The strongest entrepreneurial mind I met in college never thought about starting a company.
This is not because he lacked ideas. Quite the opposite. He was the kind of person who could look at a broken process and instinctively understand how to improve it. While the rest of us discussed startup ideas in the abstract, he thought operationally — how people would actually behave, where costs would emerge, what customers would realistically pay for. Years later, I still think he had a better instinct for building things than many founders I’ve met professionally.
But whenever conversations turned serious — quitting a job or taking a risk — he would detach himself from the discussion.
Because he couldn’t afford to fail.
At the time, I misunderstood what he meant. I interpreted it psychologically, as fear or caution or lack of confidence. Only later did I realise he meant it literally.
I grew up upper middle class in Bangalore, in the kind of post-liberalisation professional ecosystem that many urban Indians would recognise instantly. Most people around me were children of salaried professionals — corporate executives, doctors, engineers, lawyers. Nobody thought of themselves as “rich”. We weren’t old-money wealthy, and most families didn’t have businesses or inherited assets to fall back on. But we were financially comfortable enough to assume certain things almost unconsciously: that education would lead to stability, that careers would keep progressing upward, and that ambition would eventually be rewarded.
What I did not realise then was how much variation can exist even within something as broad and flattened as the Indian “middle class”.
Things shifted when I entered college and met people whose relationship with money, work and ambition looked fundamentally different from mine.
There was a friend whose family of six lived in a one-bedroom apartment because they’d chosen to invest every spare rupee into a fixed deposit to serve as collateral for an education loan. Their version of ambition wasn’t about passion or dreams, but about security. While I was experimenting with electives and internships to ‘figure out my passion’, they were calculating which job would give the highest starting salary, and how quickly it would allow them to repay their loan.
Another friend had gone to an ‘English medium’ school that was just a label. Most of their teachers barely spoke English themselves. So while I spent hours polishing sentences on my applications to college societies, they anxiously wondered whether their improper grammar would undercut the ideas they were trying to express.
There was someone who had never stepped on a plane. Their only travel stories came from government-subsidised train journeys. I remember talking excitedly about a beach town I had visited with my family, only to realise that they had never even seen the ocean. Their dream wasn’t to ‘travel the world’, it was to earn enough money to buy their parents their first flight tickets, and take them somewhere, anywhere, before age of illness took that chance away.
These weren’t sob stories. None of them saw themselves as helpless or disadvantaged or underprivileged. Nor did I think of myself as particularly wealthy. We were all, broadly speaking, middle-class Indians trying to build stable futures through education and work.
But over time, I began noticing how unevenly freedom was distributed between us.
Not freedom in the abstract political sense, but the freedom to experiment with life. The freedom to choose a lower-paying role because it feels meaningful. The freedom to spend a few uncertain years trying to build something. The freedom to make decisions without immediate financial urgency.
I think this is also why urban India’s idea of meritocracy can sometimes feel incomplete. In the highly academic, professionally-driven environments many of us grow up in, we’re taught that hard work, ambition and talent are what separate people. And they do matter. But by college, I had begun to realise that even within the same broad urban middle class, people were standing on very different financial ground. The ability to “take risks”, whether entrepreneurial or otherwise, was often being subsidised long before the risk itself was taken.
Today, many of my college peers and I work at similar firms and earn similar salaries on paper. But our money behaves differently because our obligations do.
While I think about travel, creative work, or career pivots, many are supporting parents, repaying loans, funding siblings’ education, or rebuilding years of financial strain that made their own entry into elite institutions possible in the first place.
We earn the same, and yet we don’t.
Urban India often speaks about privilege through visible excess — bigger homes, international holidays, luxury consumption. But increasingly, one of the most consequential forms of privilege is less obvious than that. It is the ability to survive uncertainty.
Some people can absorb failure. Others have to organise their lives around avoiding it.
And perhaps that is why certain kinds of ambition appear more romantic than others. We admire the founder chasing a dream, the artist pursuing uncertain work, the young professional “figuring things out”. But hidden underneath many of these narratives is an invisible luxury: the freedom to fail without catastrophe.
Not everyone is standing on equally soft ground when they jump.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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