Used Lung

The air feels like used lung. Not metaphorically. Literally like somebody has already inhaled this batch, coughed wetly into it, added a light seasoning of burning plastic and stale diesel, and passed it along to me out of neighborly sadism. My chest this morning has that familiar tightness, as if some bureaucrat of respiration has suddenly decided I’m exceeding my quota of oxygen molecules per capita and quietly shut one window of the alveolar office. The AQI app, that little digital horoscope of mortality, has been hovering around 260 here in the so-called boondocks, which is the polite way of saying “still technically Earth, yet with decorative additions borrowed from industrial Mordor.”

Winter inversion is a beautiful phrase for a stupid phenomenon. A smug layer of colder air sits on top like management, trapping all the warm, filthy, hopeful little particles closer to the ground with the rest of us workers. The pollutants can’t rise, the complaints can’t escalate, everything stays suspended at breathing height. Somewhere a meteorologist explains this with diagrams and smiles, while I’m standing in my balcony sniffing the faint whiff of someone burning trash nearby and wondering how many more of these mornings my bronchi have left before they file for retirement.

This is the countryside, remember. Or what passes for it now: semi-rural, semi-urban, fully screwed. If the outskirts are coughing at 260 on an ordinary winter day, the cities are basically slow-motion gas chambers with better food delivery options.

The patriotic art of slow strangulation

I used to think Delhi was the boss level of bad air, the final demon of particulate matter you fight after surviving the lesser henchmen—your random brick kilns, your casual two-stroke rickshaws, your sacred diesel SUV doing aarti to the gods with black smoke. But it’s not just Delhi; the whole national project seems to be about discovering new ways for Homo sapiens to marinate themselves in their own exhaust.

Hyderabad, for instance, the city that sold itself to me in the early 2000s like some eager MBA: come here, sir, we have glass buildings, we have dollar billing, we have something called “Cyberabad” which sounds like a villain’s lair from a C-grade sci-fi movie. I did go, I did live, I did build offices there. The roads to those glass boxes always went through the same muck—potholes filled with black water of unknown ancestry, improvised garbage hills sprouting like tumors on the sidewalks, dogs confusedly trying to decide whether to chew plastic or each other.

Inside the campuses: landscaped lawns, glass façades, air-conditioning pretending to be progress. Outside the gate: the rest of India, which is to say, a sprawling, unplanned, badly ventilated thought experiment on what happens when you invite global capital to walk on a floor that is still wet and full of exposed wires.

The thing that fascinates me, in a horrified anthropologist way, is how persistently we manage to pretend we are New York or San Francisco franchisees. The language is all imported—“startup ecosystem,” “innovation hub,” “world-class infrastructure,” “quantum center of excellence”—but you only have to step out with a wheezing pair of lungs and a decent sense of smell to realize it’s just lipstick, lipstick, lipstick on a very tired pig that has been pulling this cart since Nehru’s time.

How to bake a middle class, badly

In 1998 I left for the US, carrying a suitcase, a few books, and the delusion that history was moving in a vaguely positive direction. America then was in one of its smug techno-optimistic moods. The internet was new enough to feel magical but not yet so weaponized by advertising that every click felt like making eye contact with a pickpocket. Bill Clinton was busy being performatively contrite; Fox News had not yet fully metastasized into 24x7 rabies; the phrase “President Trump” would have sounded like a punchline, not a diagnosis.

The Indian IT boom was a baby then, howling for dollars. There was this great yawning boredom in American software shops called COBOL, these vast legacy systems humming away in banks and airlines and insurance companies like ancient gods nobody understood but everybody was afraid to touch. Then someone noticed: we had a surplus of bright, hungry, English-speaking engineers willing to stare at COBOL for twelve hours a day in exchange for a salary that could teleport their families from lower-middle-class to “we might afford a fridge and a washing machine this decade.”

Y2K was the trigger—those famous two digits about to flip from 99 to 00 and allegedly send planes crashing and microwaves launching nukes. What actually happened was less cinematic and more lucrative: suddenly it made sense to ship a lot of the tedious, unglamorous, deeply necessary programming work to places like Bangalore and Hyderabad. That work, multiplied by years of maintenance and expansions and new projects, baked an entire Indian middle class.

We built our cities on that imported boredom. Our glass towers are financed by other people’s legacy systems, our cafes and malls and gated communities are the dividends of having been willing to debug somebody else’s accounting software at three in the morning. It’s not an insult; it’s just how the arithmetic added up.

Now, a quarter century later, that same tier of cognitive piecework—the report-writing, the summary-making, the template-filling—is being taken apart by statistical parrots dressed up as “AI assistants.” If the late-90s were the era of “We can do your work cheaper,” the mid-2020s are the era of “We can do your work without you.”

So when I say the Indian IT boom ran from 2000 to 2025, I don’t mean the offices will vanish on 31st December like some fairy-tale spell expiring at midnight. I mean the underlying story that powered these cities—the fantasy that you could secure your family’s future by learning Java, hopping on a corporate bus, and spending your life massaging other people’s data—has quietly become historical. You can already smell the nervous sweat in HR departments.

My brief entrepreneurial tour of duty in the illusion

At some point, intoxicated by the same narrative I now ridicule, I tried to play the game on “hard mode”: small entrepreneur, real product, real paying clients. Not a deck, not a vaporware pitch about blockchain optimizing chai distribution, but an actual, functioning piece of software in health information exchange—an unbelievably boring phrase for the incredibly non-boring idea that hospitals, clinics, and labs should be able to talk to each other so patients don’t die because one system doesn’t know what the other one did yesterday.

The OPEX for my Hyderabad office in 2012 was around five–six lakh rupees a month; by the end it was closer to nine–twelve. I remember these numbers not as accounts, but as blood pressure readings. Revenue came in, went out, got siphoned off by landlords, consultants, auditors, random officials whose signatures could suddenly speed up or slow down your life, and of course the vast untraceable network of people who smelled “IT founder” and saw a walking, talking cow to be milked for every last drop of liquidity.

I had credentials, I had backing, I had code that worked. What I didn’t have, and should have known I’d never have, was an ecosystem where small-good-faith beats large-cynical. The city ran on the same default firmware as the rest of India: informal favors, creative invoices, legally adjacent arrangements, a vague ambient expectation that everyone is cheating everyone else a little, all the time. Business, but with extra curry and fewer rules.

When things went bad—and they did, as they always do for people who overestimate both their stamina and the decency of their fellow primates—the protective apparatus that’s supposed to be there in a “modern economy” simply wasn’t. In legal trouble, nobody helped. Passports can be taken away with bureaucratic ease; belongings can vanish; the system can forget your existence except as a case number. The only reason I’m not a cautionary tale in a true-crime podcast is that some of the people who were meant to finish me off liked me too much to complete the transaction.

This is what we mean when we say “corruption.” Not just envelopes stuffed with cash in back rooms, but a million unrecorded ways a society has of letting power do what it wants and then shrugging as if gravity did it.

Smog, silicon, and other invisible hands around the throat

The air, of course, doesn’t care whether you wrote COBOL patches, ran a startup, or spent your life playing Candy Crush. It enters your nostrils, takes a quick tour of your respiratory real estate, and leaves behind a film of particulate vandalism on its way out, one microscopic burglary at a time. We finally have sensors and satellites and nice colored maps to show us exactly how bad it is; that’s the progress story. The regression story is that we have neither the political will nor the basic civic competence to fix the basics: enforce emission norms, design cities that don’t treat pedestrians as roadkill-in-waiting, collect garbage before people resort to arson as a waste-management strategy.

The word “smog” itself is a neat little fusion of “smoke” and “fog,” first popularized in early 20th-century London, that great imperial capital whose talent for exporting ideas and pollution we have internalized so thoroughly that we now manage both without supervision. The Great Smog of 1952 killed thousands in a few days, triggered legislation, and became a “never again” benchmark in environmental history textbooks. Here we recast it as “every winter, again and again,” only with more WhatsApp forwards and fewer consequences.

Somewhere, in parallel, our techno-optimist friends talk earnestly about GPUs and TPUs and quantum accelerators. Nvidia is the new oil baron, so we’re told; the new Saudi Arabia is a server farm full of humming chips doing matrix multiplications for chatbots and image generators. Google, not wanting to be left out of the semiconductor mythology, has its own TPU—tensor processing unit—that does the same basic linear algebra with a different spin, like two rival priests reciting from variations of the same scripture.

All of which is genuinely fascinating if you like math and hardware and the way abstraction turns into silicon. But there is something gently absurd about breathless discussions on the future of artificial intelligence happening in rooms where a ceiling fan is circulating PM2.5 at 180 micrograms per cubic meter. We are building astonishingly fast machines to autocomplete text while struggling to maintain the basic atmospheric conditions suitable for mammals.

At some point there will be a correction, a crash, a weeding out. Some subset of AI companies and chip manufacturers will go the way of the dot-com dodos. The remaining ones will consolidate into even larger, more opaque blobs of capital. That’s how capitalism does yoga. I am not particularly worried for them. I am, however, mildly perturbed for the millions of mid-level staffers whose job today is essentially to be a slow, bipedal autocomplete—writing reports, summarizing meetings, running scripts someone else wrote, doing all the ordinance-level grunt work that AI is now learning to mimic fairly well.

The same outsourcing logic that once favored us—cheaper, English-speaking, reasonably competent—can now turn against us: cheaper, non-biological, available 24x7, doesn’t ask for sick leave or complain about the smell of the office toilet.

When that class gets squeezed, the Hyderabads and Bangalores will feel it not as a thunderclap but as a long, dragging cough—bonuses shrinking, increments delayed, EMIs getting more anxious, the mall lights still on but the shoppers a bit thinner on weekdays. The air will remain uniformly bad, of course. Pollution is communism’s only successful implementation in our time.

Quantum, backwaters, and the worship of labels

One of the more surreal spectacles of recent years has been watching politicians announce “quantum hubs” and “AI centers” and “metaverse corridors” in places where the drainage system fails every monsoon. You get a CGI video of a futuristic city with drones and self-driving cars and holographic call centers, all superimposed on a geography where actual human beings still queue up with plastic buckets for water twice a day.

Someone somewhere puts “Quantum Research Park” into a PowerPoint slide for Amaravati or some other half-imagined city, and a room full of men in suits nods solemnly as if the label itself bends reality, as if the word “quantum” will somehow tunnel through the barriers of underfunded universities, mediocre schooling, and a cultural allergy to basic scientific honesty.

Quantum computing, in its real scientific sense, is mind-bendingly hard; it sits at the intersection of physics, math, engineering, and sheer stubbornness. Even in countries with serious research ecosystems, progress is slow, incremental, full of caveats. In our mythology, it is presented as a kind of magical elevator that will take us directly from “back-office for American banks” to “frontier of the universe,” skipping the dull stairs of fixing primary education, funding laboratories, or hiring teachers who know the difference between astrology and astronomy.

We’re like someone attempting brain surgery because they once successfully microwaved Maggi without burning it.

Meanwhile, the basics stay unresolved. The city where you’re promised “world-class quantum innovation” will also happily let you die because the ambulance couldn’t navigate the traffic and there was no oxygen cylinder at the government hospital. But the ribbon was cut, the banner was printed, the acronym was launched. In a century obsessed with branding, substance is a quaint optional extra.

Health, both systems

On days like today, when each breath feels like negotiating with an unreliable supplier, my own body reminds me that all this macro commentary is not abstract. Air goes in, or it doesn’t. The lungs expand, or they don’t. Some days the chest is just tight enough to make you aware of the mechanical nature of the whole thing—a bellows, a pump, a pair of damp, overworked balloons that have spent fifty years being treated like complementary ashtrays by the municipal authorities.

Add to that the consolation prize of bipolar disorder, with its charming habit of repainting reality daily. On energetic days, the mind wants to tackle everything at once—pollution, capitalism, technology, history, the failure of civic sense, my own stupid choices, someone else’s treacheries, the entire tangled ball. Words pour out, connect, overconnect, the essay becomes a hydra with more heads than I can keep track of. On flat days, the same world arranges itself into a kind of grayscale spreadsheet: bad air, bad governance, bad luck, nothing surprising, move along.

I’ve deleted more blog posts than most people have written emails. Entire archives wiped out in an evening because the tone felt wrong, or too self-pitying, or insufficiently rigorous, or I was just tired of my own voice screaming into the void. Honesty feels important, but also vulgar, like exposing a half-healed scar to people who are only here for the circus.

It doesn’t help that the broader culture, not just here but globally, rewards the exact opposite: cheerful lies delivered with clean fonts. The America I saw between 1998 and 2014 was already capable of immense self-deception, but somehow it still had this baseline confidence in institutions—universities, courts, newspapers. Watching the Trump era from a distance later felt like seeing an old relative descend into WhatsApp conspiracy theories: the same person, but now convinced that a cabal of pizza-eating lizard people is running the world.

India, in its own exuberant way, skipped the part where institutions were strong and went straight to the WhatsApp. We have our own strongmen, our own reality-distortion bubbles, our own worship of “tough” leadership and “bold” decisions that usually translate, on the ground, into more invisible hands around the throats of those already short of breath.

Reality, that boring little thing

If there is one dull lesson the last twenty-five years have hammered into my gluteus-maximus region, it is this: reality is unsexy, incremental, and mercilessly specific.

A real business that solves a real problem has to engage with this boring specificity. Roads that don’t disintegrate every monsoon require not just “political will” but the correct aggregate size, the right binder, adequate mixing, proper compaction, enforcement, routine maintenance—the mundane chain of cause and effect between quarry and tire. A health information exchange system doesn’t succeed because of a buzzword; it succeeds because someone did the grimy work of standardizing codes, cleaning data, persuading suspicious hospital administrators, training staff, handling outages at four in the morning.

That’s what I keep wanting to tell every wide-eyed would-be founder who thinks a good logo and an AI-generated business plan will catapult them to unicorn glory. You cannot leapfrog the plumbing. You cannot market your way past the part where systems have to work on Tuesdays when three staff members are out sick and the power just went off. You cannot run a city on pitch decks, no matter how sincerely the fonts claim sustainability.

And yet, the temptation to pretend is constant. It’s much easier to imagine your company as a “full-stack solution provider in quantum AI for smart cities” than to admit you have barely figured out how to keep your small team paid and your one pilot client semi-happy. It’s easier to promise everything under the sun than to say, “We do this one painfully boring thing properly, for money.”

The tragedy is that the people who most need to hear this probably won’t, because their dopamine receptors are being stimulated elsewhere by reels about hustle culture and inspirational billionaires telling them that belief is everything. Belief is not everything. Belief is the fuel; reality is the road; if the road has a giant pothole, belief will only ensure you hit it at higher speed.

The inevitable, unglamorous warning label

Every so often, some younger acquaintance in the diaspora pings me: “Dada, I’m thinking of moving back. Parents are aging, kids should know their roots, India is growing, so many opportunities, what do you think?”

I never know how to answer without sounding like an embittered lunatic. Yes, come, of course come, this is your country, your language, your story. Also, be aware that the gap between brochure and ground reality is large enough to drive a diesel tanker through. The glittering new airport, the metro line, the IT corridor, they all exist, but so do the broken pavements, the foul air, the casual humiliation embedded in a thousand interactions where your foreign polish will be treated as both exotic and exploitable.

If you don’t plan carefully, if you don’t secure your health, your finances, your backup plans, the place can—and often does—take a leisurely stroll through your metaphorical rear entrance and set up camp. By fifty, you may find that the “roots” you romanticized have wrapped themselves so tightly around your windpipe and your savings that you can neither breathe freely nor leave easily.

I did not plan well. I believed words that should have been interrogated. I overestimated my resilience and underestimated the sheer gravitational pull of systemic dysfunction. My reward is mornings like this: a wheeze in the chest, a faint acrid smell from some trash fire a few houses away, a phone screen showing a three-digit AQI, and the absurd luxury of being able to rant about it in long, winding sentences instead of hauling water from a distant tap.

There are worse lives. There are also better ones.

For now, I’ll do what I always do on days when the lungs stage a small protest against the nation-state: keep the windows half-open, half-closed, an architectural shrug; watch the foggy, dirty light seep in; think unkind thoughts about quantum corridors; type out another overlong, overcaffeinated blog post that I may or may not delete next week; and listen carefully to the tiny, stubborn part of my respiratory system that still believes it’s worth pulling in one more breath of this ridiculous air and pushing it back out as words.