Shh, I'm rich!

"As a country, India has a complicated relationship with wealth. Through much of the nearly seventy years of our nationhood, we have lived on the wholesomeness and worthy goal of having just enough. A craving and indulgence for wealth was neither encouraged nor possible in an economic philosophy built on the idea of socialism and where the government controlled and regulated private enterprise.

It has been a country where the vast population was poor with a minor middle class, an extremely tiny portion wealthy, with rigid lines dividing them all. Mobility across these different segments was limited. Since lines were not porous, attitudes within each group — and towards each other — were more fixed and unyielding.

An adjective constantly used for modern India is aspirational. There is a greater sanction for and encouragement to people wanting more. Even within a steadily expanding middle-class that now stands at about 24 million adults (according to the 2015 Credit Suisse report that used wealth as a filter, not income), attitudes to wealth have changed. The ones that do use consumption as a metric peg the middle-class at more than 200 million people.

The emergence of the new wealthy lies within the context of a larger transformation: Many of the first-generation rich have come from within the large swathe of the “middle-middle class.” Their attitude is therefore a combination of their past perceptions as outsiders to affluence, and their changed reality of insiders looking in.

Yet, for the rapid rise in affluence, talking money doesn’t come easily to many of India’s new, first-generation rich. The conventional notion of the nouveau riche, essentially someone coming into a lot of money and perceived to be ostentatious or lacking in good taste by their visible demonstration of it, doesn’t always hold true if I think about several of the people I’ve met — generally, as well as in the course of writing this book.

Enough first-generation wealth creators interviewed went to great lengths to dismiss the fortunes they had built as being a mere by-product of their success. They seemed to consciously downplay the reality of their abundance as the focus of the conversation.

Several baulked at the idea of being interviewed for this book because it would classify them as rich; others repeatedly said that they didn’t consider themselves to be extraordinarily “loaded” and that I would be better off speaking to others who have built bigger fortunes. Many were happy to help the research by talking candidly but requested not to be quoted.

Nearly half of the interviewees said “making money” has never been a motivation or driver for them; the other half said that while money in the bank might be a metric to tabulate achievement with, it was by no means the only one. The heady rush of building a company, and the validation gained from having crafted smart solutions and seeing ideas come alive, is the prime force, most assert. In fact, the phrase “creating value” was touted much more as a metric for success than creating wealth.

The careful tweaking of the context and the discomfort in discussing wealth was surprising. At various points of the conversation, I wondered if these were rehearsed responses meant to sound “correct”? Was there also a mild delusion at play when people who I knew had upwards of Rs 50 crore ($7.5 million) in investable surplus considered themselves “not- wealthy”?

The studied cleverness of reticence

In an article for The New York Times, American economist and columnist Paul Krugman said the American public neither had a good sense of whom the rich are nor how much money they made. Because the truly-wealthy were far removed from an average person’s life, a regular American had no idea how unequal their society had become. The real-wealthy are smart enough to keep off from media coverage of their riches. If this was a smart strategy for the Americans, did a wealthy Indian consider this to be true as well?

The interview process — my primary source of gathering insights and experiences for this book — isn’t always a foolproof microscope for understanding someone. At its core, even in the most frank conversations, interviewees self-select the personal biases and motivations revealed.

Sometimes, this self-selection is directed towards the self, not as a means to obfuscate or hide but to reinforce the principles and ideas those interviewed want to be associated with. The subjects of this book are successful people adept at communicating effectively. Much of their self- consciousness around being rich might be genuinely felt but in interviews there isn’t a way to know how truly authentic someone has chosen to be.

To negotiate around this limitation, and test the assumptions I had arrived at through my interactions, I followed up the interviews with a survey of nearly sixty wealthy clients. I let them keep their names concealed, with the hope that the privacy would lead to more honest answers. The respondents were asked for other personal details: age, city, industries they worked in, whether they were first-generation entrepreneurs or professionals and how much they had in investable wealth, to build a character sketch.

The responses from the survey will be referenced in this chapter and the next. In summary, however, the findings do reveal some surprising insights, including the fact that 97.5 per cent of the respondents said they do not enjoy showing off their wealth. Nearly 55 per cent, in fact, said they made a concerted effort to underplay it.

It’s a contradictory diffidence. It isn’t as if India’s new wealthy are spartan. Certainly, there is no forced frugality. The visible manifestation of wealth, at least across our cities, is much more evident than it was a decade ago. There is an increase in consumption and indulgence. There are more expensive restaurants, luxury automobiles, steep rise in vacations and in the value of clothes bought.

Reams of newspaper print have been spent covering upmarket weddings in Delhi and Mumbai. In certain “intellectual” quarters, this extravagant display is decried. It is said to demonstrate our changing values and a culture of crass consumerism. But is the dramatic increase in spending limited to only the rich?

In an aspirational India, spends have increased across all income segments. We consume more as a nation on a whole range of “discretionary items”. The wealthy certainly do but aren’t unique in doing so. As a fraction of income, lifestyle spends have gone up steadily even in upper-middle class homes.

In the case of the first-generation wealthy, lifestyles have often undergone substantial changes — especially when compared to the middle-class milieu a large number of them were brought up in. Typically, where, and how they live, has been upgraded dramatically from their lifestyles a decade back. There has been an appreciation of the good life — for food, travel, clothes and homes — and few people would admit to not being shaukeen about at least one of these.

Most have also made at least a few indulgent purchases, usually a large house in their city’s prime real estate. They savour and enjoy their new possessions — especially the vacations they take, the homes they live in and the cars they drive — but are uncomfortable with the idea of being defined by it or if perceived to have become extravagant because of these spends.

Few will say outright that they are proud of having gathered the financial ability to acquire these. If not guilt, there is definitely an uneasy mix of self-consciousness and awkwardness when talking about the material manifestation of their wealth."

Excerpted from The Wealth Wallahs, Shreyasi Singh, Bloomsbury India.

The Wealth Wallahs is a story of entrepreneurial dynamism in India. Set in a post-2008 world, it chronicles the story of the country’s new wealthy and the people helping them manage these riches. The book also presents the story of IIFL Wealth, a young wealth management company that has in less than a decade become an industry frontrunner by building a business catering to the new wealthy. Find your copy here.