Putting on 'poverty like you put on makeup’

IN his first speech as Tamil Nadu chief minister, Joseph Vijay said in Tamil, “I have known poverty; I’ve known hunger. I am not from some royalty.” Rahul Gandhi, who was in the audience, may have felt some discomfort at the glory of yet another self-made man. This whole country seems to be filled with self-made men, not only among his foes but also among his friends. Unfortunately for Vijay, I was his classmate when we were around eight, in Chennai.

Oddly, the reason why I remember him at all as my classmate and could later connect that he was the same guy on film posters, is that he was the first rich boy I knew, at least rich by the standards of the Kodambakkam suburb of Chennai. Years later, when he was eighteen, he was cast in the lead in a film his father made. So his rags-to-riches story is plain nonsense. Some of the biggest yarns of our times are rags-to-riches stories.

Often, they are exaggerations of some hard days, a delayed dinner perhaps, a single month when debtors came home or the landlord demanded rent. Many of the self-made may even truly believe they had risen from the ground. That is because they are confusing the state of being broke with poverty. They are very different things. Poverty is not a temporary misfortune. Poverty is not only the absence of money but also a whole environment that is cut off from money. It is the amnesia of money where there is no recollection or evidence in them at all that their kind once had money. Being poor is to be stuck in time, to live in a different era from luckier people. To be poor is always in relation to the rest of society. And to be broke when you are in the top five percent is still hugely advantageous.

Yet, not only in India but across the world, people are quick to claim poverty. They put on “poverty like you put on makeup,” as Lennard Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of American vice president JD Vance, whose claims of growing up poor appear to have been exaggerations.

A poor past is a most sought-after luxury among public figures, for it shows them as people who came up the hard way. It is an oddly attractive quality in a person to a crowd, even though it is unattractive at a personal level. Its strange unreasonable shame, the exact opposite of the vapid awe of royalty, dissipates in proportion to the number of people who know of it.

Yet, very few among the truly poor have had a chance at life to make the claim that they made it against severe odds. Most people who have triumphed are nepo babies with some ‘my-dad-had-bad-days’ story, like Vijay. And there appear to be numerous old men who “came to Bombay with ten rupees in my pocket”. Yet somehow, just months later, they are in rooms with influential people. Narendra Modi, who has portrayed himself as poor, had a concrete home in Vadnagar and had access to education and food. By the standards of the India of the 1960s, he was probably provincial middle class. Even Arundhati Roy believes she was poor. Even though she hails from the cream of Kerala’s society, her rebellion against home meant that she couldn’t afford to live in the student hostel and had to move to a slum with her equally posh boyfriend.

I write with contempt for such stories because I believe I myself had a more valiant poverty story. If I can repeat my presentation of just how poor — I was so poor even Mother Teresa would have called me poor. But I also know why I was not poor enough — if most of your country was worse than you then it gave you an extraordinary advantage that even the middle-class in a rich country did not possess. This is in fact the reason why almost all public figures who claim they were once poor could do well — because they were actually rich in more meaningful ways than merely having money.

Many Indian migrants in America are belligerent about their notion that they had made it the “hard way”. Yet, the fact that they could reach America is in fact evidence not of their brilliance, but that they hail from luckier Indian households. In fact, in the 1980s only the upper middle class and the rich could make it to the stratified places that eventually gave one a shot at America. There might be exceptions, but exceptions say nothing. Progressively, the ability to reach America has travelled down the rungs, to the provincial middle classes. But that still, I believe, stops in the stratosphere, high above the hell holes of Indian poverty. Every time I point this out, Indians in America respond angrily, making me wonder how they ever cleared reading comprehension in those objective-type tests, or maybe they are truly naive about how poor India is.

Even Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, appears to have analytical problems in this regard. Once, as though in response to claims such as mine, he said, “My father spent... a year’s salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford.”

Considering the Indian per capita income in say 1992, and the price of a ticket to the USA, the fact that his father’s salary was as much as the plane ticket points to the probability that his household was in the top 1% to 5% at the time. India was that poor.

Even smart people find it hard to understand that they might have struggled more than their cousins and classmates, but if they are in the top 5% of their nation, that fact alone gives them extraordinary advantages.

The imagined poverty of public figures has created a disease in society. It’s called inspirational stories. In such a story, a man who claims to have “known hunger” hints that he made it through stellar human qualities. This cements the notion in every generation that there is a path to escape strife and if you have not escaped it maybe there is something wrong with you. And most poor people feel that there is indeed something wrong with them, and in their stars.

The refutation of the outsized role of luck in the lives of the upper class is one of the most weird aspects of human nature. Recently, when thousands of housemaids across Indian metros vanished to vote in the West Bengal elections, Gurgaon was particularly hard hit. On a WhatsApp group in my colony, affluent people cursed maids for sloth and unprofessionalism. One of them said, “(we) worked really hard to achieve what we have and are today, we never shirked hard work, inclement weather, odd working hours, bad working conditions…”

I am reminded of a line from a Zoya Akhtar film: ‘Wish self-made people had made themselves better people’.

Ends