The middle class isn't rich, it seems rich to the poor.

The big fat Indian wedding maybe vulgar to the middle class, but for the poor it is the upper middle class which is most vulgar, wrote M Joseph. This year has seen many weddings of the super rich, culminating in the wedding of Isha Ambani, daughter of Mukesh Ambani, 12th with $44.4 billion in Bloomberg's list of billionaires of the world. Anil Ambani, brother of Mukesh, is relatively very poor with a personal wealth of only $1.5 billion. In the eyes of the poor "it is the upper middle-class that is the most visible section of the rich, because the ionosphere of the super-rich is beyond what their eyes can see". Even the middle-class cannot dream of seeing the inside of a hotel costing $60,000 per night, so it is irrelevant to the poor. "This is what commentators missed in the aftermath of 'demonetisation' when they did not see its political popularity -- in the public misery of the middle class, the average voter saw the rare fall of the rich." This outpouring of schadenfreude resulted in a landslide victory for the Prime Minister's party, the BJP, in the assembly elections in UP, but the rural poor are beginning to realise how much worse the effect has been on them. This anger against the middle class is not confined to India. "The rise of strongmen and of the right across the world, and the Brexit vote too, is a demonstration of the fact that the average voter despises the articulate global intellectual -- so much, that even when the intellectual talks sense, the voter hates sense itself." The top 10% of Indians own 77.4% of the wealth of the nation, while the poorest 60% own just 4.7%. Such enormous inequality naturally gives rise to anger. Inequality is entrenched in India because of the different levels of education between the rich and the poor. While the poorest 5% of people spend a paltry Rs 16.32 per month on educating a child the richest 5% spend Rs 908.12 per month. "While the sons and daughters of the top 10% are able to get good jobs and compete with the best in the world, the vast majority of poor kids will eke out a precarious living in the informal sector," wrote M Chakravarty. The status of women is even more dire. "Nearly 75% of surveyed teenage girls said they wanted to work after they finished their studies," wrote Rukmini S, but the truth is that "over 60% of women in India -- even young women currently in their twenties -- are already married by age 20". No wonder that 92% of women earn less than Rs 10,000 per month, less than half of Rs 21,000 per month, which will qualify them to pay income tax. And if the majority of the poor are employed in our 63 million micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), that sector is hamstrung by over 60,000 possible compliances and over 3,300 possible filings. The poor may envy the middle class but the middle class is also angry because it pays taxes but gets nothing in return "because of state 'appeasement' for the poor", wrote S Srivastava. Only the politicians residing in Lutyens' Delhi are tranquil.