The Curse of the Working Middle Class

I am twenty-five. I graduated from a premiere business school last year, and landed a handsome six-figure pay. Seven months into the job, I realized I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing and so, decided to take a break to find out what I really wanted to do. It was then that I realized that I have never really done anything of my own accord! For as long as I can remember, I have been told what to do. Homework in school, assignments in college, and projects at work: everything was always served on a platter. Of course, I did full justice to whatever came my way, performed my “tasks” with utmost sincerity, but never once did I CREATE “the way”.

Twenty years of formal education, and I have never even sold my notes to a stranger!

I was born in a tier-4 city in Bihar. We had a mixed neighborhood in terms of economic distribution: a lot of doctors, engineers, government servants, small business owners living together with a lot of very-small business owners. The lady who lived right next to my house, Raju’s mom (We didn’t know her name; that’s who she was: Raju’s Mom), had two cows, and she would sell their milk to the neighbors. Her eldest son dealt in tea-leaves. Her second son drove an auto, and her youngest son had a momo-stand. Her husband ran a tea-stall outside a hospital.

In many ways, I find her family, her children, way more emancipated than I, a “well-educated”, high-earning member of the society, will ever be. The very means that were supposed to free me became my shackles, and how! The society would rather I rot of unemployment than accept anything “less than my worth”. This could be the same reason that while I waited to “complete” my education to start earning, Raju’s mom and her kids tried their hands at anything and everything without any inhibitions.

And as if the weight of my working-class heritage wasn’t enough, I had to bog myself down with another bummer: a hefty education loan. If there is anything worse than an uneducated, unemployed child for a middle-class family, it is “a child with a loan”. A middle-class person repaying a loan is like Arjuna aiming for the fish’ eye: the agenda of your every waking moment has to be paying off of the loan.

Although the college debts and their impact have been widely debated in the West for a long time now, the issue is still unheard of in India. Primarily because it impacts a limited few: One, very few streams require that kind of investment, and two, higher education is still a luxury. To top it all, Indian parents go the extra mile to protect their kids from falling into the demonic possession of credit and compound interest. Blame Bollywood’s infamous Lala and naïve Radha Rani, or blame the unorganized lending sector, loans have become eternally villainized for the middle class in India. Indian middle-class parents will sell their kidneys if they have to, to keep their kids from availing loans. Because believe it or not, education, employment and no-loan are the three pillars of middle-class parenting.

We, the middle class, are terrified of failure. Because we have been on the other side. We have seen our fathers and forefathers struggle and climb their way into decent lives, and we fear one wrong step will drag us down into the very deep dark pit we have finally managed to escape. Add to it the huge population and scant opportunities.

And this fear of failure is passed on as family heirloom.

No amount of formal education can ever prepare you to let go of a well-paying job, and venture into the unknown. Case in point? Despite having all the safety nets that one can possibly ask for: a degree that ensures I don’t die jobless, a family that will be there for me irrespective, and a close circle of friends who will readily pull me out of any manhole I land into; here I am, petrified, evaluating the outcomes of my move.

But truth be told, we, the second and third generation middle-class, can actually afford this. Because our parents worked really hard so that we don’t have to. Because our times are different. And because we owe it to our future generations.