I didn’t decide to build this, yet I did…

This project started as love, empathy, and a certain sense of responsibility toward my parents. I wanted them to have a retirement home that would make them comfortable, but also allow them to live a kind of life I felt they should be living, instead of staying inside a bubble they had inhabited for far too long, or at least that is what I used to believe at that time. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion suddenly, it was something that slowly formed as I started comparing their life with the lives of other parents around me. See my intention? It is mostly pure and mostly unevil, and I don’t think I was consciously trying to compensate for anything at that point. But like Richard Dawkins says, everything is selfish, and even the things we call love often carry our own unmet desires within them. I wanted my parents to have a good home, maybe because I myself wanted to have a good home, or maybe because I wanted to see myself as someone who could provide that.

This intention led to something that consumed seven months of my life, and during those months the idea of the house slowly became larger than the house itself. But this is just part of the story, isn’t it? Sure, I wanted a better home, but the question I should have been asking was why. What was really wrong with the previous one? Was it uncomfortable for me or for my parents? Of course not, because if it had been, we wouldn’t have lived there for twenty-two years without even repainting it after it was built. That house consumed my entire childhood, and I don’t have any intense or traumatic memories that would allow me to blame it for anything. It wasn’t a bad home, and it wasn’t even an insufficient one in any practical sense, it simply stopped aligning with the image I had begun to form in my head.

So here we begin with something uninteresting and something very easy to ignore. Even though I consider myself to be not particularly materialistic, I too want something to show for the world, not in an explicit way but in a way that quietly communicates where I stand. I want respect, not necessarily because of who I am, but because I possess a piece of paper to which a capitalist society has assigned value, and I know how that paper is read by others. There are many people poorer than me and far fewer richer than me, and yet I am not considered rich in this society. I live in a country where wealth disparity is high and increasing every day, and where the definition of being rich keeps moving further away.

So coming back to the point, I am rich and I want to be seen as rich, at least by those who live below me, or maybe I just want to live the way people like me are expected to live. A house of a certain size, with a certain taste, with a certain vibe that signals belonging without having to explain itself. I belong to a class, and I wanted my parents and myself to be visibly part of this class, because otherwise I would risk being seen as poor, which is not acceptable within my class even if no one openly says it. I imitate those richer than me because that is where I want to go, and also because everyone around me assumes that upward movement is natural and inevitable. So this was never just about being a caring child who wanted his parents to have a better home, it was also about being an adult who wanted to project himself as financially competent and settled.

The months-long journey began, and since this was my first time going through such a process, I had a lot to learn. My naïveté caused trouble, sometimes for myself and sometimes for others, mostly because I didn’t fully understand the roles people were playing. Those poorer than me worked for me, and those richer than me guided me, and neither of these arrangements felt unusual to anyone involved, including me. Together they helped me build the home I was supposed to have, and I slowly realised that this “supposed to” was doing a lot of invisible work. This was the class structure I wanted to understand, even if at that point I didn’t know what I would do with that understanding.

I saw a girl who was probably in her teens carrying rocks that weighed almost as much as her age in kilograms. I saw a man working an entire day without lunch, not because he wanted to but because stopping meant losing money. I saw people fighting over the last rupee of their payment, and I saw people trying to cheat to earn a little more, and I also saw people who genuinely wanted me to have the home I wanted and worked relentlessly for it. At the time, I didn’t know how to hold all of these observations together, because each of them demanded a different moral response. So the question becomes, what is this discussion if I got the home I wanted and the people who worked for me got paid for their work?

The problem, I think, is my so-called empathy. When I saw that girl picking up rocks instead of going to school for me, something broke inside me, especially because I am someone who often talks about the importance of education for girls. I don’t support child labour and I don’t believe children should be denied education, and yet I still did nothing meaningful about it. I kept asking myself what I could have done, and every possible answer seemed to shift the burden rather than remove it. If I had asked her parents not to let her work and paid them anyway, I would still be asking them to compensate for the time she didn’t work. Time is money, and this rule applies most brutally to people who live on survival margins, where even a single day matters.

So I sat there like a hypocrite and watched her work, fully aware of what that made me. While I was having this moral conflict, my home was getting renovated, and while she worked for me she would later return to a home that lacked the very amenities I was instructing her to help build. When I write about this, I want the reader to believe that I care deeply or that I feel an appropriate amount of shame, but the truth is that I don’t, or at least not to the extent that I should. And this is precisely why I chose to write about it here instead of doing something that would have required real sacrifice.

Now I write this from my new home, which is more polished than the previous one, with better amenities and a better vibe, and still I don’t feel particularly satisfied. There are decisions I would change, money I could have spent differently, and mistakes I could have avoided, but none of those thoughts undo the material comfort I now live in. Even in this dissatisfaction, I sit at a large desk in a well-lit room with big windows, where everything I touch has been polished to near perfection. As much as I should be content, I still find myself wondering whether I could have done things differently by imitating people who are wiser and richer than me.

When a friend of mine, who is also a designer and ultra-rich, suggests certain ideas, my hesitation is not about cost or effort. It is a quieter question of fit. Will this belong in this home? Should I even have such a thing in a middle-class home? Do we deserve it, or does it cross some invisible line I have internalised without questioning?

You see, my entire existence and my design philosophy for this home are constrained by the class I belong to. A friend from a different class tells me that I should chase the right fit instead of chasing the right fit for my class, but that advice assumes a freedom I have never been taught to exercise. In almost three decades of existence, I have never been trained to see the world from outside my class lens. This is not just about money, but also about the school I went to, the people I grew up around, the religion of my parents, and the political and social beliefs embedded in all of it. Even if you gave me a billion dollars, I would still think in terms of class, even if the objects became more expensive and the rooms became larger.

Which brings me back to the core argument I am making here. Just like me, even if I gave a billion dollars to the man working under the Indian sun without lunch, he would still be trapped in the class system. He might not work in that heat anymore, but he would still be chasing the next class in the hope of survival and legitimacy, just like everyone else around him.

I am not arguing that people should stop chasing money or that the poor should not work relentlessly to escape poverty, because this was never about money in the first place. This is about class and the way it quietly settles into the mind and starts operating from there without asking for permission, shaping not just what we do but what feels reasonable to want. It is about the things we learn to desire, the things we learn to feel embarrassed for desiring, and the things we never allow ourselves to imagine because they do not align with the psychological boundaries of the class we believe we belong to. For me, this entire project became a way of confronting that internal structure, even though I didn’t know that was what I was doing while I was doing it.

I am not sure why I wrote this, and I don’t think it was to confess or to seek absolution, because nothing here changes the outcome or corrects the imbalance in any real sense. Maybe I wrote this to understand my own behaviour, to trace how certain decisions felt inevitable even when they were not, or to see how easily moral discomfort gets absorbed into routine and presentation. If there is any output at all, it is not a conclusion but a recognition, that psychologically I am not outside the class system observing it, I am inside it reproducing it, with preferences, hesitations, and limits that feel personal but are largely inherited. Writing this did not free me from that position, it only made it harder to pretend that my choices were neutral or that my discomfort was the same thing as change.

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Thanks for reading! 🙂