The Lived Experiences Under the Algorithmic Sky

 A chorus from the gig worker, the coder, the vulnerable, and the waiting family

(Delhi · Gurgaon · Mumbai · Hyderabad · Bengaluru)

“The greatest challenge of our time is not technology,
but the loss of compassion.”
— Kailash Satyarthi

I recently had the privilege of hearing Kailash Satyarthi speak. A Nobel Laureate, yes, but more enduringly a voice of civilizational conscience in our times. What stayed with me was not a statistic or a slogan, but his stubborn insistence that compassion is not an emotion we occasionally summon. It is a discipline we practise, especially when systems grow powerful and people grow small.

Listening to him prompted an unexpected return. Not to policy or forecasts, but to lived experience. To the poets who wrote during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when London was being transformed by machines faster than society knew how to absorb the consequences. They did not write about productivity or progress. They wrote about how change felt in the body, in work, in family life, and in the quiet erosion or survival of dignity.

That lineage matters.

Because today, once again, technology is moving faster than compassion. And once again, explanation comes more easily than listening.

So what follows is not an argument against technology, nor a policy essay in disguise. It is an attempt to do something older and quieter: to listen. To listen to voices shaped by work, uncertainty, aspiration, and waiting in our own cities. Poetry is chosen here not for ornament, but for honesty. Because when volatility becomes routine and decisions are automated, prose often explains too quickly.

Poetry lingers where life actually is.

Read slowly.
These are not conclusions.
They are conditions.

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The Lived Experiences Under the Algorithmic Sky
A chorus from the gig worker, the coder, the vulnerable, and the waiting family.             

(Delhi. Gurgaon. Mumbai. Hyderabad. Bengaluru.)

The Gig Worker

The app wakes before I do.
It knows Delhi’s flyovers better than my knees do.
By the time I pull on yesterday’s shirt,
Gurgaon has already decided
which direction my life will lean today.

Green means go.
Red means wait.
Grey means nothing.
Grey is the longest.

They say I am flexible.
They say I am free.
But freedom that refreshes every thirty seconds
is just a leash that learned English.

Delhi once had factories that swallowed men whole.
Now the swallowing is quieter.
It happens between notifications.

I deliver food across Mumbai
while the rain negotiates with gravity
and the map reroutes me like an afterthought.

When the algorithm is pleased,
my phone hums like approval.
When it is not,
there is no face to read,
no office to enter,
no appeal except silence.

I know gated communities well.
I do not know how to get inside life.

At night my mother asks,
“Was work good today?”
I say yes,
because I don’t know how to explain
that work now has moods.

The Coder

I write instructions
in Bengaluru cafés and Hyderabad campuses
for a thing that does not sleep,
does not forget,
does not ask if it should proceed.

They call it intelligence.
I call it obedience at scale.

My model summarizes lives
faster than I can read them.
It drafts reports, tickets, warnings.
Sometimes it is gentler than humans.
Sometimes it is cruel
without knowing it is cruel.

Gurgaon once ran on spreadsheets.
Now it runs on predictions.

My manager says:
“We are not replacing people.
We are augmenting them.”

I want to believe him.
But every sprint review
another task disappears quietly,
like a chair pulled away
while someone is still sitting.

I wonder if my job is safe.
Then I wonder if safety
is the wrong ambition now.

The harder question is this:
When my code decides,
whose burden does it lighten,
and whose weight does it increase?

The Vulnerable Worker

I have certificates in a folder
and worry in my chest.

They told us to skill up.
So I did.
They told us to reskill.
So I tried.

But the ladder keeps moving
while I am still climbing.

In Hyderabad’s coaching lanes,
hope is sold by the hour.
In Bengaluru’s job portals,
hope is filtered by keywords.

The job descriptions ask for experience
with tools that did not exist
when I was learning to survive.

In Mumbai once,
men waited outside mills
hoping a foreman would point.
Now I wait outside interviews
hoping the ATS will blink.

I am not lazy.
I am tired in advance.

When the rejection email comes,
it thanks me for my interest.
Interest does not pay rent.

They say the future needs creativity,
judgement, empathy.
But the entry-level door
is guarded by automation.

Sometimes I think
the future wants me,
just not yet.
And “not yet”
is the most expensive answer of all.

The Family Waiting

We measure time differently at home.

Not in quarters or releases,
but in EMIs, school terms,
and how long the cylinder will last.

When the phone rings late,
we stop breathing for a second.
Late calls carry news.

We do not understand AI.
We understand uncertainty.

My daughter asks
what I do for work.
I say, “I help people.”
This is not entirely untrue.
It is also not entirely stable.

In Delhi once,
families waited for men
to return from shifts, strikes, trains.
Now we wait for messages:
“Shift cancelled.”
“Account under review.”
“Project paused.”

The words are softer now.
The effect is not.

We plan festivals carefully.
Joy must be budgeted.

At night, when the house sleeps,
we count possibilities like prayers.
One more month.
One more contract.
One more chance.

The City Speaks (Briefly)

The city does not hate us.
Mumbai does not judge.
Bengaluru does not pause.
Delhi does not explain.

The city optimizes.

Once it wore smoke
like a problem no one wanted to solve.
Now it wears dashboards,
metrics glowing like promises.

The city learns faster than people do.
That is its advantage.
That is also its danger.

A Quiet Reckoning

They tell us this is progress.
And perhaps it is.

But progress that does not pause
to ask who is keeping up
begins to sound like fate.

We are not against machines.
We are against being forgotten
while they get better at remembering.

We do not ask for guarantees.
We ask for transitions that do not break us.

If you must automate,
teach us where to stand next.
If you must move faster,
leave the lights on.

Because learning about life
was never just about efficiency.
It was about dignity surviving change.

And somewhere,
between Delhi’s dust,
Mumbai’s rain,
Gurgaon’s glass,
Hyderabad’s code,
and Bengaluru’s ambition,
the same human question waits:

Will this new power
make room for us,
or only move past us
more elegantly than before?

After the Voices Fall Quiet

If this piece leaves you unsettled, it has done its work.

Not because it predicts catastrophe,
but because it refuses amnesia.

The most dangerous outcome of technological acceleration is not unemployment alone.
It is normalisation — the quiet acceptance that uncertainty is simply the cost of modernity, that volatility is a personal failure, that adaptation is an individual obligation.

What these voices remind us is that learning about life has always required more than learning tools.
It requires learning when to slow, whom to protect, and what must not be optimised away.

Every era writes its ethics into its infrastructure.
Ours is doing so now.

The question that remains — for leaders, policymakers, designers, educators, and citizens — is not whether we will use AI.

We already are.

The question is whether we will remember,
in the rush to build intelligence,
to remain intelligible to one another.