India has no shortage of luxury. There are ₹10 crore apartments, supercars, private clubs and extraordinary wealth. The problem is not that India cannot create wealth. It is that too few people have a realistic path to creating it. Consider a brilliant engineer earning ₹4–5 lakh a month, an exceptional salary in India. The apartment he aspires to own may cost ₹7 crore. He can participate in the economy that creates wealth while remaining mathematically distant from owning much of it. A salary can make you comfortable. Serious wealth usually requires ownership. And ownership requires risk. But risk appetite is itself partly a luxury. It is easier to spend three years building a company when failure means returning to a comfortable home than when it threatens your family’s financial security. Then there is network. Stanford, MIT, UCLA, and Berkeley do more than educate. They surround ambitious people with future founders, investors, professors and alumni. Institutions like Y Combinator compress decades of entrepreneurial knowledge into networks young founders can access. India has extraordinary talent, but much less of this machinery. Often our brightest students must first leave India, enter these networks abroad, learn how companies are built, accumulate capital and connections, and then return. It is not much of a meritocracy if you first need access to the meritocracy. Software is perhaps the exception. A brilliant programmer does not need inherited land, factories or distribution. He needs a laptop. But then comes another irony: if the Indian market cannot support his ambition, he builds for America, forcing a first-time founder to understand customers 10,000 kilometres away. India therefore does not need fewer rich people. It needs far more. More angel capital. More YC-like institutions. More founders helping universities. More alumni funding students. More permission to fail. More Indian companies succeeding spectacularly and recycling their wealth, talent and knowledge into the next generation. The goal should not be to make the penthouse cheaper. It should be to build millions more staircases to reach it.