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“Middle class debt soaring,” “AI taking our jobs,” “No future for older professionals”—these are the headlines flooding our feeds daily. Whether it’s YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram, the message is relentless for those in salaried positions: your job is on the chopping block, likely within five years. The timeline might be hazy, but the constant fear gnaws at you as you navigate the digital landscape, a sea of anxiety and depression.
Being a Tax paying Indian today is pretty frustrating to say the least. You pay 50% of your income in taxes to get nothing in return, forget job security. You get dirty filthy air and water, no parks for your kids to play, skyrocketing school fees and rent, hooliganism at roads, hours wasted in traffic jams, and increased frustration of not moving abroad when you had the chance to! Adding insult to injury is the increased vulnerability to serious health issues like heart attacks or cancer, potentially derailing all our dreams. This grim picture of young Indian life echoes across countless online posts and threads.
I’ve observed four distinct personas emerging from these online discussions. Let me introduce you, the readers, to these five characters and explain why none of their approaches offer a genuine way forward.
- The financial wizard: These individuals will advise this tired, frustrated taxpaying professional to generate multiple income streams and have a passive income. The ideas vary from optimising credit cards usage, smart investing, renting vs owning to part time jobs, freelancing etc. The only problem with these solutions is that only if the individual had the time from his “on paper 8 hour job” which translates to 12 hours of work and 2 hours of travel, leaving no time to think through anything apart from an auto debit SIP!
- The Abroad Mover: Their only advice is to leave India for any other country to achieve a better quality of life and maybe build a corpus. If you already have children, they might guilt you as to why the children have an Indian passport when you could have given them the best gift of a better passport. Nevertheless, the advice is to relocate and give up the “comfort” Indians are used to – cook, maid, instant grocery delivery etc. Sounds like a pragmatic solution to most of the problems for most of the individuals only if it was easier in reality. With increased protectionism abroad and a burn of responsibilities in India moving abroad still remains a dream
- Stop Crying, you fool: The bunch who will pass statements like “live below your means”, “30L earners are not middle class” etc. These are typical folks who have either never paid taxes in their life or never worked in a job. For them, 30L translates to 2.5 Lakh a month! While they show these salaried individuals a mirror addressing their problematic spending patterns – frequent eating out/ordering, expensive lifestyles they often stretch a bit too far by suggesting extreme frugality which takes away the little joys or small luxuries which are prominent in these times aka “the lipstick effect”
- “India needs money”: They consider themselves the “true patriot” who seem to understand the economics of the country. Unfortunately, they also speak the real India’s story which is too far from the dream seen by young individuals in the early 2000s or in 2024! The answer is simple. We are a poor country, we need taxes. You earn money, so pay taxes for those who do not earn enough.
- The Ranters: The worst of the lot who add fuel to misery. The ones who have championed armchair activism and will blame the govt, judiciary, administration, industrialists, activists and everyone who they can. Their responses often make one feel more let down or depressed, doubting every choice they made in their lifetime.
You’ll definitely see a bit of yourself in either the frustrated taxpayer or one of those five characters. Maybe you even bounce between them. But these are just the ways we’re trying to deal with the crazy world right now. Tweeting, liking, upvoting, posting – it’s our easy way to let off steam. Takes zero guts, minimal effort, and maximum comfort. The messed-up part? Social media, which used to be for fun, connecting, and hanging out, has turned into our go-to for ranting, calling people out, and finding our “tribe.”
I wish R.K. Laxman was around today to help us laugh at our own craziness a little more with his cartoons!
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.