The Disturbing Poverty of Rich Indian Kids
Brought up in luxurious gated communities, sent to expensive private schools in air-conditioned buses and cars, and taken on regular vacations to holiday destinations abroad, a great number of children and teenagers from well-to-do urban Indian families suffer from a poverty of soul that is disturbing.
What exactly is “soul poverty”? Disability rights activist Savatore Cimmino, an amputee and long distance swimmer who became the first disabled athlete to successfully swim across the Cook Strait, defines it very simply as “the inability to understand, and consequently appropriately evaluate, one’s actions towards others.”
According to him, “Poverty of spirit manifests itself in a thousand ways. Spiritually impoverished persons make fun of (those who are different). These people feel they have the right to make others pay for not falling within a ‘normal’ standard. It is almost as if the norm is their merit and makes them better.”
“Lost in our self-centeredness,” he says, “we are all becoming poor inside and therefore unable to help those who are even poorer than us. The spiritually impoverished person is racist, greedy, selfish, vain. Poverty of spirit is the main cause of many problems in our society. Most people who are victims of this sad condition do not realize it. Everything is rigorously aggravated by a total lack of empathy towards others.”
A better description of the rich metropolitan, upwardly mobile, insular, often Islamophobic, well-to-do Indian family would be hard to find. Considering how they have been brought up, one is hardly surprised at the way a worryingly large number of upper class Indian kids are turning out. — Brand-obsessed, self-centred, focused primarily on their own success and profoundly unaware of, or unconcerned about, the poverty and terrible inequality just outside their gated communities.
Some will protest that this observation is unfair because, after all, don’t their kids do some sort of ‘community service’? Granted, there are parents who have consciously taught their kids to treat the poor with dignity and respect, and there are schools that make a sincere effort to cater to the less fortunate, but their number is small.
More often than not, the so-called ‘community service initiatives’ that teenagers in the fancier schools take part in are not much more than portfolio-builders to facilitate their entrance into foreign universities. NGOs get regular requests from parents to let their children “come and help for a few hours every month because it will improve their chances of getting admission in a university abroad.”
This is sometimes accompanied by an offer of a donation. The goal, more often than not, is a glowing letter of recommendation from the NGO highlighting the child’s “enterprising spirit” and “leadership skills” that foreign universities apparently look for in aspirants.
(The joke in the NGO sector is that if foreign universities did not require applicants to have done some community service, rich Indian kids would never do any).
But honourable exceptions exist, even amongst the affluent.
I am reminded of Gagan (not his real name) who was a student of class 9 when I first met him in 2012 during a Life Skills workshop for high school students at a private school in Delhi. Gagan caught my attention because he was different from the rest of his class. Though from a rich family himself, he was careful not to flaunt the fact. He also made it a point to befriend the handful of EWS (Economically Weaker Section) kids in his class, unlike most of his classmates who kept them at a disdainful distance.
Gagan told me he found it difficult to be like everyone else around him. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to participate in the social life of his class, which, according to him, was not much more than a “nonstop show-off marathon” in which his classmates gauged themselves and each other by the amount of material wealth their families owned.
Gagan battled depression and anxiety through his school years and would wryly remark, “I’m told it’s because I ‘overthink.” My guess is it was because the rest of his classmates did not think enough.
In April 2015, when a terrible earthquake devastated Nepal and claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people, Gagan’s school took a collection for the earthquake victims at the request of a local NGO helping the survivors.
Gagan volunteered to go to Sadar Bazar, Delhi’s wholesale market, to help buy relief materials in bulk. (“That’s my part of town. I am acquainted with the shops there and can get the best prices.”). He even managed to motivate a small group of his classmates to work through the hottest weeks of the year packing a huge truck full of relief essentials. He would have probably accompanied the relief truck all the way to Kathmandu too, given half a chance.
One wonders why kids like Gagan (now a young man in his mid 20s) chose to respond so differently to the pain of the world than his peers. His upbringing undoubtedly had much to do with it, as did the good influence of some of his teachers who responded to the request to help the distressed people of Nepal. Perhaps his own battles with depression helped nurture a sense of solidarity with the suffering of others. Whatever the reasons, Gagan chose to look beyond himself.
Here again, Savatore Cimmino, quoted earlier, offers wisdom on how to tackle the problem of soul poverty:
“Poverty of spirit can be solved with knowledge and good will. We need a bit of introspection, sincerity and a lot of humility. Those who recognize the problem in themselves can overcome it. Imitating the right role models and generous people can be the beginning of a great change.”
Children become what they behold. The onus, as always, remains on us as adults to become those role models and generous people. It is up to us to bring out the best in our kids.
