The Epstein Files & dangerous boredom of rich people.

Everything told to you about Rich People was fake.

While reading the emails, one thing among many obvious others kept occurring to me, why these people cannot write even a single proper sentence. Most of the emails are themselves a demonstration of this struggle to construct or finish a thought. One reason is that rich elites are so dependent on outsourcing labour that even the act of thinking begins to feel like an assault on their “me time.”

This is very much possible as I too have felt this in the company of few elites. Many rich people have a clear aversion to thinking and they are lazy af. They are also bored. Very bored. This boredom often takes a dangerous turn, and now we are seeing what we are seeing.

The recent Epstein files break a long held myth, that rich people are highly ethical and possess a special mastery over personality and money. These qualities were routinely attached to billionaires, and from this belief emerged an entire self help book economy. People, especially in small towns, were told that wealth was a learnable skill. Pick up the right book from a railway station stall, memorise its lessons inside a four by four room, and success would follow. This produced a class that believed anyone could become rich, and that all it required was discipline, willpower and hard work.

This illusion that the rich are mainly hardworking has produced real damage. I saw this most clearly where I studied. One of the founders of my college in Rajasthan was a devoted follower of Bill Gates. He believed that success meant following the Gates way, extreme discipline, ethical living, and a constant problem solving attitude. Cribbers, we were told, could never succeed.

This belief shaped everything. Strict attendance was mandatory. Internal marking was strict. Dress codes were strictly enforced four days a week. We were made to wear a uniform, blue shirts and black pants. It was disgusting. Bill Gates had stolen the vibe of our youth and left us aura less. The main keyword was strictness over leisure.

I was watching an interview a few days ago with Dolly Chaiwala, a tea seller in India who became a social media sensation after Bill Gates drank tea at his stall. The interviewer asked him about the experience of meeting Bill Gates. Dolly snapped back, visibly irritated. “Bill Gates nahi. Bill Gates sir hota hai”- He replied. (It is not Bill Gates, it is Bill Gates sir.)

The same kind of delusion gave birth to the Great American Dream, where you are promised that you can be rich if you work hard, and the Indian one, where people live with the guilt of not trying hard enough to be rich. While hard work does pay off, it is not the most important criterion for success. Especially when it is now amply clear that rich people are not hardworking, they are hardly working. They are well rested beneficiaries of systems designed to keep money circulating around them. They call this arrangement merit, mostly to sleep well at night.

This is how morality gets manufactured in the average person. While driving home in Jaipur, I saw a large Rajasthan Patrika billboard that read: Jeff Bezos padhte hai din ki ek kitaab. Aap ko kon rok rha hai. (Jeff Bezos reads one book everyday, who is stopping you).It is strange that a local newspaper ends up doing free public relations for a billionaire. The billboard builds a small mythology around Bezos, presenting him as a serious reader whose wealth is a natural outcome of intelligence and discipline. His riches appear as a moral reward, not as the result of systems designed to concentrate money. This helps maintain the status quo. Working class readers are left with the comforting explanation that the system works perfectly, and that they are poor only because they are not reading one book a day.

This illusion of rich people being smart is not limited to an average person in Jaipur. I recently saw a tweet by a very successful ad filmmaker who began by saying that some of the smartest men on the planet thought they would get away with the Epstein mess. The assumption that these men remain smart even after being exposed for what they are shows how deep this conditioning runs in society.

It is also worth noting that despite elite society being so shady, Indian cinema has produced very few films that actually depict this shadiness with any depth. The one name that comes to mind is Zoya Akhtar, a very competent filmmaker. But her gaze towards the rich is gentle and somewhat affectionate despite the mild crique. She occasionally hints that wealth brings its own problems, but the suggestion is never allowed to threaten the aspirational glow around that world. Their troubles are the usual ones, a little loneliness, a little confusion, the occasional detour outside marriage. The camera never strays far enough to show what their comfort rests on or to hint that they might be grotesque beneficiaries of an unfair world. Even in their brokenness they remain aspirational figures, lightly bruised yet never contaminated.

Madhur Bhandarkar has attempted it in his usual one dimensional and Punjab Kesari style of filmmaking . Still, there is one interesting scene in Page 3. Several rich people learn that an influential woman named Anjali has died. The news comes over a phone call.

A woman receives the call while standing inside an expensive clothing store, browsing colourful clothes. The voice on the phone tells her that Anjali is dead. She puts the phone down, exhales, and asks the salesman “alright, show me something in white.”

---

If you like reading this piece without a paywall, buy me a coffee and keep it that way.