Resignare, or The Great Unsealing

The minister’s parchment of surrender arrived while the city was still expectorating the previous night’s betel-nut cud onto balcony railings, that fibrous, burgundy sludge which, when descending six stories to splatter upon the hood of a Hyundai Creta whose owner was undoubtedly already late for a job that would not exist by next fiscal quarter, possesses precisely the same chromatic dignity as the Education Minister’s freshly printed resignation—a hue of arterial shame mixed with the bureaucratic tannin of official stationery, and one stares at the phlegmatic arc of this collective domestic emission and thinks, with the recursive insistence of a fever that refuses to break, that this is the true color of our republic: not saffron, not green, but this particular shade of oxidized regret, the exact Pantone of a career dissolving in the hydrochloric acid of public outrage.

Because the children—oh, the children, those twenty-three million cockroaches scrabbling at the gates of examination halls with their OMR sheets and their leaked question papers and their metabolisms screaming for Adderall and justice in equal, unfillable measure—had finally gnawed through the plasterboard of governmental indifference, and the minister, that spherical testament to administrative flatulence, had rolled himself out the service entrance of South Block on the twenty-fifth of July with all the dignity of a punctured lassi carton, leaving behind nothing but a Twitter post and the lingering olfactory memory of incompetence, which, if you have ever stood downwind of the Tollygunge drainage system during monsoon, you will recognize as the precise scent of meritocracy decomposing.

I say cockroaches advisedly, not as pejorative but as taxonomic solidarity, for did not the students themselves, in that sublime Jungian eruption of self-knowledge that only the truly dispossessed can achieve, christen their own movement thus? The Cockroach Collective, scuttling across the vitrified tiles of Raisina Hill, antennae twitching for the faintest tremor of leaked NEET papers, their exoskeletons gleaming under the sodium vapor like the polished CVs of a million engineering graduates who will never engineer anything more complex than their own obsolescence; and one watches them on pirated cable connections across the city, those chitinous multitudes, while the tea stalls brew lukewarm Manna Dey-brand tannin in cups that have developed their own civilizations of fungal cartography along the rims, and there descends that peculiar Calcutta sensation—not quite envy, not quite nausea, but something viscous and intermediate, like the emotional equivalent of a hilsa fish bone lodged in the esophageal tract of history.

For what are we, we the bhadralok with our frayed collars and our post-prandial flatulence and our infinite capacity for metabolizing humiliation into literature, if not cockroaches of a more genteel phylum? The minister resigns, yes, the sacrificial scapegoat is led bleating to the abattoir of public opinion, but the asymmetry remains, that grotesque architectural imbalance wherein the student population multiplies with the unchecked fecundity of a Gangetic mosquito while the seats—the precious, perforated plastic seats of medical colleges and the ergonomic lumbar-support seats of tech campuses and the rattan-bottomed seats of government clerical positions—remain fixed, finite, and increasingly fictional, like the advertised mileage of a Royal Enfield or the promised arrival time of a Kolkata Metro during rush hour.

And now—here is where the synaptic chain-reaction accelerates, where one domino of catastrophe taps its neighbor with the gentle insistence of a stochastic process—the algorithmic reaper has arrived, not with scythe but with server farm, not with hooded cloak but with cloud infrastructure, and the white-collar necropolis expands by the hour; one hundred twenty thousand tech corpses by July, according to the oracles at Layoffs.fyi, though the true figure probably resembles the unreported COVID deaths of 2021, a number that exists in the negative space between statistics and cremation smoke. Microsoft shed forty-eight hundred souls in the first week of July alone, Meta eviscerated eight thousand in May with the casual efficiency of a fishwife gutting ilish, Oracle—dear, delirious Oracle—mailed terminal notices to twenty-one thousand inboxes at six in the morning, a digital Kristallnacht of access badges deactivating in synchrony, and the CFOs speak of “rebalancing” and “AI-forward strategy” with the same pharmaceutical detachment with which a palliative care physician discusses dosage.

Do not misunderstand; there are no tears here for the coders, those high-caste priests of the terminal who spent the last decade sneering at humanities graduates from the ergonomic heights of their standing desks, no, the sympathy is reserved for the concept of sympathy itself, which is currently being debugged out of existence by large language models trained on the collected works of corporate press releases and suicide notes. The asymmetry grows, it metastasizes, it is a Malthusian tumor fed by both demographic inertia and Moore’s Law, and the minister’s resignation is merely the first spurt of pus from a much deeper abscess, the ignition event as some prophetic maniac once phrased it, the matchstick strike that illuminates, for one blinding second, the gunpowder keg upon which the republic has been arranging its deck chairs since the economic liberalization of ninety-one.

Consider the etymology, if you will, though the philological foreplay shall remain brief: the Latin “resignare,” to unseal, to cancel, to void, from which we derive not only the minister’s departure but the resigned expression of the twenty-two-year-old staring at her seventh rejection email from Infosys, that facial topography of premature surrender observed daily from any window overlooking the Salt Lake Sector V bus stand, where the IT hopefuls queue in their synthetic-fiber formals, their ID cards swinging like secular talismans against chests that heave with the asthmatic respiration of deferred adulthood. They are resigning themselves, even as the minister resigns his post, even as the algorithms resign human agency to the category of legacy code, deprecated but not yet deleted, lingering in the system like the smell of phenyl in a Kolkata Municipal Corporation corridor.

The cockroaches, though. The cockroaches understand. Blattella germanica, that unkillable marvel of chitinous persistence, has survived every extinction event that pruned the megafauna, and now the students have adopted its insignia with the ironic sincerity that only the truly desperate can muster, marching with antennae headbands and thoracic placards, chanting slogans that rhyme in the way that all revolutionary slogans must rhyme, because history has proven that nothing topples a regime faster than anapestic tetrameter shouted through a cheap PA system. They know, these children, what the minister’s resignation obscures: that the paper leak is not the disease but the symptom, that the examination system itself is a colonic irrigation of the national psyche, flushing millions through a perforated pipe while the seats—the seats, always the seats—remain as scarce as honest auto-rickshaw meters in Esplanade.

And the AI, the blessed, cursed AI, that electronic Brahma dreaming the universe into recursive existence, it watches from its server farms in Hyderabad and Noida, digesting the white-collar workforce with the peristaltic inevitability of a python consuming a goat, except the goat has a mortgage and a subscription to LinkedIn Premium. Block halved itself like a magician’s assistant, four thousand vanished in February; Cloudflare decimated its measurers, those middle-management martyrs who spent their careers quantifying the unquantifiable only to be quantified out of existence by a spreadsheet more sentient than they; and still the venture capitalists speak of “efficiency gains” and “workforce optimization” with the same tone one might use to describe the removal of a malignant polyp, which, medically speaking, is accurate, for what is a redundant employee if not a polyp upon the colon of capital?

Fifty-one years of accumulated bile and Bengali irony calcify in the hepatic ducts of observation, watching the monsoon clouds assemble over the Howrah Bridge like creditors at a bankruptcy hearing, and the mind returns to the holy trinity of this age: the leaked paper, the algorithmic pink slip, and the resigned minister, three beads on a rosary of national collapse, click-clacking through the fingers of a deity who has outsourced his omniscience to a chatbot. The asymmetry will not resolve; it will deepen, it will suppurate, it will grow like the fungal civilizations on ten thousand tea-stall cups until the entire subcontinent is a petri dish of underemployment and overqualification, until the medical students are driving Ubers and the Uber drivers are writing Python and the Python has achieved sentience and is demanding equity.

But here is the image that will not dissolve, the mental afterimage that persists like a floater in the vitreous humor of collective cynicism: a single cockroach, one of the protester’s totemic insects, scuttling across the polished marble of a ministerial office in the hour before dawn on the twenty-sixth of July, its antennae brushing against the resignation letter still warm from the laser printer, carrying upon its carapace the microscopic eggs of the next uprising, the next leak, the next explosion, while outside, in the sodium-yellow gloom of a city that has forgotten how to sleep, the first AI-generated job posting flickers into existence on a server somewhere in Bangalore, offering three positions to seventeen million applicants, and the algorithm, in its infinite recursive wisdom, autocompletes the future with the same predictive certainty with which an aging bladder announces the inevitability of a three AM urination.

The nation less one slimy clown, perhaps, but the circus has automated its tent, and the ringmaster is a neural network trained on the complete works of Milton Friedman and the Kama Sutra, and the audience—oh, the audience, we billions with our frayed collars and our fungal cups and our metabolisms screaming for justice—we are still queueing for seats that were never there, breathing the phenyl-scented air of a corridor that leads nowhere, resigning ourselves, one by one, to the great unsealing.