Credit, and contempt, for the paths to quick riches

Hindustan Times

8 hours ago

A screenshot on the internet screamed, '41 crores! That's the net worth of a 23-year-old content creator'. Many on the internet lost it. They beat their breasts, posting their marksheets and entrance exam ranks, and their current in-hand salary, and claimed life is unfair. I wonder. Young people getting rich quick isn't new. Almost every new IPL player has a similar rags to five-tattoos-on-arm story. Hindi newspapers have been forever converting Day-0 dollar salaries to rupees to scare parents into packing their offspring off to Kota. A girl having poha in the college canteen being spotted by Subhash Ghai is not unheard of. So, why the commotion over influencers becoming famous and, subsequently, rich? Maybe this new path to wealth — earning money on the internet — is not yet culturally acceptable, hence the distaste among people.
Several acceptable ways to make money have become Bollywood tropes. Going to school is just a brief and annoying interruption before you hop onto a plane to New York to study film-making, eventually to return and manage your family's spare-parts business in Karol Bagh. 'Vicky baba aaj hi vilayat se apni padhaai poori karke wapas laute hai (Vicky baba has returned home, after finishing his studies abroad),' an old caretaker helpfully tells the guests seated in the large living space. Clearly, Vicky baba's vilayati degree couldn't ensure employment, which is why he had to return. But nobody treats Vicky baba like a loser, he is ripe to be married off by converting dosti (friendship) to rishtedaari (relationship). A moviegoer in Muzaffarpur then aspires for this life.
Another acceptable and respected way to get rich young is to study very hard, sacrifice friends, cable TV, smartphones, and get an All India Rank that doesn't look like a phone number. The number of hours studied is akin to currency. News-channels will ask you about the number of hours studied every day; smartness doesn't count, they just want to promptly report the number of hours, and a parent hearing that the topper studied 12 hours a day will use that benchmark to make their kid's life miserable.
Here again, several movies have glorified the academic path. A scene with a person studying under a street lamp moves to the same chap jostling with scores of youngsters like him, gathered around a list stuck outside the Union Public Service Commission office, to find his name on it. Then he breaks down, uplifting music playing in the background. The academic path to wealth is the most common — the one that generates the least wealth at a young age and yet expects 70 hours of work a week.
And still another is for ones who won the genetic lottery, blessed with such good looks that a film director spots them even as they are having paani puri on the street. Most such multi-million dollar careers kick off when a car stops at the roadside, a window rolls down, and an offer is made. Within a year or two, the paani puri eater is stepping out of a Land Rover, wearing oversized glasses, and making patronising small-talk with the paparazzi, while suffering from success. Very few in India begrudge such meteoric rise. It is, as they say, very acceptable.
So, why are content creators judged so harshly? There is a concept in differential calculus, called the 'Local Maxima'. It relates to the highest point of a mathematical function in the immediate neighbourhood. When the internet was not there, those good at academics (local maxima) got accolades from relatives and neighbours for cracking a tough exam. The comparisons were local. And the relative superiority gave happiness.
With the internet, the world became one's neighbourhood, and suddenly all the local maxima realised they aren't the global maxima. People their age were earning much more, while doing really, really less, and not necessarily studying 12 hours a day. It disturbed the local maximas' mental equations.
Rags to riches stories, propelled by genetics and a bit of luck, always existed, but they were distant. With the internet, they are at your doorstep. The rise is swift, and every bit is recorded. 'My first two-wheeler' to 'first foreign trip with parents' to 'my first BMW', it is live-streaming large-scale hay production while the sun is shining.
Then, Bollywood is yet to validate this new path, glamourise it and make a serious actor of repute play the role of a content creator, making the general public root for an influencer. Perhaps till then, influencers won't be immune to day-to-day jealousy, like Bollywood stars are. Barely any layperson would be jealous of Aishwarya Rai. She and her kind are in the stratosphere already. Influencers, however, operate somewhere in the middle, within range for people on the ground to take potshots. People like me, however, who aren't genetically chiseled or have the content creation chops, would do better to focus on differential calculus.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal.