Manu Joseph: Why do so many public figures have exaggerated tales of past poverty?

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In his first speech as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Joseph Vijay said in Tamil, “I have known poverty; I’ve known hunger. I am not from some royalty.” This whole country seems to be filled with self-made men. Except that most of them may not be at all.

I happened to be Vijay’s classmate when we were around eight years old. Oddly, the reason why I remember him at all and could later recognize him as the same guy on film posters, is that he was the first rich boy I knew, at least rich by the standards of the Kodambakkam suburb of Chennai. Years later, when he was eighteen, he was cast in the lead role of a film that his father made.

Some of the biggest yarns of our times are tales of rags-to-riches.Often, they are exaggerations of some hard days, a delayed dinner perhaps, a single month when debtors came home or the landlord demanded rent. Many of the self-made may even believe that they really did rise from “nothing”. That is probably because they confuse being broke with poverty.

These are very different things. Poverty is not a temporary misfortune of the fortunate. Poverty is not only the absence of money, but also immersion in a whole environment that is cut off from money.

It is the amnesia of money, where there is no recollection or evidence at all among those who suffer it that their kind once had money. To be poor is to be stuck in time, to live in a different era from luckier people. Poverty is always in relation to the rest of society.

Yet, not only in India but across the world, people are quick to claim poverty. They put on “poverty like you put on makeup,” as Lennard Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois, once said of US vice-president J.D. Vance, whose claims of