The Coming White-Collar Mendicancy

AI will not arrive for most office workers as a robot kicking open the door. It will arrive as a missing vacancy.

That is the small cold thing to notice first.

Nobody will announce, with drum and conch shell, that the junior analyst’s job has died. The company will simply not hire the next junior analyst. A role will be renamed. A team will be “made lean.” A manager will say, with the exhausted face of a man pretending cruelty is spreadsheet hygiene, that the work can now be handled by tools. The office lights will remain on. The tea machine will still cough. Someone will still write “hope you are doing well” to people who are not doing well at all.

And then, one rung of the ladder will be gone.

For the rich, this is inconvenience. For the lower-middle-class educated person, this is weather. Bad weather. The kind that enters through the window gap at 3 a.m. and makes the mattress smell faintly of defeat.

A large number of us are not middle class in the way television advertisements imagine middle class. We are not sipping coffee in glass buildings while discussing mutual funds and Scandinavian chairs. We are educated people holding on to the lower rungs with our teeth. We know English, yes. We know Excel, some code, some billing, some documentation, some report writing, some compliance, some customer support, some project coordination, some polite lying in email. We have erect spines because we were told education would give us that. But the floor under us is still cheap cement.

This is the class AI may hurt most quietly.

The daily tragedy will not always look tragic. That is why it will be easy to ignore. A contractor does not get renewed. A content team becomes two people and a subscription. A support desk hires fewer freshers. A claims-processing unit keeps only the people who can supervise machine output. A coder becomes a reviewer. A reviewer becomes a temp. A temp becomes a freelancer. A freelancer becomes a man checking his phone every twelve minutes while the ceiling fan turns above him like a tired witness.

Outside, in my part of Calcutta’s edges, life continues with magnificent indifference. The vegetable seller argues over coriander. The para dogs sleep like philosophers under scooters. A boy on a bicycle transports a gas cylinder with the confidence of someone who has never read a safety manual and is therefore spiritually free. The tea stall has the day’s politics, cricket, local gossip, and economic theory, all for twelve rupees and a chipped glass.

Then the phone buzzes.

No reply from the client.

Again.

That is modern mendicancy. Not a bowl at the temple gate. A browser tab. An inbox. A job portal. A LinkedIn message sent into the fog. A CV adjusted for the four-hundredth time, like a sickly plant being moved from one patch of weak sunlight to another.

White-collar mendicancy will wear a clean shirt.

It will have a laptop. It will know how to write “circling back.” It will understand deadlines, dashboards, invoices, tax portals, video calls, and the little theater of professional cheerfulness. It will say, “No worries,” when there are many worries. It will say, “Happy to help,” when happiness has left the room by the back door.

You think poverty always looks like torn clothes. Not quite.

Sometimes poverty looks like a man with a degree, a decent vocabulary, a dying phone battery, and no margin left.

The old promise was simple. Study. Behave. Learn the manners of offices. Speak properly. Do not be too angry. Do not be too honest. Sit straight. Take the bus. Swallow the insult. Do the certification. Send the CV. Smile in interviews as if rent is not holding a knife to your ribs. If you do all this, society said, you may not become rich, but you will not sink.

Now the promise is being edited.

AI does not have to replace every worker to break this arrangement. It only has to remove enough beginner jobs, enough routine jobs, enough writing jobs, enough checking jobs, enough back-office jobs, enough “first step” jobs, and enough “not glamorous but pays the bills” jobs.

A ladder does not become useless when every rung vanishes.

Remove the bottom three.

Watch what happens.

This is the part the glossy people skip. Work is not only income. Work is also rehearsal. You become competent by doing small, boring, supervised things badly, then less badly, then almost well. That is how judgment forms. Nobody becomes a good analyst by watching motivational reels. Nobody becomes a good engineer by asking a chatbot to “explain like I’m five” for eighteen months. You need contact with the ugly little facts of real work: the missing field, the angry customer, the contradictory spreadsheet, the manager who wants the answer before the question has finished putting on its shoes.

If AI eats the boring first tasks, young workers lose the training ground. The company saves money now and quietly burns tomorrow’s adults for firewood.

Of course AI can help. Let us not become village uncles shouting at electricity. AI can draft, summarize, classify, translate, search, compare, and suggest. Used well, it is a bicycle for the mind. Used badly, it is a bicycle owned by someone else, rented back to you by the minute, while you are told to be grateful for mobility.

The problem is not the tool.

The problem is who owns the tool, who captures the saving, and who is told to become “resilient” after the saving has been captured.

Productivity is a lovely word. It walks into the room wearing perfume. But sometimes productivity means one person doing the work of four while the other three discover the spiritual benefits of unpaid anxiety. Companies will not always say this plainly. They will say optimization. They will say transformation. They will say AI-first. They will say the future has arrived. The future, I notice, often arrives with a security guard asking the past to leave the building.

In India the matter becomes more combustible because our educated job market is already packed like a suburban train at office hour. Too many degrees. Too few good jobs. Too many coaching centers selling hope by the kilogram. Too many families treating education as the last respectable gamble. A son’s job is not just a son’s job. It is parents’ medicine, sister’s tuition, house rent, family status, emergency fund, and occasionally the only thing preventing the entire household from sliding one full social floor downward.

Then comes AI, smiling like a salesman at a wedding.

It says it will improve efficiency.

Fine.

But whose efficiency? For whom? Paid to whom? Saved from whose stomach?

The average lower-middle-class educated worker does not have a private island of savings. He has a few months, maybe. Often less. He has an EMI. He has aging parents. He has a landlord who is polite until the fifth of the month and then becomes a weather system. He has dental problems postponed so long they have become family members. He has a shirt for interviews. He has hope, but hope is not legal tender at the pharmacy.

And yes, he should learn AI. I should. You should. Anyone who works with words, numbers, code, documents, design, operations, teaching, finance, research, sales, or support should learn it properly. Not as magic. Not as religion. Not as a shiny toy. As a dangerous useful tool, like a pressure cooker. It can feed the family. It can also explode if treated with devotional stupidity.

But “reskill” is not a social policy. It is a verb people throw at the drowning.

Some will rise. Let us admit that. Some clever, fast, well-positioned workers will use AI to become more productive and better paid. Some small businesses will do more with less. Some people will escape drudgery. Some new jobs will appear, wearing strange new hats and asking for strange new skills.

But many will be pushed sideways before they are pushed downward.

That is the hidden motion. Not always unemployment. Downgrading. Stable employee to contractor. Contractor to freelancer. Freelancer to platform worker. Platform worker to invisible man with invoices pending. The descent will have respectable labels. Flexible work. Portfolio career. Independent consulting. Creator economy. Fractional talent. Very nice words. Smooth words. Words with scented candles in the bathroom.

Underneath: uncertainty.

The educated spine bends by installments.

One month you stop eating out. Next month you delay the electricity bill. Then you avoid a friend’s call because he may ask how work is going. Then you tell your mother the payment is “in process.” Then the tea outside starts feeling expensive. Not unaffordable exactly. Just guilty. A cup of tea becomes a financial referendum.

This is how class falls. Not like a building collapsing. More like a shirt fading in repeated washing. One day you hold it up and realize it is not the same color anymore.

Meanwhile the newspapers will celebrate market records, startup valuations, data centers, new apps, new models, new miracles. The world will look busy and important. Somewhere a panel discussion will announce that India is entering a golden age. The men on stage will have excellent shoes. Nobody will ask the support engineer from Sonarpur what happened when his entire ticket queue became a dashboard supervised by one exhausted senior employee and two AI tools.

The future always looks cleaner from the stage.

From the cheap seats, you can see the wires.

The real villain is not AI alone. That would be too easy, and also false. The real villain is a social arrangement that treats human beings as temporary scaffolding. Use them to build the floor. Remove them when the floor can hold itself. Then praise innovation.

This is not new. Machines have displaced workers before. Software has eaten tasks before. Globalization has moved work before. The difference now is that AI is entering the soft middle of office life, the place where educated people once thought they were protected because they did not lift sacks or operate machines. We thought language was a shelter. We thought analysis was a shelter. We thought the ability to summarize, draft, compare, and coordinate made us safe.

It did.

Until those verbs became buttons.

That is the tiny horror.

A button is not just a feature. Sometimes it is a grave marker for a task that once fed a family.

So what do we do?

First, stop lying politely. If a role disappears, say it disappeared. If a profession is being hollowed out, say hollowed out. If AI raises output but lowers bargaining power, say so. If entry-level work is being removed, ask where the next generation will learn judgment. If workers are pushed into freelancing without safety, do not call it freedom too quickly. A goat tied to a longer rope is not a tiger.

Second, workers must learn the tools without worshipping them. Use AI. Test it. Break it. Make it useful. Learn where it lies. Learn where it flatters. Learn where it confidently serves nonsense like bad biryani at a railway platform. The worker who refuses AI may be crushed. The worker who trusts it blindly may be replaced by someone who knows better.

Third, we need institutions with some imagination. Universities must stop producing exam athletes and start producing people who can write, reason, count, argue, verify, and adapt. Employers must stop destroying apprenticeship. Governments must think about portable benefits, unemployment support, payment protection for freelancers, public training that is not ceremonial, and labor laws that understand the new office without walls.

Will this happen neatly?

Please.

We live in a country where a footpath can be dug up three times in one month by three departments who appear not to have met socially or spiritually. Clean solutions are for brochures. Reality comes with dust, delay, ego, corruption, jugaad, brilliance, and one missing signature.

Still, naming the danger matters.

Because once you see white-collar mendicancy, you cannot unsee it. You see it in the man refreshing his inbox at midnight. You see it in the woman taking three underpaid projects because one may vanish. You see it in the young graduate learning ten tools and still not finding the first door. You see it in the older worker, fifty-one, educated, tired, still sharp, still trying, living on the edge of a city that keeps melting and rebuilding itself with equal enthusiasm.

That man may still have his books.

He may still have his mind.

He may still have his stubborn little cup of tea.

But the roof, the bread, the dignity—those are not abstractions. They are daily negotiations. AI will test them. The market will pretend this is natural. The winners will call it progress. The losers will be advised to update their profiles.

And somewhere in Calcutta, under a fan making the sound of an old argument, a man will look at his CV and wonder when respectability became another word for begging.