‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians’ by Manu Joseph is a mirror, an indictment, a summons

When you look at Manu Joseph — tall, dark and handsome, hair balding like an unresolved argument — you don’t immediately think of him as dangerous. He has the air of a man who has stayed up too late with his own thoughts, someone who knows the burden of irony but wears it lightly.

His home, I imagine, reflects this same blend of nihilism and quiet misanthropy — the sort of place that insists on its own seriousness. A low bookshelf bending under the weight of books that mock him as much as they sustain him. A desk with coffee rings that speak of long nights and longer thoughts. Curtains that do not quite meet in the middle. A sofa that has never known indulgence. The decor of someone who has never cared to perform wealth, only irony.

It’s important to mention this because in Joseph’s world, the stage is as revealing as the script. Not operatic, not indulgent, but sharp — like a quiet cough in a library. You hear this timbre in every page of ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’, his first full-length work of non-fiction. The book is less a polemic than an anatomy, a scalpel cutting into the membrane that separates the rich from the poor, privilege from precarity. The book lays bare, with pitiless precision, the absurd, obvious and counterintuitive reasons why we are safe. So far. That italicised so far is the shiver under the blanket, the whispered warning in the stillness.

Joseph refuses to indulge in easy binaries. He does not canonise the poor or demonise the rich. His is a more sorrowful proposition: that society survives because inequality is not absolute but managed. The poor don’t kill us, he suggests, because the system is cunning enough to hand them crumbs of aspiration — a festival wage, a tenuous job, the hope of climbing a ladder that never quite ends. It is this cruel choreography of Indian society that sustains the so-called peace.

And what is peace, if not decor? A living room arranged so that the cracks don’t show. Joseph turns these metaphors into indictments. The truth is brutal: we, the readers, are the reason the system holds. Our inertia is its foundation. His humour — dry, serrated — could only come from someone who has looked out from a balcony at the chaos below, half-amused, half-appalled, his hand resting absently on a railing he knows is rusting.

One cannot help but notice the play of expressions in Joseph’s writing. The half-smile of irony. The tightening of the jaw when the rage bubbles up. His wit is raw: a restrained fury, never screeched, always measured, as though he knows that anger must be dressed well if it is to be heard.

This is not a book of solutions. It does not propose policy or soothe with platitudes. Instead, it reflects Joseph himself: unwilling to flatter, unable to look away. What is left is the essential furniture of critique, which can feel stark, even cold, but also impossible to ignore.

It is worth noting the irony that one of India’s finest writers — of greats like ‘Serious Men’ and ‘The Illicit Happiness of Other People’, both of which kept me up all night — is compelled to ask for reader donations on his website, a damning reflection not of him but of a society that leaves its best minds unsupported. The sadness of that image — the writer as supplicant, the intellectual as hustler — should shame us. Yet Joseph never begs on the page. His prose does not merely command. It summons.

‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’ reminds us that the fragile safety of the privileged is not built on justice but on compromise. Unless we confront this fiction, it will not hold. Reading the book, one wonders: will empathy ever outlast comfort? And what happens when the illusion finally breaks?

The poor do not kill us because we, collectively, have built an elaborate stage where illusions of order play endlessly. We are complicit.

But what if the performance ends? What if “so far” runs out of time? Joseph does not soothe us with answers. He leaves us with silence, like an undecorated wall staring back.

To review Joseph’s book by dwelling on his hairline, the fire in his eyes, or the probable decor of his home, is of course to parody the way female authors are often reviewed — especially by male reviewers: reduced to decor, body, timbre. The art sublimated to the artist. But that is the point. Joseph, ever attuned to hypocrisy, would appreciate this irony.

So here is where the book leaves us: staring at the relentless irony of its author, and through him, at our own reflection. Will we continue to live in the false lull of being “safe” or will we lean into the jagged edges of revolt?

‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’ is more than a book. It is a mirror, an indictment and a summons. And like its author — sharp, unsentimental, oddly tender — it refuses to let you look away. And perhaps that is why it matters. A lot.

— The reviewer is an acclaimed author