The Rich Are Not Like Each Other

There are three kinds of rich people in India. Lalas, yuppies and hippies. If you’re a rich person in India you pretty much fall into one of these three stereotypes unless you’re a rich hermit or something. By the way, this division is based on behaviour rather than actual net worth or occupation. So even poor or middle class people who feel rich and act that way fall into these categories. With that settled lets define them.

So lalas are basically the people who run family business or their family members. Their source of income is pretty much selling whatever the family business makes or doing real estate deals. To handle their finances they employ an accountant. To handle their homes they have domestic servants who are trained by the women of the house and who generally stay with the family in a lifetime employment situation. And the homes themselves have been in the family for years or purchased with a heavy black money component.

Then you have yuppies. These are basically the people whose income is salary from third party organisations and capital gains (though the capital gains are only for advanced yuppies). For housing they either pay rent or housing loan EMIs. They also do their household chores themselves or in the best case have a very unreliable kaamwali bai who they don’t have the time to train. The mark of a yuppie is that she or he does his or her own finances including personally paying the credit card bills, going over bank statements and marking their investment portfolio to market. And typically their job involves any one of the following either as input or output:

  1. MS office files
  2. code
  3. statistical models

So that leaves us with the hippies. The hippies are basically people who have neither family business nor salaried employment. They do stuff like fashion design or star in TV serials or movie direction or guided tours of Chandni Chowk or write books. This is stuff which doesn’t give a regular salary and which rarely involves Microsoft Office. The unsuccessful hippies are the ones who live with their lala families and whose day to day lives are handled by the lala family’s accountant and domestic servant. But the successful hippies like Arundhati Roy and Rakhi Sawant move out. Then they buy houses on EMI, employ a higher class of kaamwali bais, and have their personal finances looked after by private bankers.

Now of course there are boundary conditions. People who work in marketing and advertising draw salaries but basically have hippie occupations. So they are borderline hippie-yuppies. Then there are borderline lala-yuppies who handle new divisions of the family business. And all yuppies dream of being hippies and spending their days playing in a rock band instead of working the 9 to 7 grind. So these are not mutually exclusive categories but have some overlap and you can make a Venn Diagram of lala-yuppie-hippie.

But why am I talking about all this? Well mostly because I started watching TV back in July. That inspired me to come up with a blogpost, but before I can write that blogpost, I have to write this one with all the definitions. The main blogpost will come up soon. Till then, pip pip.

6 Responses to The Rich Are Not Like Each Other

  1. […] Aadisht The Rich Are Not Like Each Other Oct […]

  2. […] has written a couple of excellent posts (1,2) while farmers are dying in Vidarbha. His classification of the rich in India is spot on, and his […]

  3. Dibyo says:

    I think the success of this blog post is putting Arundhati Roy and Rakhi Sawant in the same sentence. These two fine ladies don’t get the attention they deserve.

    Heh.

  4. harithekid says:

    The Cheap Simian put call on my prolonged 7 day break and absolutely insisted I read this, so he could then abuse me by calling me a wannabe hippie-yuppie, a hippie trapped in a yuppie’s job, a fraud yuppie, a fraud hippie and all other possible combinations involved that only he can think of. Good stuff.

  5. Karan Bhagi says:

    I disagree..

    Marketers are yuppie.. In fact as yuppie as they get.. They crunch crazy amount of data and have insane amounts of backups of Excel files because all reporting is in Excel..

  6. […] Lala rich, Yuppie rich and Hippie rich – Aadisht’s take on the segmentation of rich people in India, based on observation of Indian television shows and films. […]

Leave a Reply to Karan BhagiCancel reply