First of all, referring to them as Covid vultures is a misnomer. And that’s not just because it is an insult to the vulture, a noble bird which performs a scavenging role that may seem disgusting to us but nevertheless is crucial for the ecosystem to sustain. It is also because the term limits our understanding of the wide variety of ways in which India’s Covid vultures are monetizing our dead. Calling them vultures is a bit like referring to a Boeing 747 as a “flying auto-rickshaw.” The former is just too versatile for the description to make sense.

Consider all the ways in which the dead and dying can be useful to the vulture journalist. The first and most obvious is old fashioned ambulance chasing. You find a family desperately trying to find a place in hospital for their loved one. You shove cameras in their face and record their cries for help. The more the despair in their eyes, the more compelling the coverage. If you can, you shove something in the face of the one gasping for breath. Then you wait. Because you don’t want to cash out too early. If that person dies, your video footage will be worth more money.

However, the second wave saw this perversion taken to a sick new level. They followed the dead bodies all the way to the crematorium and took pictures of rows of burning funeral pyres. Some of these pictures were taken from a very great height to capture a full panorama view, which I can only suppose is drone footage. After all, I suppose the New York Times had taken out a global tender of some sort and they don’t compromise on quality. So move away, you wretched scavenger birds, because there is a vulture drone flying over the burning ghat.

The pandemic took millions of lives all across the world, but did you see such coverage from anywhere else? In New York, they piled hundreds of bodies into freezer trucks, where they still lie today, over a year later. Entire neighborhoods in Italy and Spain turned into death valley, but the dignity of the departed was not violated like this. Not for the voyeuristic pleasure of others.