Imagine being the richest and most powerful person on earth and not being able to be yourself or marry the person you love. Imagine being shamed to hide, perform as society wants you to, an avuncular sage or shamed into that Bollywood template of family: dancing siblings and playful grandmothers. Since you have what everyone wants, everyone believes you must also be happy, wise and nice. Nobody cares about your loneliness.
This leaves a tragic, bitter, sour taste in the mouth. Despite all the wealth and power, you start seeing yourself as a victim. You punish the villains around you- those who deny you the agency you desire and deserve. You hire people to abuse, to vent the pent-up frustration. This is the story of many elite and privileged people around the world, whose love and longings are silenced by those who surround them, well-meaning parents and relatives and public relation officers keen to protect reputation.
Perhaps this is the reason where the Krishna of the Bhagavata, who dances with milkmaids and cowherds, plays the flute, even cross-dresses in delight, has to give up his carefree ways when he becomes the Krishna of Mahabharata. The freedom of the wilderness is traded for the rules of palaces and battlefields. Even Rukmini can see the longing for Radha in Krishna’s eyes. But he will not speak of it. Emotions are locked in the golden closet, marketed as sacrifice for the larger good. After all even Sita was cast out of the palace to save royal reputation. Even Ram lived alone while the gossip mongers enjoyed Ram-Rajya. Both Ramayana and Mahabharata draw attention to private desires in public spaces. In a Marathi folk retelling, we learn how Draupadi secretly loves Karna despite having five husbands. She is shamed by society, but Krishna comes to her rescue. He asks everyone to eat the Jambul (Java/Malabar plum) fruit. If tongues turn purple, it indicates everyone has something to hide. Everyone lives in a golden closet, hiding desires that cannot be publicly displayed.
The rich envy the poor as they believe the poor have more freedom, more agency, less rules, less reputation. They do not carry the burden of tradition or inheritance or family name. Bitter old patriarchs do not have the grace to give freedoms, that they were denied, to the next generation. They are no different from bejewelled daughters-in-laws who are as cruel as their mothers-in-laws, repeating the soap operatic platitude: you have the right to be cruel if you have been abused.
We live in a society where the rich cannot differentiate between a forest and a zoo. They genuinely believe that they are helping nature by locking up birds and beasts in their private garden. For that is their life-a zoo that they are told is a forest, where they are deluded by the court into believing there are no rules, and that they are the alpha predators. Palaces are gilded prisons where kings scream silently. Corporations are cages where every CEO, MD and Chairman is carefully domesticated by shareholders and regulators. Even kindness is regulated carefully with rules for charity, social responsibility, as well as diversity and inclusion.
One of the things that catches your eye with rich and powerful people is their public grace and their private nastiness. When the cameras are gone, when the door is shut, the mask comes off-the yelling and the screaming, the threats, the tears, the rage. No more pretence of democracy and collaboration. The dictator demands full submission.
If you mention this in public, you are likely to be branded as jealous. It’s a lie everyone wants to believe. For, the poor aspire to be rich. They believe that those in positions of power live in paradise with the wish-fulfilling tree. Only the staff in the palace know the secret desires, the hidden portrait of Dorian Gray, deep in the golden closet. If they speak, their tongues will be cut, their eyes gouged out. The palace servant knows judges exist to serve the affluent. A tabloid scandal is but entertainment, a vicarious pleasure for the have-not.
No one wants to believe the unhappiness of the rich. The elite are privileged, say activists. They have all the agency in the world they argue, refusing to believe that gays and lesbians in Brahmin household face the same degree of torture as gays and lesbians in Dalit households. For activists, Palestinians can only be victims, not homophobic. Jews can only be colonisers, not defenders, as they are rich and successful. Labels are used to deny human desires. We are not allowed to empathise with oppressors. Everyone pretends to see the Emperor’s New Clothes. Even in death, everyone remembers only your long list of grand public achievements that benefitted them. No one acknowledges their contribution to your invisible prison.
