You are not a citizen. You are a financial battery for a billion-dollar illusion.
You did exactly what the nation demanded of you. You studied relentlessly. You secured the job. You took the ₹2-crore home loan to build a stake in your city.
And you quietly surrender up to a third of your labor every month to the state. You built the much-boasted "New India."
But the moment the market falters and the layoff email arrives, the government vanishes. It only reappears one last time—to extract a 30% cut from your severance pay.
When they boast of the world’s fastest-growing GDP, they are holding up a billboard that reflects their vanity, but our exhaustion.
GDP is not a metric of human dignity. It is an abstract ledger that ignores: ▪️ The crumbling roads and gridlocked signals you commute through. ▪️ The toxic air you breathe. ▪️ The sheer financial terror of losing your job with zero state-backed unemployment insurance.
We are funding a welfare state we are explicitly forbidden from participating in. We pay First-World taxes for Third-World infrastructure, administered by a political class that enjoys lifelong pensions, secure housing, and zero personal financial risk.
Look at the social contracts of the Gulf. A state like Dubai delivers for its citizens today, not in some abstract 30-year vision document. They build infrastructure and distribute housing without demanding groveling gratitude, and without plastering a politician’s face on a billboard as if taxpayer-funded dignity is a personal charitable gift.
They understand that a government's job is to serve the citizen, not to farm them.
But here, the salaried professional is treated as a shock absorber. You are expected to generate wealth, absorb economic downturns, pay for your own private healthcare, secure your own private safety net, and quietly fade away when you are no longer useful.
We are not asking for a favor. We are demanding the basic dignity of a return on our investment.
We are the silent, bleeding engine of this economy. It is time the engine stopped running quietly.
Are we the only demographic that has normalized being financially exploited?