If you have spent your life building a great professional career, working hard to build a corpus, the worst way to help humanity would be to spend it on charity. Don’t get me wrong, helping the underprivileged is great. But you need to build privilege for your offspring first. Let me explain.
The best way to contribute to humankind would be to provide a financial cushion for your kids, so that they can study without worrying about getting a stable monthly salary to pay off their education loan. Many great scientists from the 19th century came from privileged backgrounds, be it J Robert Oppenheimer or Niels Bohr. You need to build enough corpus so that your child can spend more years in college and happily “opt-out” of final placements; a privilege many people of my generation couldn’t enjoy. As a school-going kid, I loved physics, especially rotational mechanics, so much so that I would doodle free-body diagrams on the back of notebooks. Drawing force vectors and conjuring tougher questions. Imagining myself to be one of the three cast members of Big Bang Theory. But I also knew, for a lower middle-class kid like me, education was a means to eventually earn money and pay back to my investors — my parents — who had taken money out of their Provident Fund account to pay the first-year fees. Naturally, my education loan EMIs strangulated my love for physics. And I shifted to a shared PG in BTM Layout, Bengaluru, hissing obscenities at the morning traffic while chasing the next pay slip.
One would say, there are plenty of underprivileged kids who pursued physics, went for their PhDs, committed themselves to research, and became professors with a rich Google Scholar profile, doing well in their labs (yet struggling on matrimonial websites). But they are very few. A lot of us couldn’t survive the delayed gratification of a PhD, purely due to depleting bank reserves, and accumulating compound interest. I remember in my first job, when a colleague of mine from a similar loan-dependent background was accepted into an elite United States university, the entire floor had pooled in money to prop up his bank balance so that he could show he has enough reserves to pursue education. The scholarships aren’t enough. A lot of kids have figured out ways to minimise the associated costs, but it still requires privilege. So, eventually a lot of bright kids, who could have been chasing patents, are trying to sell software as a service. And derive validation in life by sending their kids to an IB school or making a trip to Mauritius paid for by their credit card points. That becomes their steady state. Nothing wrong with it, but they could have been much more.
{{/usCountry}}One would say, there are plenty of underprivileged kids who pursued physics, went for their PhDs, committed themselves to research, and became professors with a rich Google Scholar profile, doing well in their labs (yet struggling on matrimonial websites). But they are very few. A lot of us couldn’t survive the delayed gratification of a PhD, purely due to depleting bank reserves, and accumulating compound interest. I remember in my first job, when a colleague of mine from a similar loan-dependent background was accepted into an elite United States university, the entire floor had pooled in money to prop up his bank balance so that he could show he has enough reserves to pursue education. The scholarships aren’t enough. A lot of kids have figured out ways to minimise the associated costs, but it still requires privilege. So, eventually a lot of bright kids, who could have been chasing patents, are trying to sell software as a service. And derive validation in life by sending their kids to an IB school or making a trip to Mauritius paid for by their credit card points. That becomes their steady state. Nothing wrong with it, but they could have been much more.
{{/usCountry}}The same individuals can make their children free from such assembly lines that optimises for a linear trendline of wealth accumulation, where one is eventually consumed by death, with no legacy thereof and forgotten completely by the world after two generations.
A counterpoint is privilege often makes men weak; a lot of people reach where they are via sheer hard work, chiselled by hardships, and a determination to not die. When there is no safety net, you stay the most focussed. Hence, privilege often leads your offspring to take it easy, and eventually makes you write an essay as a punishment for running over people while drunk driving.
That’s where parenting comes in, with the right genetics and enough privilege to take the road less travelled, one can do pioneering things. Our country is still young, most rich people are either first or second generation. Our mindset is still attuned towards escaping poverty and finding ways to not fall back into it. Hence, much of our smartness goes to repurposing, reusing stuff that’s been invented in countries that house the fourth- or fifth-generation rich. Most entrepreneurs in India are still traders. Importing foreign ideas, technology, processes, apps and then Indianising them and selling it to the domestic audience. The majority of our exports are also just cheaper man-hours. When we achieve success by this trade, we are felicitated, and that satisfies our collective hunger.
We need hungry people whose stomachs are already full.
Hence, the biggest responsibility is on people like you, the successful ones, who escaped poverty, rose up, gave back. Now is the time to prepare the launch pad for the next generation who won’t be satisfied by repurposing an idea or importing a generic drug, or exporting cheap man-hours; they would be the inventors, the ones who will build legacy, free from the encumbrances of an education loan.
Every subsequent generation’s job is to push the next generation one level above in Maslow’s need hierarchy. We need the self-actualised next generation, who would write research papers instead of apologetic essays to a judge.
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal