The first thing I think of when I open my eyes is switching off the AC. It's been running all night, quietly eating into a bill I'll dread at the end of the month.
We have air conditioners in every room of our home — for comfort, for the upgraded lifestyle we've earned, to keep pace with the social strata we now belong to, and because Delhi's heat leaves us no real choice. We run them so that after a punishing day, we can steal five or six hours of sane sleep.
I started writing this after seeing a quote on Instagram, loosely attributed to Ramachandra Guha — I can't verify the source, so take the attribution with caution. But it stayed with me, because it captures something true: life has become harder to simply survive in the last ten years, even for those of us who are supposedly winning at it.
The Win That Doesn't Feel Like One
I have a graduate and a master's degree from top universities in India. Nine years of work experience. I live in Delhi with my family. I work at an MNC; my husband is with a Big Four firm. On paper, to anyone looking in, this is success.
In practice, we are struggling — not to survive in the literal sense, but to keep up with a life we've built and a set of ambitions that keep climbing, not because we need more, but because we're comparing ourselves to everyone around us. I admire a stranger's vacation in Nice, France. I want the EV my neighbour just brought home, even though my six-year-old automatic runs perfectly fine. The goalposts move because we let them.
The Invisible Labour of Just Getting Through the Day
At work, I push to finish deliverables on time and make myself visible enough to leadership that I might be appraised above my peers. The going rate for all this effort, across the board, is a 5–7% hike — often without anyone above us even registering the work that went into it.
Meanwhile, running our household is its own management exercise. We employ three people — a cook, a maid, a nanny — just to keep the machine running smoothly enough that both of us can go to our jobs. Coordinating three people's schedules, moods, and reliability is a skill in itself. No performance review anywhere credits it as one.
And the fragility of that system shows itself fast. One morning, the nanny is late because the road through her neighbourhood hasn't been repaired, a rickshaw flips into a gutter, traffic backs up for an hour — and I miss a client meeting. A colleague picks up the credit. A month of effort toward visibility evaporates in a single missed attendance by the nanny.
A Different Kind of Hard
I think often about how this compares to the struggles people describe elsewhere — someone in the US, say, doing the paperwork for an H1B visa. That's real hardship too. But at least, once they're home, they often have a genuine kind of peace: no household staff to manage, because a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner do that work, and the air outside doesn't require checking an index before you can breathe it in it safely. Daycare, for them, is usually dependable.
Here, even something as simple as taking my child to the park requires planning — checking the AQI first, and accepting that "nearby" still means a 30-minute drive for an entry fee of 50 rupees. Something so ordinary requires this much coordination.
Who Do We Blame?
Salaries are rising at roughly half the pace of inflation. The daily friction of life — commutes, air quality, safety, logistics — seems to be compounding at four times that speed.
Our parents and elders, meanwhile, don't always understand why we can't give them more time. They read it as a generation chasing money instead of family. It's not entirely wrong, but it's not the whole truth either.
So who is responsible? The government, for infrastructure that hasn't kept pace with the cities it's meant to serve? Society, for turning comfort into a competition? Or ourselves, for chasing what we're shown rather than what we actually need?
I don't think it's one answer. I think it's a policy environment that seems to favour those who already have the most, layered on top of millions of us chasing things we've been conditioned to want rather than things we actually require.
The Unitary System
There's a phrase from primary school arithmetic that keeps coming back to me: units, tens, hundreds, thousands. We are, each of us, a single unit of this society. The frustration in one household — mine, and millions like it — adds up. I suspect that's part of what shows up, eventually, as a slowdown in a nation's collective mood, if not its economy.
And the smaller frustrations keep finding new forms. I switch off the AC in the morning to save electricity, and my bill still climbs — from five thousand rupees to ten thousand— for reasons that never quite add up on paper. News article- Adani won the tender for smart electric metres".
Whatever the cause, the result is the same: I sleep in more heat at night, and I'm no less frustrated in the morning.
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