Is the Indian middle class dying?

I'm gonna get a 7,000 rupee thali to try

Average Indian is fed five hours a day of curated images of luxury, and naturally, the average Indian is loading up on debt to live the good life.

So we have become the most indebted middle class in the world.

Tell us why is the middle class so bamboozled?

In the post '91 world, this is the first time we've run out of jobs.

Real wages, i.e., salaries after adjusting for inflation, have stopped growing in India over the last six, seven years.

But between five lakhs to a crore, at that exact band-

Mm

... which is our definition of middle class, household incomes are frozen solid for the last 10 years.

But the debt thing, actually, when I read about it in your book, it kind of shocked me.

Mm.

In this world of hyper-connected social media, a lot of people feel that everybody else's lives are perfect.

Great.

I too am the guy who's completely shafted, but that's because it's me.

I also have to go on that holiday to Mauritius because otherwise, you know, how will I show my face at the Diwali party?

I think for millennials or maybe even boomers growing up, a loan was an act of shame.

Youngsters in their 20s and 30s who have taken 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 700 personal loans, that was the record I've met.

700 personal loans.

Yeah, his point was 670 [laughs] Right? So...

You say that the middle class, they don't have a lot of political leverage.

So middle class neither represents, uh, voting power, nor represents money power, and hence why should a politician really kill himself trying to look after this constituency?

Indians actually have a very unusual system where we waste years of our 20s studying for these exams.

Mm.

Studying for competitive exams, studying for the IAS exam.

In fact, I did the maths, you're more likely to win the Maharashtra state lottery-

[laughs] Right

... than to land a seat in one of these entrance exams.

The economics of the middle class is so removed from the lived reality of their existence today, the, the way they are enacting their lives, that, that, that gap is enormous.