"The company does not have to end my job. It only has to stop my career from moving."

Rohan Deshpande writes that on a yellow sticky note on a Monday morning, after a meeting whose invitation used the word mandatory. Nobody at his company is being laid off. Nobody needs to be. Hiring is frozen, promotions this year will be "selective", and increments will "reflect the new productivity reality". Work that took twelve analysts three years ago now takes five.

In Bengaluru, Arjun Mehta gets six per cent and the phrase market correction. He has grown better at his job every year. The market has quietly decided his job is worth less. Asleep on his sofa is his twenty-three-year-old cousin Nikhil, who has applied to three hundred and eighty companies since finishing his degree. The one role that reached a final interview wasn't given to somebody else. It was cancelled. The team had decided to absorb the work internally.

Years ago, Arjun's first job was handed to him by Rohan. That job does not exist any more. Nobody built a replacement rung.

Escaping Middle Class Money Trap is a warm, funny, unflinching novel about what artificial intelligence is actually doing to middle-class life — not through dramatic mass layoffs, but through frozen salary bands, vanishing first jobs, and promises that stop working one April at a time.

It is also, quietly, a useful book.

In a rented room above a bakery in Indiranagar, a man called Ravi Menon hands out index cards and asks thirty people one question. If your salary stopped this Friday — not reduced, stopped — how many months could your family live exactly as it lives now?

Rohan writes one and a half. He writes it small.

What the two families do next is not a portfolio, a product, or a target number. It is four things, built early, while they are still cheap to build.

For everyone who did everything they were told, and is now being asked to do something else.