Stuff Indian People Like #2: Riches-to-Rags Stories

I’m currently reading Gladwell’s Outliers, where he talks a bunch about how people become successful. His thesis is that as much as we like to believe in the Horatio Alger story of the modest lad from underprivileged circumstances rising up to success, fame and fortune by his own genius and/or hard work, it’s not the whole truth. The real story is that there were a lot of fortuitous circumstances and environmental advantages along the path for successful people that allowed them to achieve what they did. For example, Bill Gates was one of the few students in the country in the 60s to go to a high school with computers, and happened to live next to a university that eventually let him continue to hone his skills using their facilities. If it weren’t for those and a half-dozen other turns of fate, he probably wouldn’t have gone on to do big things in the computing industry. Gates himself calls it luck.

Anyway, American society tends to be obsessed with the idea of bootstraps, of going from nothing to something. In India, I think people are more enchanted with the opposite. They love the riches-to-rags story.

I hear these sort of stories all the time. Someone or other made his fortune in industry, or trade, or some clever invention, or through the IT boom. And then he realized that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be so he decides to be a philanthropist, or go back to the land and start a farm, or start a bunch of schools for high achievers in his family’s village locality. I don’t know exactly what it is, but my guess is that this story appeals to the part of Indian culture and spiritual tradition that values renunciation. Giving it all up is seen as heroic… it’s what the Buddha did. Conversely American culture is about excess and getting mo’ everything.

As far as the riches-to-rags stories in India, it’s nuts to me how people give a mulligan to a guy who was exploitative and greedy in his most productive years as long as he eventually realizes he’s erred in his life and makes an attempt to recalibrate by thinking about someone else for a change. And that when he is old, gray, and lonely. Never mind that he stepped on a bunch of people in his life before waking up. Sure you’re trying to fix the problems you helped created, but good lookin' out!

Maybe no person better epitomizes riches-to-rags than Chairman Gates. Indians love him. I think his legend has grown leaps and bounds since he’s decided that he’s going to be the richest philanthropist in the world. It’s ironic that the Gates Foundation has decided that its top priority isn’t development, but making sure they spend the vast reserves of cash they were endowed as quickly as possible. So they have millions tied up in huge foundations that are pretty much just like them, with a pittance remaining to fund smaller experiments on the ground that often produce impressive results. They also apparently have managed to blow $258M in India with nothing to show for it. Of course I can’t rant without acknowledging that I am seriously biting the hand that feeds me (my funding for these 6 months comes from none other than the Gates Foundation), but as my friend Rikin of DigitalGreen pointed out, it may be too little too late.