[Written in 2015 and published in Jan 2026]
It is very likely if you are reading my blog, you must have grown up in India in the 70s and 80s. It was the height of socialism in India when there were only two types of cars, only one radio broadcaster and only one TV channel. Everybody I knew in the temple town of Tirupati I grew up with is solid middle class. I am aware of a few rich, but I can count them by my fingers.
Both rich and poor struggled to study hard to succeed academically. Rich could not buy education seats as it was happening in neighboring states of Karnataka, yet. The values that I grew up with are heavily influenced by the limited resources we had to improve ourselves, limited financial resources, and a fear of being left behind due to a lack of education. There was no second thought about pursuing a liberal arts education. While most in my town were able to get into a local university, many in cities were more successful in getting into IITs.
This generation moved to the US and has done fairly well both financially and professionally. When they started to have children of their own, such as myself, I found a great dilemma among parents of my generation. When I moved to India with two sons, I found the same dilemma among the newly successful and rich in India.
A sudden leap in wealth and prestige confused our generation. We know how to bring up children with the salary of a school teacher or a college professor, or a government office clerk, but we don't know what values to teach our children when we have two cars, a house in a garage that is many times bigger than the one we grew up in. In Indian, it is even worse with maids, cooks, and drivers.
My obvious approach was to take the path my father took. Bemoan about lack of money, tell the kids the importance of not wasting food, electricity, and water. Tell how many miles I used to walk to school every day. Tell how hard we worked to get into colleges. How we could afford to eat meat only once a week and many more. My kids would give me the look and say So what? It was impossible to develop the value I held about simplicity and frugality in them. I believe they turned out to be rich brat kids.
Looking at India as a nation, I found the same bewilderment. Within a single generation, a significant number of people became many times richer than their parents. It is like winning a lottery. The first issue of India Today I read after returning to India in 2006 was the cover article on the rich and young in India. The whole issue was about how youngsters ignore their parents, are sexually active with many partners, sex in school (I believe one of my blog here is about that topic), young having expensive cars, killing bystanders when driving drunk, when caught threatening officials with their influence, flunking college, extravagant weddings in Thailand, Bali, called Destination Weddings, with full travel and accomodation paid for.
Many of us consider ourselves financially successful because "...we learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of [t]his success, it would be difficult for [our] children to learn those same lessons," says Malcolm Gladwell in his book David & Goliath. Speaking of the same dilemma, he has much to say. Here are few quotes:
".. it's much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment."
"People are ruined by challenging economic lives. But they're ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition, and they lose their pride, and they lose their sense of self-worth. It's difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There's some place in the middle which probably works best of all", says one wealthy Hollywood executive in this book who had a rough and tumble life in Minnesota before he became successful."
"The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around $75,000 a year. After that, what economists call "diminishing marginal returns" sets in. This means that any amount you make after beyond $75k will increase your happiness marginally. Gladwell goes on to say that, in fact, parenting starts to become difficult when the income continues to grow. If you imagine a plot with growing wealth on the x-axis and ease of parenting on the y-axis, it would be an inverted U-curve."
There is nothing new about this. Every culture has proverbs warning about it. There are tons of movies in India showing a hard-working father going from rags to riches, only to see his children not having the same values and getting ruined.
I would ask my sons, who attended an expensive International School in Hyderabad (Oakridge), what they felt about the rich classmates who come to schools in BMWs, Audis, and other expensive cars, and live in these ultra-rich mansions in Banjara Hills. Their response was that they are equally prone to failure as their middle-class friends. As a matter of fact, my son tells me that some of the best performing students are so rich that they don't have to work for generations, but still work hard to get into good colleges abroad. Those kids seemed to have realized that no amount of wealth can make them successful unless they earn it themselves. I am sure this is happening in all cultures.
So what would I do? I realized that I can use the same approach that my father took. I believe one of the reasons I took my family back to India was to show them poverty. Unfortunately, they started to live a much richer lifestyle in India than they did as a middle-class family in the US, resulting in both my sons refusing to return to the US. I hope they will be able to contrast the lifestyles of the middle class in both countries and gain some of the values of my generation. I wonder how successful it will be.
Both rich and poor struggled to study hard to succeed academically. Rich could not buy education seats as it was happening in neighboring states of Karnataka, yet. The values that I grew up with are heavily influenced by the limited resources we had to improve ourselves, limited financial resources, and a fear of being left behind due to a lack of education. There was no second thought about pursuing a liberal arts education. While most in my town were able to get into a local university, many in cities were more successful in getting into IITs.
This generation moved to the US and has done fairly well both financially and professionally. When they started to have children of their own, such as myself, I found a great dilemma among parents of my generation. When I moved to India with two sons, I found the same dilemma among the newly successful and rich in India.
A sudden leap in wealth and prestige confused our generation. We know how to bring up children with the salary of a school teacher or a college professor, or a government office clerk, but we don't know what values to teach our children when we have two cars, a house in a garage that is many times bigger than the one we grew up in. In Indian, it is even worse with maids, cooks, and drivers.
My obvious approach was to take the path my father took. Bemoan about lack of money, tell the kids the importance of not wasting food, electricity, and water. Tell how many miles I used to walk to school every day. Tell how hard we worked to get into colleges. How we could afford to eat meat only once a week and many more. My kids would give me the look and say So what? It was impossible to develop the value I held about simplicity and frugality in them. I believe they turned out to be rich brat kids.
Looking at India as a nation, I found the same bewilderment. Within a single generation, a significant number of people became many times richer than their parents. It is like winning a lottery. The first issue of India Today I read after returning to India in 2006 was the cover article on the rich and young in India. The whole issue was about how youngsters ignore their parents, are sexually active with many partners, sex in school (I believe one of my blog here is about that topic), young having expensive cars, killing bystanders when driving drunk, when caught threatening officials with their influence, flunking college, extravagant weddings in Thailand, Bali, called Destination Weddings, with full travel and accomodation paid for.
Many of us consider ourselves financially successful because "...we learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work and the joy and fulfillment that come from making your own way in the world. But because of [t]his success, it would be difficult for [our] children to learn those same lessons," says Malcolm Gladwell in his book David & Goliath. Speaking of the same dilemma, he has much to say. Here are few quotes:
".. it's much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment."
"People are ruined by challenging economic lives. But they're ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition, and they lose their pride, and they lose their sense of self-worth. It's difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There's some place in the middle which probably works best of all", says one wealthy Hollywood executive in this book who had a rough and tumble life in Minnesota before he became successful."
"The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around $75,000 a year. After that, what economists call "diminishing marginal returns" sets in. This means that any amount you make after beyond $75k will increase your happiness marginally. Gladwell goes on to say that, in fact, parenting starts to become difficult when the income continues to grow. If you imagine a plot with growing wealth on the x-axis and ease of parenting on the y-axis, it would be an inverted U-curve."
There is nothing new about this. Every culture has proverbs warning about it. There are tons of movies in India showing a hard-working father going from rags to riches, only to see his children not having the same values and getting ruined.
I would ask my sons, who attended an expensive International School in Hyderabad (Oakridge), what they felt about the rich classmates who come to schools in BMWs, Audis, and other expensive cars, and live in these ultra-rich mansions in Banjara Hills. Their response was that they are equally prone to failure as their middle-class friends. As a matter of fact, my son tells me that some of the best performing students are so rich that they don't have to work for generations, but still work hard to get into good colleges abroad. Those kids seemed to have realized that no amount of wealth can make them successful unless they earn it themselves. I am sure this is happening in all cultures.
So what would I do? I realized that I can use the same approach that my father took. I believe one of the reasons I took my family back to India was to show them poverty. Unfortunately, they started to live a much richer lifestyle in India than they did as a middle-class family in the US, resulting in both my sons refusing to return to the US. I hope they will be able to contrast the lifestyles of the middle class in both countries and gain some of the values of my generation. I wonder how successful it will be.
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