Credit, and contempt, for the paths to quick riches

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........

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