said the breakup was inevitable because she and her cousins kept fighting over the company’s future. She now runs half of the business on behalf of her mother.

One of her cousins, Saravana Mahesh, 50, said his branch of the family no longer speaks to Mrs. Madhan’s side, even when they run into each other at the flagship shop, now split by a concrete wall. “It is still awkward, even after 12 years,” he said.

Families can be so complicated. And, as I’ve gotten older, I know definitively that most of them are dysfunctional in their own ways.

I remember when I was young and watching the Brady Bunch from the perspective of living with an extremely dysfunctional family, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a family like that? Where nobody gets drunks and fights in the front yard so the cops are called, but instead works together to figure out how we’re going band together to help our sister who breaks her nose right before the big prom when Billy the football team captain had just asked her out?”

If only!

I’ve known families who approached that level of love and commitment to one another, and they always seemed like aliens. I was always half-expecting the perfect mom and perfect dad and perfect kids to suddenly split in half as aliens shed their human disguises and reveal that it was all an other-wordly field experiment in earth family dynamics.

This article in the New York Times today ought to give pause to anyone on this side of the pond who still admires the British monarchy.

It examines the manner in which Prince Charles — now King Charles — has managed to become even more grandly wealthy than before by building up the Duchy of Cornwall:

The conglomerate’s holdings are valued at roughly $1.4 billion, compared with around $949 million in the late queen’s private portfolio. These two estates represent a small fraction of the royal family’s estimated $28 billion fortune. On top of that, the family has personal wealth that remains a closely guarded secret.

As king, Charles will take over his mother’s portfolio and inherit a share of this untold personal fortune. While British citizens normally pay around 40 percent inheritance tax, King Charles gets this tax free. And he will pass control of his duchy to his elder son, William, to develop further without having to pay corporate taxes.

The growth in the royal family’s coffers and King Charles’s personal wealth over the past decade came at a time when Britain faced deep austerity budget cuts. Poverty levels soared, and the use of food banks almost doubled. His lifestyle of palaces and polo has long fueled accusations that he is out of touch with ordinary people. And he has at times been the unwitting symbol of that disconnect — such as when his limo was mobbed by students protesting rising tuition in 2010 or when he perched atop a golden throne in his royal finery this year to pledge help for struggling families.

Today, he ascends to the throne as the country buckles under a cost-of-living crisis that is expected to see poverty get even worse. A more divisive figure than his mother, King Charles is likely to give fresh energy to those questioning the relevance of a royal family at a time of public hardship.

That part about inheriting billions without having to pay taxes like every other schlub is likely not sitting well with many people.

Sort of put Charles’ promise to serve Britain “until I die” in a different light, does it not? I’d serve every day until I die if someone threw in $28 billion.

I wonder how the Crown can possibly survive now that the beloved Queen is gone. Taking money from a grandmother figure who served in a world war is one thing. But I doubt Charles inspires that kind of loyalty, and I doubt William will, either.

As the initial shock of Elizabeth II’s death has started to lessen, and with it the time when people in love with the idea of The Queen can scream “too soon!” regarding criticisms of the Crown, cracks have been begun to appear in the hagiography that has thus far been emblematic of the media coverage, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

Such is the case with this piece in the New York Times by Hari Kunzru, whose ancestors fought in bloody battles to overthrow the the brutal and rapaciously greedy monarchy in the far-flung empire.

The British elite have always understood that the monarchy is a screen onto which the people project their own fantasies, and Elizabeth’s greatest asset as queen was her blankness. She liked dogs and horses, and rarely betrayed strong emotions. She seemed to accept that her role was to be shown things, so very many things: factories and ships and tanks and local customs and types of cheese and the right way to tie the traditional garment, to receive bouquets of flowers from small curtsying girls, and in return never to appear bored or irritated by what was surely often a boring public role.

The queen bridged the colonial and post-colonial eras. But for those of us who have a complicated relationship to Britain’s imperial past, the continuity represented by Elizabeth was not an unmitigated good. My father’s side of our family was made up of staunch Indian nationalists who worked for the end of imperial rule in 1947. Like many other people around the world whose families fought the British Empire, I reject its mythology of benevolence and enlightenment, and find the royal demand for deference repugnant.

Elizabeth was queen when British officers tortured Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising. She was queen when troops fired on civilians in Northern Ireland. She spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction. Throughout that lifetime, the British media enthusiastically reported on royal tours of the newly independent countries of the Commonwealth, dwelling on exotic dances for the white queen and cargo cults devoted to her consort.

You can also read this very good piece by the Times‘ Serge Schmemann, titled, “Queen Elizabeth Embodied the Myth of the Good Monarch.”

And then there is this piece by Maya Jasanoff, titled “Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire.”

I see these pieces not as trampling on the memory of a Queen who was indeed admirable in so many ways, but rather as attempts to say that, as good as she was, she represented a system and monarchy whose history is the opposite of the anodyne public performance art she embodied.

I think young people — in Great Britain, as well as around the world — are, if you are to believe news coverage since Elizabeth’s death, more willing to see the monarchy without rose colored glasses.

After all, if I support the movement to remove Confederate monuments as representations of a racist, murderous past — and I do support it — then how can we not turn the same critical eye to a monarchy which practiced murderous racism on a far larger scale?

As with many people, I’ve had conflicting feelings about The Queen. Mostly due to her family and family history.

I felt admiration for the figurehead, Elizabeth II, thrust into a largely ceremonial role as monarch she didn’t want, the same role that is widely thought to have caused the early death of her beloved father. She embodied much that was good, and much that was very bad, about Britain and the British monarchy.

There was nothing ceremonial about the fabulous inherited wealth passed down and around in a royal lineage full of inbred social climbers. Lords and ladies and princes and princesses galivanting around the Commonweath in luxury to cut opening ribbons and give tepid speeches about charities they likely knew little about.

They were interesting, in a TMZ kind of way, as long as you don’t look too deeply in their bloody past to discover where all that money came from. Elizabeth II headed a family who lived their lives in studied indifference as they stepped over a lot of corpses — in Ireland, Africa, India, and elsewhere — to get and keep their money and monarchy.

To take just one example: under British rule, India shifted its focus toward cash crops like cotton, sugar cane, and tobacco that could not feed local populations. They imported food from other parts of the empire to feed its citizens. This policy, combined with the unequal distribution of food, led to 24 famines killing tens of millions between 1850 and 1899 alone.

The policy was not to interfere in grain markets even in time of famine, originating with the economic theories of Adam Smith. Famine relief was to remain as cheap as possible and ideally follow natural market forces. Racism was an influence, as Britain would interfere for their own poor, but never in India unless famines became too severe. The most startling case was the Bengal famine if 1943, which killed up to 3 million people. Britain policy chose not to import extra food into India after Japan took over Burma.

Britain also destroyed the existing system of Indian businesses in favor of British ones who shipped their profits back to Britain, leaving India a nation of servants without generational wealth. This was repeated throughout the British Empire.

Much of Britian’s aristocracy, including the royal family, can trace its generational wealth back to the exploitation of people of color during the British Empire.  These are families who should be paying reparations, not staging elaborate garden parties.

They were interesting, in a TMZ kind of way, as long as you don’t look too deeply in their bloody past to discover where all that money came from. Elizabeth II headed a family who lived their lives in studied indifference as they stepped over a lot of corpses — in Ireland, Africa, India, and elsewhere — to get and keep their money and monarchy.

Elizabeth II’s sense of duty and decorum contrasted with her dysfunctional family that is the largely the creation of her inability to be the mother and sister she ought to have been. She had a willing helper in husband Phillip, whose notions of masculinity and femininity, power and poverty, were toxic influences on Elizabeth and the rest of the family. (I imagine Elizabeth arriving at the pearly gates, only to be told, “Sorry, that awful Phillip and the equally detestable Queen Mother didn’t make it. But here’s a pack of corgis to lead you inside!)

I understand that, as a constitutional monarch, her functional power over day-to-day British politics was limited. And that too much overt public meddling might have caused problems of another kind for the Crown. But what behind-the-scenes powers she did have she did not use wisely when they were most needed. She was also a bigot on other issues — hello, gay rights? — although with age she seemed to mellow out of some of those.

I think the most interesting thing to happen in her last year of life was when she announced that, on her death, as son Charles ascended to the throne, his wife Camilla was to be known as Queen Consort.

That was huge.

Camilla, the divorcee (nee adulteress) whose sneaking around with Charles contributed greatly to all the drama and infighting that would eventually lead to the death of Princess Diana, would be given a title nobody thought possible at the time Elizabeth’s father was thrust onto the throne by her uncle The King choosing his love for an American social climber. He chose her over his monarchy because the Church of England would never allow him to marry a divorcee.

I wonder if The Queen finally confided to someone near the end of her life that she realized it all didn’t have to happen the ways that it did. The abdication. The early death of a much-loved father not emotionally equipped to be King. Her becoming the Queen she never thought she would be. Charles being miserable with a first wife he did not have to choose. The traffic accident that night in a Paris tunnel that killed the most beloved member of the royal family.

In any case, I still think the monarchy is outdated and silly. I’ll not be watching the funeral nor the coronation.

But I understand what The Queen meant to millions of her subjects who loved her and her reign. Then there are the countless others around the world who felt a connection to her as a diminutive grandmother figure in dowdy hats.

So I’ll not be whining about the non-stop coverage because, to much of the white world, she was and will always be the only Queen who mattered to them. That makes for a bit of understandable public keening and wailing, even though I’m going to ignore what amount of it I can.