From a living fossil to a free man

IT was a cool morning in Shoghi, near Shimla, the kind that makes you wonder if the clouds have decided to take a leisurely stroll through the hills. Birds chirped, the chai boiled, and at the corner tea shop, sitting on a rickety wooden bench, was my old friend Raghu — now a free man.

Raghu had done the unthinkable. He had quit his ‘sarkari naukri’ after three decades. No, not in Shoghi, but somewhere in the hot plains. People whispered about it in hushed tones, as if he had left civilisation itself.

“You’re crazy,” I told him.

“I was crazy when I joined,” he said, sipping chai. “But when I left, I was just… fossilised.”

He leaned in conspiratorially. “You know, the first day I joined, a senior colleague patted my back and said, ‘So, you’ve come to become a living fossil.’ I laughed then. I stopped laughing 30 years later.”

“But why now?” I asked. “Did AI make your job redundant?”

Raghu burst into laughter so loud that the chai shop owner stopped mid-pour. “AI? Oh no, my friend! The real threat wasn’t AI. It was… incompetent bosses.”

“You see,” he continued, “for three decades, I watched AI grow smarter. My bosses, however, remained blissfully immune to intelligence. If anything, they became dumber. AI started automating work. My bosses started automating blame. AI learned from past mistakes. My bosses repeated them.”

He took a deep breath. “You know, there was a time when an incompetent boss was an inconvenience. Now? They’re a legacy system. You can’t replace them, you can’t upgrade them, and you can’t uninstall them.”

I was in splits.

“But tell me,” I asked, “What was the final moment that made you quit?”

Raghu grinned. “One day, I walked into a meeting where my boss was explaining a policy change. Halfway through, I realised that he was reading last year’s memo, word for word. He had just changed the date.”

I shook my head.

“So I thought — if AI ever takes over, at least it will be efficiently heartless. My boss was both inefficient and heartless. That was my cue.”

We sat in silence for a moment, watching the hills.

“You know,” he mused, “everyone fears AI will take their jobs. But AI doesn’t promote its useless cousin or send emails full of typos and excuses. AI doesn’t need to take over. It just needs to wait.”

He grinned. “And so do I. Here. With my chai. While the fossils keep piling up back there.” The hills echoed with our laughter, as the morning sun slowly turned the mist into a memory.