Why the Poor Don't Kill Us

by Manu Joseph

In this searing and darkly hilarious diagnosis of contemporary society, acclaimed Indian writer Manu Joseph explores why the poor don’t rise in revolt against the rich despite living in one of the most unequal regions of the world.

The poor know how much we spend in a single day, on a single meal, the price of Atlantic salmon and avocados. “Why,” he asks, “do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids, who squat like frogs beside kitchen sinks, pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off? Why is there peace?”

Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us lays bare, with pitiless precision, the absurd, obvious and counter-intuitive reasons why we are safe. So far. It is a fragile peace, and we need to understand how it has come to be.

Manu Joseph is a former columnist for the New York Times. He is also a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the novels Serious Men, The Illicit Happiness of Other People, and Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous. He is the winner of the Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, whose jury described him as ‘…that rare bird who can wildly entertain the reader as forcefully as he moves them’. He has been nominated for several other prizes. He is also the creator of the Netflix series, Decoupled. This is his first “non-fiction”.

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Politics

238 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 5, 2025

Reviews

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bravo! A truly great achievement from my favorite and coolest Indian writer. Just to prove how cool Manu Joseph is, let me tell you about an online exchange he had with a Hindu nationalist on Twitter/X. The Hindu nationalist who was offended by something Manu said on Twitter (I forget what) called him a rice bag (a slur for Indian Christians. The slur is an accusation that Indian Christians converted to Christianity from Hinduism for a bag of rice). Manu, who is into jogging and fitness, responded in an article by saying "I am offended by this high-carb insult; I would rather be accused of renouncing my religion for a bag of avocados, or even asparagus".

HAHAHAHHA! If someone addressed me with a religious slur, I doubt whether I could come up with something so clever. Now Manu is no bleeding heart liberal. In fact, Indian liberals despise him on account of an article he wrote, in which he called them amateur Indians, right after Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist came to power in 2014. That article is a part of this book.

I wonder whether Manu would translate this book into regional Indian languages. That would be truly dangerous because the poor who like to read in their mother tongues would realize how they are being conned. This book is bound to piss off many activist Indians because Manu puts them down with such hilarious and at times subtle lines. This book is so many things. A foreign spy/mercenary aiming to fuck things up in India could use this as a bible. In a way, this book may also be named "How the Rich Can Escape a Violent Revolution". There's something in this for everyone. A manifesto for everyone. Especially the poor. But can also be used by rich upper-middle class charlatans like me to keep the poor oppressed. So it is a dangerous book in many ways.

Manu starts off by trying to separate the Indian poor from the rest of the world. He says India's poor are different from the rest of the world because they are poor in one of the most unequal regions of the world. There is wealth and luxury all around India's poor. The first chapter contains some of Manu's strange experiences while covering an earthquake as a journalist. The book's title is not tongue in cheek in anyway. Manu really wonders why India's poor do not rise up in a violent revolution. He proceeds to examine why they dont.

He says the ugliness of Indian cities and its squalor reassures the poor that the country still belongs to them. This is not just a book about India's poor. It is about the Indian psychology. How the Indian mind works and how we look at the world and each other.

Indian politicians protect the rich from the poor. Manu narrates an incident in which a village in India was ravaged by leopard attacks. Many villagers lost their lives. The villagers demanded the leopard be killed. Journalists, activists and even branches of the Indian government prevented this. It was only the local politicians who spoke for the poor. Manu uses examples of Jayalalita and Karunanidhi, Tamil politicians who gave away freebies like television sets and even ounces of gold to the poor to illustrate this point. Politicians calm down and reassure the poor in India.

The poor have been conned into believing that education will save them. Not good at studying? Then maybe its their own fault is what the poor have been convinced by India's elites. Manu wants the college degree as a qualification for non-technical and non-scientific jobs to end. He considers his own literature degree to be a complete waste of time. In an interview I watched last week in which he promoted this book, he says during college his sister sent him synopsis of Shakespeare's plays which he couldn't bear to read.

There are dark forces that protect the rich from the poor. The poor fears Indian law enforcement agencies - the dreary courtrooms, dreadful jails and encounter killings which is another important reason why they do not revolt. Unlike the Western world, there is no compassion for the rioters and gangsters in India. This is why despite its inequalities, many Indian cities are safer than ones in the Western world. But Manu wonders for how much longer Indian law enforcement can continue to be so brutal.

The dismantling of "amateur Indians", a phrase coined by Manu to describe English speaking and sometimes old rich middle class Indians who feel lost in the new Indian where the street smart villager Indian now calls the shots is one of the books highlights. Manu is merciless with them. He says many of them hide out in colleges and activism to escape adult life. It has become expensive to escape from the other India. The other India is encroaching into the once safe islands where the amateur Indians used to live. There isn't much they can do about it.

The chapter called "Let the Poor Have Fun" in which Manu describes how a bunch of Indian activists convinced the Indian government to stop Facebook's free basics free internet for India's poor really convinced me about how well meaning activists might actually harm the poor. Maybe the poor just want to watch free porn and use the internet for entertainment. They do not care whether Facebook might favor some websites and platforms over the other which was the argument used by these activists to block Facebook's free internet for India's poor.

The profiles of Nandan Nilekani and an unnamed patriarch of a Malayali Christian family who runs a gold pawning institution (I suspect this is the Muthoot family) are excellent. Manu believes entrepreneurs and billionaires are underrated rescuers of the poor and are more effective than incompetent empathetic do-gooders and pompous activists.

There are many more interesting and original observations, anecdotes and advice to the upper middle class. Even though it is easy to read and only 266 pages long, you feel like you have read a sprawling work. There is so much to appreciate. This book is as interesting and important as Naipaul's India trilogy. And more entertaining than those books which predicted India's rise. Once again, bravo Manu Joseph. I will read this book again and again.

[Satwik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting from the guard at your gated community to the peon who serves you tea at the office, even though the poor in India are the backbone of daily life, they don't revolt. Why the Poor Don't Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians by Manu Joseph explores plausible reasons for the absence of a broad-scale revolution among the poor in India. Is it because our legal system is tilted towards the wealthy, or because they are inherently good? The author has discussed many points, and most of them make

A good, light read to understand your neighborhood. Can we really do anything, or are we just doomed to live in inequality? You might find some answers.

The author has strongly criticised what he calls the amateur Indian-the English-speaking, upper-middle-class segment in India. If you have already read Meet the Savarnas by Ravikant Kisana, you would appreciate the book even more.

[Asif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing about a serious topic like this in a satirical and dark humour manner is not easy. However, the author manages to bring the story of daily struggles and mundane moments in India to life in a profound way.

One paragraph that really stuck me is: “So often activism is the war of millionaires against billionaires.Across the ages, all of activism is just this the second rung of a society fighting against the top rung in the name of a public cause.”

[Jiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp, tight, funny, and hard hitting.
Best reads of this year till now.

[Pranjal Awasthi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manu Joseph’s Why Don’t the Poor Kill Us? is easily one of my top reads of the year, and perhaps the sharpest book to come out of India this year. Cutting, snarky, and unapologetically irreverent, Joseph offers a rare piece of writing that is an equal-opportunity offender—calling out leftists, rightists, Marxists, socialists, and everyone in between.

Rather than leaning on academic theory or sociological jargon, the book operates from the vantage point of a highly observant journalist who doesn’t hold back. He takes a question many conscientious Indians might have privately pondered—why the poor of India, despite their suffering, don’t rise up violently—and gives it a treatment that is at once biting, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining.

What emerges is a refreshing work of folk psychology—keenly attuned to the absurdities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of Indian public life. Joseph’s prose sparkles with wit and precision, and his observations often land with the force of uncomfortable truths.

It’s not a manifesto, nor is it a sentimental portrait of the “benign” poor. Instead, it’s an unfiltered, razor-sharp lens on Indian society that manages to be as funny as it is unsettling. A must-read for anyone craving honesty in Indian non-fiction

[Siddhant Shekhar · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I just got done reading Manu Joseph's latest book, "Why the Poor Don't Kill Us", and I have a couple of theories. Firstly, Manu Joseph is in deep with some loan sharks. They are bad people. They break kneecaps, and he needed a quick advance royalty check. Because other than that, there is no reason for this book to exist. The book is just lazy. For example, the back cover is identical to the inside jacket, which is taken for verbatim from a passage. Same passage, printed three times. So if you're not even going to bother to write a fresh blog for the book, why are you even writing a book?

My second theory about this whole thing is that Manu Joseph is a lot smarter and funnier in his head than he is in real life. Because despite having read this 250 odd page book, and I am very gracious calling it a book, I have no idea why the poor don't kill us. The entire book is a series of loosely connected vignettes (I can't even call them essays because none of them go over a couple of thousand words) where Manu Joseph is just making assertions. "I believe", "Probably why". None of them are backed up by any research, reference, or footnotes. It just feels like the rambling of an old Indian WhatsApp uncle. Only this WhatsApp uncle is not a raging Islamophobe or the other way around. He has a lot of problems with wokeism, with intellectuals, with the left, with activism. But he doesn't really give any consistent solutions to any of those things.

And my biggest problem with the book is the tone that the book takes. Across the entire book, rich and affluent Indians are referred to as "They", as if Manu Joseph is not one of them. But with three very successful books, A stint with the New York Times and a show that has been produced on Netflix, I don't think he can distance himself from a system that actively benefits him. Sure, there is some "white guilt" where he talks about how little he pays his maids. But at the end of it, I don't think there's any effort that is taken to remedy that. He makes a prescription of tipping more, but I don't think charity begins at home for him.

So in conclusion, I think the real reason why the poor don't kill us is that they don't know yet that people are paying 600 Rupees to read this. If they did, they probably would. And honestly, I wouldn't even fault them.

[Umesh Kesavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manu Joseph , the original and provocative novelist, saves these adjectives for reviewers to describe him in his first work of non-fiction as well. He takes up the burning topic of the poor and inequality , asks some disturbing questions and answers them in his typical irreverent and witty manner. No one's hypocrisy (sample : "And the disdain that Arundhati Roy has for Mukesh Ambani's giant home - wouldn't a malnourished tribal feel the same about Roy's affluent home in Delhi's prime Jor Bagh? ") is spared in his inimitable manner. The author's style may infuriate many but that is exactly his aim. He concludes : "As long as there are the rich, there will be the poor". As long as there is hypocrisy in this society, Manu will keep waging such verbal battles.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent portrayal of the current India. What and who drive it. Few chapters would feel similar to Manu's articles. Manu has a way of putting things as is no sugar coating.

[Satdeep Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate how Manu Joseph connects the dots in this book.

[Arushi Pandey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a powerful and unsettling read that grabs you from the very first page. In fact, it's so immediately impactful that it's easy to find yourself needing to pause and take a break after just a few paragraphs. The author's writing is incredibly poignant and thought-provoking, requiring you to sit with certain phrases and ideas to fully grasp their weight. While not an easy read, the style is deeply appreciated for its ability to convey such complex emotions and ideas.
The central theme, a stark look at inequality in India, is conveyed with an honesty that can be both shocking and deeply sad. The book forces the reader to confront their own obliviousness to the struggles of others for basic necessities, leading to a profound sense of unfairness. This is a book that will make you think and will make you feel, with moments that can make you somber or even bring you to tears.
Interestingly, the book's structure feels less like a traditional narrative and more like a series of connected meditations. The chapters don't necessarily follow a clear progression, but this non-linear approach only enhances its impact. It allows each story and idea to stand on its own, contributing to a larger, more complete picture of the societal issues at hand. And despite the heavy subject matter, the book has moments of unexpected levity that can make you laugh.
Ultimately, this is a book that doesn't just inform—it inspires. It sparks a deep desire to "do more" and to take action, even in a small way, to address the profound injustices it lays bare. While there may be ideas you disagree with, the book's core strength is its ability to challenge your perspective and make you think. If you want a closer and more honest look at the realities of inequality, this book is an essential read.

[Jai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, this book was a great and terrific reality check about my privilege. It made me feel things that no non-fiction has to date, but then again, that's Manu Joseph for you. There are powerful gospels (or 'bars,' as we Gen Z call them) in here, which I am going to start using in my daily life. Thanks, Manu! Sarcastic(very funny in my opinion) jibes are a mainstay in his work, and the book is filled with them

"As in love, so in society, people who do not have power are quite nice."

"Any form of economic behaviour is usually not rational, it is merely a habit."

"The most captivating stories are not necessarily true, nor what will make our lives better. People ‘identify’ with stories not out of wisdom or clarity but impelled by that highly influential force: misunderstanding. Clarity is often inconvenient, while misunderstanding is a pleasurable massage of prejudice. For when we misunderstand something, we attribute to what we get wrong all that we want it to be."

& lastly a harrowing not so convenient fact of the matter, stated out loud, my favourite go to defence of capitalism from now onwards(which I think is a critique of the same in the eyes of author):

"People desperately want many experiences that they can see in the lives of the most visible section of the rich not the billionaires but the upper-middle classes. And everything that people desperately want becomes a ‘basic necessity’ of life. Every time a new way of life makes living better, its denial to the majority becomes one of the new meanings of poverty. That is why, as long as there are the rich, there will be the poor."

[Sudarshan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The trademark acerbic wit of Manu Joseph is on full display. Although lot of the source material should be familiar to readers if you already read his columns.

Manu’s observations on Indian society especially regarding poverty are all true. There are quantitative descriptions of it which will throw streams of numbers to highlight the pervading poverty of India and then there are qualitative descriptions which forms the core of this book. I personally prefer the latter as that drives home the point more efficiently.

I also liked the various tidbits and anecdotes from his childhood and his career as a journalist that he very cleverly uses to sell his thesis. There are parts of quite a few chapters that don’t have structure, that don’t neatly fit into the chapter but they are still valuable if only to hear what Manu has to say.

Few things that stood out for me,
The core theory that it’s the second rung of the society that co-opts the poor to fight against the elites.
You must think in the language(say Kannada) to understand at a base level, Kannadigas.
The poor are poor story tellers and are always telling stories that the second rung of the elites want them to say.

Manu might not like it but he is an articulate intellectual, someone who he very much derides throughout the book and asparagus eaters like myself and most likely the reader of this book need to hear more of 😉

This book is highly recommended.

[Enakshi J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manu Joseph’s Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us is a sharp, unsettling, and darkly witty exploration of one of the most glaring contradictions in contemporary India: why do the poor, despite their daily struggles, not rise in revolt against a system built to exploit them?

Joseph spares no one. He points out the absurdities of privilege with biting humour—how the price of a single salmon meal can equal days of a labourer’s hard work, how maids and workers live invisible lives beside us, and how society’s hypocrisies go unquestioned. His questions are provocative, even uncomfortable: Why don’t they resist? Why is there peace amidst such inequality?

The brilliance of the book lies not just in its fearless critique but also in its ability to hold up a mirror to both the complacency of the privileged and the resilience of the poor. It is as much a social diagnosis as it is a wake-up call, written in Joseph’s trademark style—satirical, incisive, and painfully relevant.

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the undercurrents of India’s socio-economic divide, and for those willing to confront truths we usually prefer to ignore.

[Ramya · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the non-fiction books that I enjoyed most this year. I've always loved Manu Joseph's style of writing and speaking. He is super funny, blunt and most importantly, has the talent to express complex ideas in a way that hits you hard. Sometimes, it's not even complex ideas - it's just the things that have been in front of you, maybe they made you uncomfortable, but you didn't know what it was or you couldn't articulate what it was, but that's where Manu Joseph shines. He expresses it in a way that makes you nod and laugh along.
In this book, he has taken a rather difficult topic about economic inequality in India - I don't think he actually attempts to or proposes any solutions to address the problem but it's more of a general commentary on rich vs poor, and a psychoanalysis of how the poor perhaps look at the rest of us. And how they are incentivized and deincentivized to behave in a certain way.
Also, there are numerous quotable quotes sprinkled throughout the book that I'm sure to come back to. Hard truth bombs that show us a mirror! And I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to understand India a little bit better.

[Pranjal Awasthi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manu Joseph’s Why Don’t the Poor Kill Us? is easily one of my top reads of the year, and perhaps the sharpest book to come out of India this year. Cutting, snarky, and unapologetically irreverent, Joseph offers a rare piece of writing that is an equal-opportunity offender—calling out leftists, rightists, Marxists, socialists, and everyone in between.

Rather than leaning on academic theory or sociological jargon, the book operates from the vantage point of a highly observant journalist who doesn’t hold back. He takes a question many conscientious Indians might have privately pondered—why the poor of India, despite their suffering, don’t rise up violently—and gives it a treatment that is at once biting, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining.

What emerges is a refreshing work of folk psychology—keenly attuned to the absurdities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of Indian public life. Joseph’s prose sparkles with wit and precision, and his observations often land with the force of uncomfortable truths.

It’s not a manifesto, nor is it a sentimental portrait of the “benign” poor. Instead, it’s an unfiltered, razor-sharp lens on Indian society that manages to be as funny as it is unsettling. A must-read for anyone craving honesty in Indian non-fiction

[Sitesh Shrivastava · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled across Manu on the Dostcast podcast, ended up reading this book, and found it to be well-written, full of astute observations about contemporary India. His psychoanalysis of Indian civilization is quite accurate, stitched with global & national anecdotes to highlight the point, and offers a reasonable realist perspective of an insider/outsider capable of comparative study.

I'd recommend this book to make sense of why India feels in such despair on the ground, despite all the GDP growth hype among the laptop class, and why there is no way out of this quagmire.

[Prakash Holla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Economic inequality is a subject everyone talks about but rarely comprehend..author in his first nonfiction venture tries to understand and explain the phenomenon, now humorously and then seriously, which makes the reader dive deeper into the enigma..

[Janani]

Well, that was certainly a book

[Sneha Divakaran · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly amusing.

[EM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutally honest, this book may hurt you.

[Balachander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much like reading my own thoughts - not sure if that’s a good thing