In the last decade if there was one phrase that was used, or I should rather say abused, it was “middle class”. Marketers, planners, strategists et all have talked about the middle class. Some claim it to be around 250million, some say 400million and some go as far as 600million.
However I am not talking about the marketers, planners and the strategists that have abused the word. In fact most of them have a theory to which their numbers fit. The people that have abused the term are people like you and me. My neighbor who drives a Honda claims to be coming from a middle class household. My senior colleagues at work and otherwise claim to be middle class. My friends who send their children to international schools have called themselves middle class. And recently my wife and I were cribbing cauliflower at 60 rupees a kg and how could a middle class family like ours afford it.
You see, we have this amazing habit to downplay our happiness and overplay our sorrows. Ask someone you know well and it is more likely that he or she will talk more about their problematic issues rather than their happiness. We would talk about the maids not coming or doing poor work, the unfair boss, the low pay, the demanding client, the poor infrastructure, the sad sex life, the aging parents and the ailing health. Not to mention rising prices of vegetables and houses. We love to talk about these things to get some words of sympathy from our near and dear ones. And we love to call ourselves “middle class”. Middle class is a joke for us. People will never acknowledge that they are the premium class or the lower premium class. We would always say that we are upper middle class. We find a lot of comfort in the phrase. We do not want to let it go. If you are still not convinced, please take this test.
Let’s say there are 100 households in India.
• How many do you think own a car?
• How many took a vacation abroad?
• How many earn more than Rs.10lakh a year?
• How many can afford to spend Rs1000 on a dinner for 2-4 people?
• How many own a big LCD TV at home?
Chances are high that you qualify to most of the above, if not all. If that is true, then I have a real bad news for you. You are rich! You are not middle class. Less than 4-5 homes out of 100 can enjoy these luxuries. We are one of them. We are not even upper middle class.
Still don’t believe me? Chew on this. Different estimates put 300 to 450 million Indians below poverty line. Lets call them poor. Another 200 million or so can afford two square meals a day but few comforts and no luxuries. Another 200 million or so can afford more comforts, live in livable conditions (drivers and maids may come from this group). Another 200 million or so enjoy a vacation once in a while, live in better homes, send their children to English medium schools. Clerks, small time salesmen, petty traders may come here. These last two groups are middle class – upper middle, lower middle, middle middle what have you.
That leaves less than a hundred million people. We are among them. By any stretch of imagination you cannot be middle class. Middle class comes with the word middle – you are at one end of the extreme.
The problem is that we believe what we see and what we see is prosperity all around. A lot of people with Blackberry, a lot of people with premium cars (I see so many Hondas these days, it reminds me I am a middle class!), a lot of people with premium watches, a lot of people that travel abroad on holidays. That is our circle of vision and we conveniently don’t want to look beyond the circle. We assume that since so many of them have a Blackberry, a Honda car, an apartment in an up-market neighborhood and since we don’t have all or some of these things we may be middle class. What we don’t see is what are the things we have that others don’t. This article is not aimed at being philosophical. Far from it actually. This article argues us to be realistic.
If you are among those 4-5 households that has a car, a LCD TV, a couple of ACs and you fly most of the times you travel, you are not middle class. You are rich. Expenses on vegetables are less than a couple of percent of our monthly income so please let’s not crib about cauliflower at Rs.60 a kg. Reality is we don’t care. However we love to crib. It hurts the real middle class and of course the poor but to us it makes no difference in reality. It’s just that we do not want to be seen as rich that we conveniently want to snuggle inside the “middle class” cushion. Let’s please stop abusing the term. Let’s be real.
