Upwardly mobile poverty
In May last year, journalist Gayatri Jayaraman wrote an article for Buzzfeed India that quickly went viral. The article highlighted the plight of what she called the “urban poor”, young men and women who move to the big cities from small towns and scrimp on the most basic necessities in order to survive and fit in.
The article drew some empathy but also a lot of flak. For a country where the vast majority is officially poor, and where the definition of the poverty line hinges on earnings that are deplorably low, to call poor someone who lives on chips during the monthend in order to pay the EMI rankled.
Ms Jayaraman has expanded her original article into the book under review, and has substantially broadened the scope of her study. Quoting first-person accounts, she builds an argument on how several factors come together to force the young and the upwardly mobile to make choices that they come to regret.
She covers a wide variety of professions, from fashion to IT, media to consultancy. The story is nearly uniformly one of struggle. The problem starts with the culture shock that many small-town residents face when they come to the big city. They are used to their parents’ involvement in all decision-making, and the new independence, while thrilling, can also cause anxiety.
The major issue, as Ms Jayaraman sees it, is the desperate need to belong at work and among the peer group. She profiles those who would rather spend money on apparel and bling than save enough for a decent meal. There are accounts of interns and new recruits going without food the whole day just to have enough to spend at a high-end coffee shop.
Even the academically well-off are not safe. One BITS Pilani graduate speaks of his discomfort with the pressure to take out his team for lunches, since that is the thing to do and one cannot risk coming across as a miser. Combine this with the high rents in metros, and the serial EMIs the young pay today, and it is easy to see how they end up depleting even respectable salaries.
It gets tempting to suggest that those who fill Ms Jayaraman’s book — people who earn enough to live decently if they lived within their means — are a spoilt lot who couch their lack of financial discipline in loftily sad tales. But the truth is more nuanced.
Several Mumbaikars Ms Jayaraman writes about, for example, spend a substantial chunk of their salary on taking Ubers and Olas home after working 12-hour days. In a country where someone always suffers more than you, avoiding the local train might strike you as a luxury, but the touching need to reach home without being crammed into an unbreathable space with other heaving bodies would count as a necessity in more developed societies.
Some of these pain points are, thus, very real; others not so much — Ms Jayaraman profiles a young woman who bought an iPhone by offering her body for sex. She defends her decision as not very different from what the young get up to on Tinder and other hook-up apps anyway, so why not make the most of it and get what one wants.
Although Ms Jayaraman makes no judgement, the inclusion of such stories takes away from her thesis. Buying branded clothes and contributing towards the weekend liquor pool may be necessary to avoid becoming a pariah at work, but if you do not know when this might tip over into emotionally ruinous territory, then the obsession has gone too far.
Even so, the fact that a large number feels the need to bow to the dictates of the market economy indicates that the problem is not imaginary, as critics of Ms Jayaraman’s theory believe. I also find the niggling about the term “urban poor” self-defeating. Ms Jayaraman is not a sociologist looking to introduce a new term to the canon; she is merely capturing an observable phenomenon with a smart phrase.
Ms Jayaraman ends her book with advice on how best to manage finances. Like the rest of the book, the tone here is not preachy — she recognises the need to do things that our parents, raised on Gandhian ideals of sacrifice and socialism, would balk at. At the same time, she cautions against giving in completely to the idea of presenting a certain winning picture, especially at the cost of braving wretched personal conditions. The improved monetary and career prospects may never arrive and you may end up hurting yourself in the bargain.
“India has changed” is a refrain that we hear unceasingly. Who me, poor? brings out an important aspect of the transformation, one that is perhaps pushed into silence for it captures neither the glories of a growing economy nor the plight of its more obvious victims. Ms Jayaraman’s attempt at recording the pressures and struggles of those in the middle is an important corrective. How India’s Youth Are Living In Urban Poverty To Make It Big Gayatri Jayaraman Bloomsbury 184 pages; ~399