They are our legislators, the so-called elected representatives, bureaucrats, civil and uniformed hierarchy, feudalistic landlords, industrialists, businessmen, tribal chieftains, judges, traders, pseudo intellectuals, for-sale writers, journalists and intelligentsia. They are a class of their own and the law unto themselves. Theirs are the wealth and the riches of the land and they are its predecessors, successors and inheritors.

You may not know their names or recognize them by their faces but they are present everywhere. You may or may not feel them breathing down your neck but you can feel their presence everywhere. You bear, directly or indirectly, the expense of their extravagance and grandeur through direct or revealed taxes, exaggerated utility bills, profiteering, hoarding, unjust price increases of all essentials, products and services. Since they are the law unto themselves no body should dare challenge them. They come up with ingenious schemes to gobble your hard-earned money no matter how small it is.
One of their favourite pastime is lecturing you abut the virtues of sacrifice, selflessness, honesty, hard work, dignity of labour without having least respect for any of these virtues themselves. They live in sea of luxury but miss no opportunity, appropriate or otherwise, to glamorize poverty. They pay no or next to no taxes but love to tax us to death. They do not shoulder a gram of the burdens of the land but fight among themselves for the share of all of its riches.

They drink mineral water but ask the people make do with harmful tap, tanker and packed water. They hoard up every grain of wheat, rice, sugar, pulses and every drop of edible oil and petroleum and every other essential or non-essential item, produced locally or imported, so that they can sell it at a premium.

They talk as if they are God's special gift to the people. They demand respect instead of earning it. Like all ruling classes elsewhere there are rivalries among them as well but they display an envious unity when their collective interests are threatened. They do everything in the name of the people too bad if it is never in the interest or benefit of the people.

They decide what the people should or should not know, do, think, ask, believe and practice. They decide what is good or harmful for the people. They demand, and expect, unconditional loyalty and absolute conformity from their lowly subjects. They want people to agree with their line of reasoning no matter how demented it may be. In short, they want people to love, fear and obey them nothing less than God.

They allow people to live at their own expense and die at their own risk. They take loans and people pay it. They are indifferent islands of luxury oblivious to the vast sea of poverty that surrounds them. They sermonize, people digest. They are all good, all wise, all enlightened and all sparkling clean. They are articulate compared to their dumb-to-the-core people. They are drenched in perfume compared to sweat-reeking people. They are all benevolence their subjects absolute barbarians good only for ruthless punishment be it economic, financial, physical or even capital if need be.