The Rent Is a Clock
Acronyms used in this post:
AI — Artificial Intelligence, software that can generate text, images, code, summaries, decisions, predictions, and other outputs by learning patterns from data.
EMI — Equated Monthly Installment, the fixed monthly payment people make toward loans, often for homes, cars, phones, or other purchases.
Rent is not a number. Rent is a small animal with sharp teeth.
It sits quietly on the first day of the month, wearing the expression of a harmless clerk. Then, around the twentieth, it begins to move. By the twenty-fifth it has claws. By the last day, it is walking up and down your chest at night like a cat that has learned accountancy.
Even my tiny income has now become uncertain. Tiny is an important word here. I am not discussing a corporate bonus, a second car, a cancelled Maldives trip, or the unspeakable sorrow of having to postpone a modular kitchen. I am talking about the kind of income that keeps a 51-year-old single Bengali man indoors, alive, connected to the internet, and able to buy tea without conducting a parliamentary debate with himself.
That income is now wobbling.
This is the sentence that enters the room and makes all other sentences sit up straight.
I live in what I call the shanty boondocks of Calcutta. It is not a village. It is not proper city either. It is that familiar belt of leaking roofs, half-built dreams, medicine shops, angry scooters, dangling wires, small flats, big mosquitoes, and men in lungis standing before tea stalls discussing geopolitics with the authority of retired field marshals. The lane has more opinions than drainage. The dogs know everyone. The electricity behaves like a visiting relative with mood swings.
And still, this room is shelter.
A door closes here. A fan turns. The laptop opens. Some rice can be made. A shirt can dry on a chair in that defeated Indian way, one sleeve hanging like a tired flag. It is not comfort, exactly. It is permission to remain human.
Now I do not know how long I can afford it.
Here is the unpleasant comedy. I cannot even imagine the next rung down. I have never lived in a slum. I have never slept under the open sky. I do not know the rules of pavement life, the negotiations, the illnesses, the thieves, the police, the territorial treaties between men who own nothing except a square of footpath and a grievance. I do not know what happens to a person like me there, with bad health, bipolar depression, anxiety, missing income, and a face that has already been overruled by life.
People say, “You will manage.”
This is usually said by people who are not planning to help.
“You will manage” is one of India’s great national lullabies. It is sung to the unemployed, the sick, the old, the widowed, the indebted, the evicted, the underpaid, the overworked, and the young who are still innocent enough to believe that hard work is a magic key. It sounds kind. Often it means: please suffer quietly so the rest of us can finish lunch.
So let me say something to the young Indian reader. The one in a coaching center. The one on a local train. The one scrolling this between two job applications. The one learning Python, English, Excel, spoken confidence, interview grooming, cloud computing, data science, digital marketing, and possibly levitation, because every job advertisement now wants one human being to contain an entire municipality.
Life is not fair.
India is not a meritocracy.
It is not completely without merit either. That would be too simple, and India dislikes simple things. India is more like a badly wired switchboard where sometimes the right bulb comes on, sometimes the fan starts, sometimes the neighbor’s doorbell rings, and sometimes smoke comes out while an uncle explains that this is how the system has always worked.
You can study. You can work. You can be decent. You can learn the right skills, speak the right English, avoid the wrong people, send invoices on time, deliver good work, stay honest, and still find yourself outside the gate while a cheerful fool with connections walks in carrying a plastic folder and a family surname with four-wheel drive.
This is not bitterness. Bitterness is when you add poison to truth. I am trying to remove the poison and leave the truth standing there in its underpants, embarrassed but necessary.
A steady income may become an illusion for many people. Not because everyone is lazy. Not because the young lack discipline. Not because some motivational speaker with dental brightness has not yet shouted loudly enough into a microphone. The deeper reason is uglier. Work is being reorganized faster than dignity.
AI will first nibble at the educated middle class.
Nibble is the wrong word. It sounds like a biscuit.
AI will arrive with a polite face and a corporate slide deck. It will summarize, draft, translate, code, design, analyze, recommend, screen, rank, grade, respond, and pretend to be helpful in twenty-seven colors. It will not replace every job at once. That is the childish version. The adult version is worse. It will weaken bargaining power before it eliminates the chair.
A worker does not have to be fully replaced to become afraid. He only has to be told, gently, that the machine can do 40 percent of his work, the intern can do 30 percent, and the remaining 30 percent can be renamed “strategic ownership” and given to him without extra pay.
Then comes the new normal.
Then comes the smaller contract.
Then comes the delayed payment.
Then comes the sentence every precarious worker knows: “We are just waiting for funds to clear.”
Funds are always clearing somewhere. Like monsoon clouds over the Bay of Bengal, they are visible, dramatic, and not necessarily coming to your lane.
After the white-collar nibbling will come the slower bite into lower-middle-class physical work. Robots will not descend with thunder, wearing sunglasses and quoting science fiction. They will come through warehouses, factories, delivery systems, nursing assistance, security, logistics, cleaning, retail, transport, and every place where a human body is currently cheaper than a machine until the machine becomes cheaper than the human body.
The middle class thinks it owns the future because it owns coaching notes and a phone on EMI.
The future is not impressed.
Meanwhile, people will become meaner. Not all people. There will always be decent ones, little lamps in little rooms, stubbornly burning. But when income shrinks, truth becomes expensive. Cowardice becomes practical. Lies become lubricants. Flattery becomes a job skill. Silence becomes a retirement plan.
You will see it everywhere.
The man who knows the company is cheating will say the market is challenging. The man who knows the client will not pay will say the payment cycle is complex. The man who knows the system is corrupt will say we must be realistic. The man who knows you are drowning will advise swimming technique from the balcony.
And those who insist on reality?
They become a nuisance.
They are called negative, unstable, jealous, failed, bitter, impractical, dramatic, anti-growth, anti-national, anti-progress, anti-whatever-is-convenient-before-tea. Labels are cheap. You can paste them on anyone. India has a great talent for labels. We label jars, gods, castes, neighborhoods, political enemies, and uncles who drink too much at weddings. A label saves the labor of thinking.
But truth has a nasty habit. It does not disappear because you insult the messenger. It waits. Like damp in a wall.
I have spent years studying systems. Healthcare systems, data systems, American institutions, Indian jugaad, broken workflows, missing accountability, old software, new lies. The pattern is not mysterious. Most collapse begins long before the collapse becomes visible. First the numbers stop making sense. Then the polite explanations grow longer. Then the people who notice are told to lower their voice. Then the floor gives way, and everyone asks, with fresh innocence, “How could this happen?”
It happened while everyone was clapping.
My own life is now a small version of that larger failure. A little private economy with a cracked foundation. Consulting income here, unpaid work there, hope in one pocket, fear in the other, health standing in the corner like an old watchman with asthma. One more financial demotion and I do not know what remains.
That is not a dramatic flourish. It is a weather report.
I have bipolar depression and anxiety. These are not literary decorations. They are practical constraints, as real as rent or fever. A healthy man may survive a fall and call it character-building. A sick man may not. When you are already carrying a broken inner battery, poverty does not arrive as an inspiring workshop. It arrives as heat, insomnia, skipped medicine, bad food, shame, panic, and a body that begins resigning from small departments.
First the sleep department.
Then the appetite department.
Then the courage department.
Finally the department that opens the laptop and says, “Let us try again.”
This blog may also be living on borrowed time. Not because the ideas are finished. I have more ideas than money, which is the most Bengali sentence ever written after “The fish was good but slightly overpriced.” The blog may end because writing needs a minimum civilization around it. A roof. A plug point. A mind not being chased around the room by rent. A body not sweating through despair in a power cut.
People imagine writing as romantic. A man with a notebook. Rain at the window. Some moody music. Very nice.
In reality, writing is rice, electricity, rent, bandwidth, medicine, and a chair that does not destroy your spine. Literature begins with infrastructure. So does dignity.
Now, before some energetic optimist arrives wearing the perfume of LinkedIn and says, “But sir, there are opportunities,” yes, of course there are opportunities. There are also fish in the Hooghly. This does not mean you can catch one with a bus ticket and a spoon.
The question is not whether opportunity exists.
The question is who can reach it, who can wait for it, who can afford the training, who can survive the unpaid interval, who has family backing, who has social polish, who has mental health, who has English, who has contacts, who can move cities, who can take a risk without the ceiling falling on his mother’s medicine budget.
That is where meritocracy quietly removes its coat and reveals the old machinery underneath.
Class.
Family.
Health.
Network.
Timing.
Luck.
And then, yes, merit. Merit is there. But often it arrives late, like a government bus, and by then the interview is over.
So what should a young person do with this cheerful mango pickle of a message?
Do not panic. Panic is expensive and has poor resale value.
But do not be innocent.
Protect your income like a small flame in wind. Build more than one source if you can. Keep records. Learn how contracts fail. Learn how nice people delay payment. Learn how quickly affection changes temperature when money enters the room. Learn AI, not because it will save you, but because not knowing it will make you easier to cheat. Learn writing because unclear people are easy to exploit. Learn basic finance because debt is a mosquito that breeds in ignorance. Learn health because the body is the only machine you cannot replace with a subscription.
And please, do not worship companies.
A company is not a family. A company is a machine that may occasionally distribute cake.
Do not worship politicians either. They are not your uncles. They are not your redeemers. Most of them would not recognize your lane unless a camera crew got lost there.
Do not worship influencers, gurus, founders, markets, exams, English, America, India, technology, tradition, or your own suffering. Suffering can teach, yes. It can also make you boring, cruel, and permanently tired. I speak as one who has attended the course and would not recommend the hostel.
What remains then?
A small hard discipline.
See clearly.
Speak carefully.
Save what you can.
Learn what you can.
Do not sell your mind for applause.
Do not mistake noise for truth.
Do not assume fairness will arrive just because you behaved well.
And if you are still young, keep one private corner of yourself uncolonized by fear. You will need it later. Everyone does. It is the small room inside the small room, the place where you can still say, “No, this is not right,” even when the world offers you a discount coupon for silence.
As for me, I am writing this from a room whose future is now uncertain. Outside, Calcutta continues with its usual cracked grandeur. A scooter coughs. A pressure cooker whistles. A dog disapproves of another dog. Somewhere a television panel is shouting about the nation. Somewhere a billionaire is being praised for vision. Somewhere a young man is updating his resume for the seventh time this week and wondering why the world feels like a locked bathroom at a railway station.
The rent clock ticks.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
It is not philosophical. It is not metaphorical after a point. It is simply the sound of a life being measured in months instead of dreams.
I wish I had a sweeter ending. But sweetness, too, has become costly.
So I will leave you with the only honest thing I still own in abundance: suspicion of pretty lies.
Keep that.
In the coming years, it may be worth more than your certificate.