The Monopoly of the Powerful

There was a boy once, luminous with promise, the kind of promise that makes teachers write notes in margins and relatives nod with the solemnity of prophets. He could conjugate Latin verbs before he could properly conjugate his own despair. He knew the periodic table the way other children knew nursery rhymes, and he recited both with equal irrelevance to the world that awaited him. That boy, reader, is now me, or what remains of me, a middle-aged specter haunting the corridors of Calcutta’s irrelevance, watching the powerful rich and connected erect their monuments to monopoly while I sink, sink, sink into concentric circles of deprivation nested one within the other like some grotesque matryoshka doll designed by a sadist with a taste for the theatrical.

The monopoly of the powerful is too vast to set aside, too grotesque to ignore, and yet ignore it we must, for what else is the middle-class Bengali to do but cultivate the fine art of dignified suffocation? We are experts at it, we Calcutta scum, bobbing up and down in the grim low light of insecure lives, our heads barely above the surface of the latrine, our mouths opening not to scream but to form the shapes of polite acquiescence. “Yes sir,” we say, “no sir,” we say, “thank you for the opportunity to be ground beneath your heel, sir,” we say, and we say it with the grammatical precision of a people who once ruled an empire of the mind and now cannot even rule the space beneath their own beds.

I have watched the circles close in, year by year, ring upon ring, each one tighter, each one darker, each one more insistent on reminding me of my place in the chain of consequences, or rather, my absence from it. The first circle was merely uncomfortable, a slight tightening of the belt, a deferral of dreams, the kind of thing one writes off as temporary, as “just a phase,” as “things will improve once the economy picks up.” The economy, that great god of the modern age, whose priests are economists and whose sacrifices are the hopes of the poor, the economy never picked up, not for me, not for us, not for the ordinary Bengali middle-class neighborhood specimens who were never invited to the banquet but were expected to clean the plates afterward.

The second circle was educational, in the cruelest sense of the word. I learned, with the thoroughness of a man studying his own autopsy report, exactly how the system is rigged, how the dice are loaded, how the cards are marked, how the game is fixed from the opening move to the checkmate that was always inevitable. I learned that merit is a word the powerful use to justify their power, that hard work is a virtue they preach to those who will never benefit from it, that connections are the true currency of advancement and that I, with my Latin verbs and my periodic table, possessed a currency that had been devalued before I was even born. I was US educated, you see, fifteen years in healthcare research, fifteen years of contributing to the great machine of American medicine, fifteen years of believing, with the pathetic naivety of a man who reads too much and understands too little, that my credentials would matter, that my expertise would translate, that my labor would be valued. I returned to Calcutta, that great gravitational well of dashed hopes, and discovered that my American education was about as useful as a chocolate teapot in a house fire, that my research credentials were invisible to the local gatekeepers, that my fifteen years of service to the empire had earned me precisely nothing in the colony.

The third circle was the circle of visibility, or rather, the progressive loss of it. I began to notice, with the slow horror of a man realizing he is becoming transparent, that people stopped seeing me. Not in the metaphorical sense, though there was plenty of that, but in the literal, transactional sense. Shopkeepers addressed the person behind me. Colleagues at conferences spoke over me. Job applications disappeared into the void without so much as an automated rejection. I was becoming a shadow, a mere outline of the bright school boy I had been, a ghost haunting the margins of a society that had no use for ghosts except as cautionary tales told to children who still harbored the dangerous delusion that the world rewards the worthy. The powerful rich and connected, they do not merely monopolize wealth; they monopolize attention, they monopolize relevance, they monopolize the very narrative of what constitutes a life worth living, and in their monopoly, they render the rest of us not merely poor but invisible, not merely deprived but nonexistent.

And now I find myself in the fourth circle, the innermost ring, the one that smells of sulfur and resignation, where the ordinary Bengali middle-class turds bob in the grim low light of lives that drag on needlessly and endlessly, without meaning or content, empty hollow shells of past and frittered opportunities. I am scum, dear reader, and I say this not with self-pity but with the clinical detachment of a man who has finally accepted his diagnosis. I am scum floating in the Calcutta latrine of third world irrelevance, and the float is not even a dignified one, not a stately drift upon the surface, but a desperate, undulating bob, up and down, up and down, in the tidal rhythms of a sewage system designed by people who have never had to smell it. The bright school boy is gone, buried under layers of disappointment and debt and the slow accretion of minor humiliations that compound into a major catastrophe of the self. He is a memory now, a photograph yellowing at the edges, a voice on a tape that grows fainter with each playback, and I, his remainder, his residue, his dregs, I persist, because persistence is what the poor do, because stopping is a luxury we cannot afford, because the alternative to this meaningless drag is a silence that offers no more meaning than the noise.

The etymology of “monopoly” is instructive here, not that anyone asked, but I will give it anyway because etymology is the archaeology of meaning, and I am in the mood to dig. From the Greek monos, meaning “single, alone,” and polein, meaning “to sell.” A monopoly is a single seller, a lone vendor, a solitary merchant who controls the entire market. But the word has metastasized, as words do, as power does, until it encompasses not merely the control of goods but the control of opportunity, the control of visibility, the control of narrative, the control of who gets to be human and who gets to be scum. The powerful rich and connected have monopolized not merely the economy but the ontology of success, they have cornered the market on what it means to matter, and they have done it so thoroughly, so comprehensively, so obscenely that the rest of us do not even realize we have been priced out of existence until we try to purchase a future and discover our currency is counterfeit in a realm where they mint the coins.

I think sometimes of the mathematics of it, because mathematics, unlike life, does not lie, or if it does, it lies beautifully, elegantly, with the honesty of a well-constructed proof. The Gini coefficient, that elegant measure of inequality, where zero is perfect equality and one is perfect inequality, where a single person holds all the wealth and everyone else holds none. India, my beloved catastrophe, hovers around 0.35 to 0.45 depending on whether you trust the government or the World Bank or your own lying eyes, but the number is abstract, bloodless, a decimal point that conceals the hemorrhage. I prefer to think of it in terms of concentric circles, each one a standard deviation from the mean, each one a further exile from the center where the powerful feast, and I, we, the ordinary, the obscure, the irrelevant, we spiral outward into the penumbra, into the twilight, into the darkness where the Gini coefficient becomes not a number but a sentence, a life sentence, served in the prison of third world irrelevance.

The Pareto principle, that 80/20 rule beloved of management consultants and apologists for the status quo, tells us that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes, and in the realm of wealth, this translates to the top 20% owning 80% of the assets, a ratio that in India is more like the top 1% owning 50%, which is less a principle and more a confession. Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist who first observed this distribution in his garden—of all places, in his garden, among the pea pods, as if inequality were a natural phenomenon like photosynthesis, as if the concentration of wealth were as inevitable as the turning of leaves toward the sun—Pareto gave the powerful a mathematical alibi for their avarice, a statistical justification for their monopoly, and the rest of us, the 80%, the 99%, the whatever-percent-we-are-now, we are left to fight over the scraps with the desperation of peasants at a banquet where the plates have already been licked clean.

And yet, and yet, there is a perverse wonder in it all, a dark astonishment at the sheer efficiency of the machine, the elegant cruelty of the system, the way it grinds and grinds and grinds without ever breaking down, without ever needing maintenance, without ever requiring the powerful to lift a finger to keep it running. We, the ground, we keep it running. We are the lubricant and the friction, the fuel and the exhaust, the input and the waste product, and the machine consumes us with the appetite of a god who demands not worship but mere existence, not sacrifice but mere persistence. The monopoly of the powerful is too big to set aside and rest, yes, but it is also too big to fail, too big to question, too big to even perceive in its totality, and so we do not perceive it, we live inside it like fish in water, like worms in earth, like scum in latrines, and we call it life, we call it fate, we call it the way things are, because calling it anything else would require a vocabulary of resistance we have been systematically denied.

I grow older now, and the circles grow smaller, and the light grows dimmer, and the boy I was recedes further into the haze of memory, a bright spot in a darkening room, a voice growing fainter, a promise unkept by the world that made it. I am obscure middle-aged scum, and I say this with the pride of a man who has survived, who persists, who bobs up and down in the grim low light with the stubbornness of a turd that refuses to be flushed, that clings to the porcelain with the tenacity of the dispossessed, that insists on its own existence in a system designed to render it invisible. The monopoly of the powerful will continue, the rich will get richer, the connected will get more connected, and I, we, the ordinary Bengali middle-class, we will continue to sink, to fade, to become shadows of our former selves, empty hollow shells of past and frittered opportunities, dragging on needlessly and endlessly in the Calcutta latrine of third world irrelevance.

But I will write about it, because writing is the last monopoly of the powerless, the one market the rich have not yet cornered, the one currency they cannot devalue, the one visibility they cannot erase. I will write in the first person, because the first person is the last person, the final stand, the solitary “I” against the collective “they,” the single seller of my own experience in a market flooded with their narratives. I will write with the vocabulary of the defeated and the syntax of the desperate, with the burstiness of a man who has too much to say and too little time to say it, with sentences that coil like serpents and sentences that strike like hammers, because this is what remains, this is what persists, this is what the monopoly of the powerful cannot take, cannot buy, cannot sell, cannot own.

I am scum, and I am writing, and in the writing, I am, for this moment, visible, audible, present, alive, a bright spot in my own darkening room, a voice that refuses to grow fainter, a promise I keep to myself, needlessly, endlessly, without meaning or content, an empty hollow shell that echoes with the sound of its own persistence.

P.S. References: Pareto, Vilfredo. “Cours d’Économie Politique.” 1896. World Bank. “Gini Index.” DataBank, 2024. Piketty, Thomas. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Harvard University Press, 2014.