Chapter 1: The Burden

While growing up, we didn't have much. We were crammed into a small room, with two beds that my father got as dowry. Our uncles also lived with us, but thankfully, they slept at the shop and not in that small room. My father was the oldest of the seven siblings. He was the breadwinner who had to ensure everybody was fed, married, and had proper families. In such a scenario, a kid understands the struggles on their parents' faces and always says no to most things because he doesn't want to be a burden. No expensive toys, even though he got jealous of other kids. No expensive chocolates, even though he wanted to eat them. No expensive school trips? Actually, scratch that. I was an introvert as a kid, too. I never wanted to go on those stupid trips that cost twice what it would cost to go there myself and stay for just one day without even getting to explore the region properly. I recognised that scam even as a child. You learn a particular skill when you grow up like this. You learn to read a room before you enter it. You learn to calculate whether your needs are allowed before you voice them. You learn to make yourself small. Not because anyone tells you to, but because you've done the maths on your parents' faces and decided that the cost of your wanting is higher than the cost of your silence.

I remember one thing, though. All of my friends had cable, and their mothers made them watch various Indian serials. Most were of no interest to me, but there was one called Prithvi Raj Chauhan (I think that's what the name was, I don't remember exactly). I remember this because the show was a bit different from the other dramatic shows about household affairs. This was about a Prince and his kingdom. From childhood, I really loved books and stories. I had read all the books of the Arabian Nights, Sinbad the Sailor, Aesop's fables, all the fictional stories with pictures that we had in the library. So when they started talking about this prince, in contrast to the usual dramatic household affairs, my ears perked up. I sensed an adventure in the air. Obviously, we didn't have cable. I didn't know anything about the show, just a few bits of information I got from the discussion I was eavesdropping on. We just got the news from the one channel you could receive by dancing around the room with the antenna. I'd like to believe my father was the reason many farmers got rain. Back to the classroom. When the boys started talking about the show, I made my way to the conversation and listened first. They said, "Yesterday's episode was so cool." And everyone else concurred. I nodded as well to be a part of the group. They started giving bits and pieces about the story. The Prince dressed so well. How he had trained, and the training montage was so cool. He was similar to our age when he started training, so we should start training as well. Then came the crux of the story. One concluded, "The scene at the end was so cool. The Prince with his army." To which I added, "It was indeed. The Prince was standing in front of his army, because he knew an army is only strong when the leader is ahead, alongside the soldiers, going headfirst into battle." Everyone was in awe of my fervent telling of the story. They looked at me with wonder, and this fuelled me to continue. "The Prince rode into battle. He fought with his sword against the evil villain that wanted to take over his kingdom, take all the women as his wives (we didn't understand what they would do with the women just yet; how naive were we) and then kill all the dogs." I got up on the desk and continued on. "He took his sword with great grace and skill, and then parried the enemy to drop his. As an honourable prince, he allowed the enemy to pick the sword back up again. When the enemy reached for his fallen sword, he grabbed a fistful of sand and threw it into the prince's eyes." Everyone was staring at me now. Of course they were. None of them had watched this show last night. Like a ninja, I stepped from desk to desk with the ruler in my hand, trying to be as graceful as the Prince with the sand in his eyes. "But the Prince was unfazed. Even though he was blinded by the sand, he parried every attack the villain made. He was a prince who was not coasted, not given victories because of his title. He was taught by great swordsmen who understood that the defeat of the prince on the battlefield means the defeat of the kingdom. They had trained him to understand his enemies, to fight in darkness, to see with more than his eyes." I could see my friends going "Wow!" "He was able to hear the sound of every grunt the enemy made and move accordingly," I said, as I tiptoed across desk to desk. "The sound of his enemy's clothes, the movement of his feet in the sand, the way he attacked previously, the panting of his breath. All of it led the prince to not only dodge the attacks but return the strikes, bringing terror into the heart of a foe who was now losing to a blind enemy. When the villain could fight no longer, he kneeled and accepted defeat." At this point, I was on top of the desk and on top of the world, with my ruler as my sword. "Then the Prince killed the villain," I struck down, pointing my ruler at the kid sitting on the bench. Then I swept it across the classroom, exclaiming, "If he lived, he would rise up again and attack my people." This may have been a bit dark. They would never show this on television. But everyone was so happy. They started clapping. And at that point, I didn't realise it, but the entire classroom was looking at me, just smiling at the fact that the prince had beheaded the villain. People think children are innocent and pure, but they're dumb enough not to understand what armies do to the women and children they capture. And quite possibly evil, and like the idea of their heroes beheading villains. The ruckus caused the teacher in the next room to peek at what was happening. And there she saw all the kids clapping, clamouring, making noise, and at the centre of it all, little me, standing on top of the desk with a ruler in my hand like the prince who won the battle. Suffice to say, I got a few smacks on my bum with the ruler for disturbing the classroom.

But as I stood outside the class for a period, I realised a few things. That was immensely satisfying. I didn't have cable. That was a made-up story. Why did no one try to point out that this isn't what happened? There were people in that room who had watched the episode the night before. They knew the real story. But they didn't care. They chose my version. I had actually stolen the fight in the dark from an episode of "Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go!" (there's an eye villain who turns people into zombies if they look at him directly, and the protagonist, Zero, learns to fight without using his eyes to defeat the monster). I adapted it, dressed it up as an Indian prince, and sold it to a room full of children who had the real information and chose to believe me instead. I also realised something else. I loved it. I loved being at the centre. I loved the moment the room belonged to me. For a kid who spent most of his time calculating whether his needs were allowed, that moment on the desk was the first time I stopped calculating. I wasn't asking for permission. I wasn't reading anyone's face. I was just there. Taking up space. Telling a story. Existing out loud.

That's the pattern I've carried ever since. Most of the time, I make myself small. I suppress what I want. I do the calculus: read the room, read the faces, decide what's allowed. And then, in bursts, something erupts. I stand on a desk with a ruler. I entered a speech contest. I started writing a book. I am founding an institute in a city that nobody in AI governance has heard of. I submit an application to a research programme that has no obvious reason to take someone like me. Every one of these is the same gesture: a kid saying, I am here. And every time, the same voice follows: Who asked you to be? That's the burden. Not poverty. Not the small room or the two beds. The burden is the belief (planted so early you can't remember learning it) that your existence requires justification. That taking up space is something you must earn. That the default state of you is too much, and your job is to be less.

I thought this was just my story. The poor kid's arithmetic. Something you grow out of, or learn to manage, or bury under enough professional achievement that it stops mattering. Then I watched it start happening to other people. Not children. Adults. Educated, accomplished, professionally secure adults, who were suddenly doing the same calculus I did as a seven-year-old, staring at their parents' faces. Except they weren't reading their parents' faces. They were reading a screen. And the screen was telling them: the thing that made you valuable can now be done by a machine, for twenty dollars a month, without sleeping, without complaining, and without needing to be told it matters. I saw it first in developers. Software engineering is a prideful profession, and rightly so. There is something genuinely godlike about making a machine do what you command. You type instructions into a void, and the void obeys. I am a developer means something different from I work in development. It means: I am the kind of person who can bend reality to my will through precise language. And then someone else's precise language built a system that can do it faster, longer, and cheaper. A subscription that costs less than a dinner, shipping in three days what would have taken thirty. But it didn't stop with developers. I watched it spread. The illustrator who spent a decade mastering light and anatomy, now watching a machine generate in seconds what took her a career to learn, only to be told to use that machine to "increase her output." The designer who trained his eye for years, now being asked why the company should pay for taste when a prompt can approximate it. The writer who thought her voice was hers, watching it get scraped, digested, and regurgitated in a style close enough that most people can't tell the difference and don't care to. Each of them had the same relationship to their craft that I had to my silence: it was how they justified taking up space. The developer's code, the artist's eye, the writer's voice. These weren't just skills. They were answers to the question that every person carries, whether they know it or not: Why should you exist? And now the answers are free. What do you do with your identity when the thing that made you you can be purchased, replicated, and scaled without you in the room?

I recognise the look. I've been seeing it in forums, in conversations, in the silence that follows when someone demonstrates what an AI can do in the time it takes to make coffee. It's the look of someone recalculating. Someone reading the room. Someone asking themselves: Am I still allowed to take up space? It's the same look I had as a child. The same arithmetic. The same quiet decision to be less, to need less, to shrink into whatever shape the situation permits. The difference is that when I did it, nobody called it a crisis. When a poor kid in Kathmandu learns to want less, that's just growing up. That's life. That's what you do when resources are scarce, and your existence is a line item on someone else's budget. But when it happens to a software engineer in San Francisco (when someone with a six-figure salary and a title that used to mean something starts wondering whether they're still necessary), suddenly it has a name. It's an existential crisis. It's the future of work. It's a policy problem. It was always a policy problem. It just wasn't happening to the people who make policy.

That's what this book is about. Not the technology. The technology is just the latest mechanism. What I'm interested in is the burden: the one I've carried since I was a kid in a small room, the one that's now being distributed to millions of people who never expected to carry it. The experience of being made redundant. Of being reclassified. Of watching the thing that made you you become something anyone can buy. This isn't new. It's just new to you.