I, along with most of my friends who grew up in lower-middle-class families in India, carry a trauma—whether we acknowledge it or not. We grew up with limited resources for everything. There was never enough money for anything. Our parents always felt financially insecure and they passed down their financial insecurities to us on aluminum platters — because gold or silver platters would have been too expensive(sic). 🙂
We learned early to analyze every expense, calculating the ROI of that expense before deciding whether to take it on or not. In college, for example, if I wanted to go home for a few days, I would first crunch the numbers. The trip only would make sense if the travel cost was less than what I would have spent on food had I stayed back.
You never really get over this trauma. It stays with you. You save as if you’ll live forever, yet you never feel financially secure. You work until you’re either forced to retire or physically can’t continue.
This is what I call “The Great Indian Middle-Class Trauma”. It’s like waking up panicking you missed an exam when it’s been decades since you left college. The middle class trauma is waking up panicking you are poor when you are not 🙂
