For a large section of high-performing Indians, the highest form of self-actualization is not building something lasting inside the country. It is escaping it.

Escape takes two primary forms. The first is physical: leaving India through education, visas, and settlement abroad. The second is domestic: withdrawing into gated societies that function as private islands of order inside a disordered public sphere. Both are responses to the same underlying conditions.

Poverty is often treated as a natural condition or a personal failing. In reality, it is largely a product of systemic exclusion, uncertainty, and structures that create vulnerability.

Anirudh Krishna and Dirk Philipsen argue that poverty is not simply the absence of money. It is a web of deprivations — lack of security, opportunity, agency, and dignity — shaped by policies, institutions, and historical processes of dispossession. Common myths (that poverty has always existed, that it's mainly about cash, or that it's self-inflicted) obscure its structural roots.