You can split hairs and split hairs until you have identified your way out of upper class. But everyone knows youre bullshitting. Do you know what 45k gets you? does it get you IB education for kids? does it get you amity/jindal/ harvard degrees?

You understand people who go to these places pay something close to 8-10 lakhs a year all told? Who in the world is saving that with a 70 k salary and a family to feed I wonder?

Don't stereotype Marwari people like that. Many Marwaris now enter fields other than business and quite a few study STEM. These days one can also see Marwari girls marrying non-Marwari boys. All communities in India are moving beyond age-old traditions, be it in their professional or personal lives -- though I admit this phenomenon is mostly confined to large cosmopolitan cities.

Full disclosure: I am the type of kid you are thinking of (no lawyers in family except for my mum's dad, who doesn't count because he stopped practicing in the 1970's). My dad's a venture capital person working out of a T1 city, I attended an IB school there and am studying law at university abroad. From this perspective, here are my opinions on this question and on some of your observations:

1. A middle class kid and a nepo kid can be of the same intellectual strength (after all, brains are not so much designed based on privilege as biology). Of course, very often you will find two kids - one middle class, one nepo - where the former is a lot smarter than the latter. You might also find the other way around (I wouldn't know, as I personally haven't seen the other extreme). Regardless of that, my experience is that middle class kids often have more initiative and a higher drive to make the most of the opportunities given to them, whereas nepo kids are more likely to become relaxed and think everything will become okay, once they achieve the baseline. For example, I know a kid in my uni who is from a deprived (in the UK context) part of London. He and I often study together. He is so visserally thankful to our uni (despite being very smart indeed and having achieved a tripple A* at A Levels) for giving him the opportunity to do law there, that that gratitude sometimes drives him to do (what might seem like) really crazy things, like staying up all night to do the additional readings that the professors give us as a topup to the essential stuff. Obviously, everyone with any sense knows that doing above average in the exams requires you to do some additional readings, but nobody is as committed as this chap - if your average weekly reading list contains five essential and five additional readings most of the time, the week this guy does four out of the five additional readings will be a once in a blue moon occasion. The logic behind this is that despite being British and everything, a Russell Group education was like a fantastic dream for this guy, and he'd rather torture himself into sickness doing extra work and find that it is a reality that he has this education, than not make the most and find it really is a dream.

2. Received wisdom in elite circles in India, which I have experienced, and in the UK (based on certain opinion columns I have read in the London Times) would have us believe that to be successful, we should surround ourselves with other elite, rich, successful people. The correctness (or otherwise) of that, I don't know. However, what I do know is that it is very important for us rich people to have middle class contacts and connections like my friend, described above.

3. You are right from a finance perspective, but not necessarily in other ways. The Amity kids paying independent tuition (and trust me, there are some of those) are not at all smart people, and add little to these unis' reputation or name (among other things, because they tend not to do very well in their studies anyway). I hardly know of any who end up staying back abroad once they are done with their studies, so TBH they can be a bit of a liability for the type of unis you are thinking about.

4. As for what you said about qualified teachers in the IB schools, again yes and no. For example, my economics teacher in 11th and 12th was an engineer with an MBA under the belt, meaning my friend who went to study Economics as an undergraduate in Toronto will have had three more years of economics education at university than her high school economics teacher! At the same time, my English teacher had a BsC in Microbiology from India, and a second bachelor's, followed with a master's, both in English literature, both done in the U.S.

There's another dcet to it. So called nepo kids get a very early exposure. Like Marearis discuss dhandha at their breakfst table, a class 10 marwari stident would generallly know a lot about dhandha. Similarly, a 3rd gen lawyer would know a lot about nitty gritties of law before the law school.

The stereotype is that middle class kids are brighter and work harder, while nepo kids are dumb, lazy and care only about fashion and partying. But we are now in an era where the more money you have the better education and training you have. For example, you would start at an IB school, then go on to Jindal or Ashoka. The teachers in these places would be well-qualified people, many of whom would have been poached from institutions where middle-class people study. You would even probably study abroad, at universities with excellent faculty and infrastructure. Even Oxford and Harvard would rather have a full fee-paying Amity student than an NLU student on scholarship.

Thoughts?