Manu Joseph: Why do so many public figures have exaggerated tales of past poverty?

Some of the biggest yarns of our times are tales of rags-to-riches.

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 believe that they really did rise from “nothing”. That is probably because they confuse being broke with poverty.

These are very different things. Poverty is not a temporary misfortune of the fortunate. Poverty is not only the absence of money, but also immersion in a whole environment that is cut off from money. It is the amnesia of money, where there is no recollection or evidence at all among those who suffer it that their kind once had money.

To be poor is to be stuck in time, to live in a different era from luckier people. Poverty is always in relation to the rest of society.

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, once said of US vice-president J.D. Vance, whose claims of growing up poor appear to be exaggerated.

No one wants to be poor but everyone wants a poor past, especially public figures for it shows them as gritty 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’ stories. 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 full of influential people.

Many Indian immigrants in America are belligerent about the notion that they had made it the ‘hard way.’ Yet, their ability to reach America is in fact evidence not of their brilliance, but that they hail from luckier Indian households. In the 80s only the upper middle class and the rich could make it to the rarefied places that eventually gave one a shot at America. There might be exceptions but exceptions say nothing.

In the decades that followed, the ability to reach America has travelled down the rungs of society, to India’s provincial middle classes. But that privilege still, I believe, stops in the stratosphere, high above the hell-holes of Indian poverty.

Every time I point this out, Indians I know in America respond with rage. This makes me wonder how they ever cleared the analytical reasoning and reading comprehension sections of those objective-type tests. Or maybe they are truly naive about how poor their country of origin actually is.

This seems to be a problem that afflicts even Google CEO Sundar Pichai. 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 the early 90s and the price of a ticket to the US, the fact that his father’s annual salary was as much as the airfare points to the probability that his household was in India’s top 5% at the time. India was that poor.

In my experience, even smart people sometimes find it hard to understand that they might have struggled more than their cousins and classmates, but if they are among the social elite of their nation, that alone gives them some 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” or “slept in a railways station” hints that he made it through stellar human qualities.

This cements the notion in every generation that there is a path to escape an impoverished life, and if you have not managed to, maybe there is something wrong with you. And most poor people probably feel there is indeed something wrong with them, their minds, their character or perhaps in their stars.

The rejection of luck’s outsized role in the lives of the upper class is one of the weirdest aspects of human nature. Recently, when thousands of househelps from West Bengal across Indian metros vanished to vote in their state elections, Gurugram was particularly hard hit.

On a WhatsApp chat 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…”

There appears to be no correlation between intelligence and affluence.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’