Nothing is made, nothing disappears.

Bengaluru’s footpaths are being cleared of encroachments.

Pushcarts, roadside food stalls, vegetable carts, milk booths, and establishments that have quietly turned public footpaths into extensions of their private property are being removed. The stated objective is simple enough: footpaths belong to pedestrians, and encroachments must go. Predictably, there is opposition, much of it from those whose carts, stalls, and makeshift shops are being removed.

For the authorities, it may be an encroachment being cleared. For the person standing beside that cart, watching it being taken away, it is something else entirely.

When I saw those visuals, I was taken back to January 2024.

On one otherwise ordinary day, an email arrived from HR informing me that my role had been marked redundant and my employment terminated. Just like that, a long professional journey came to an end—not through resignation, retirement, poor performance, or even a gradual transition, but through a corporate decision conveyed in a few carefully chosen sentences.

A new management had taken over the company. It believed that management roles were redundant in a technology company. Now, a new minister has taken charge of Greater Bengaluru’s development. He believes that the city’s footpaths are blocked by encroachments that need to be cleared.

The circumstances are vastly different. The scale is different. The people involved are different. The rights and wrongs of each decision deserve separate examination, which I will leave for another article.

But there is one thing that connects them.

Someone, somewhere, makes a decision. And somewhere else, a person suddenly discovers that the life they had built around a livelihood no longer exists in the same form. For the person making the decision, it may be restructuring, rationalization, urban renewal, efficiency, compliance, or enforcement. There are files, presentations, meetings, notices, and policies.

For the person at the receiving end, there is only one immediate question: What do I do tomorrow?

That question is especially terrifying when you are the sole breadwinner of a family.

Losing a livelihood is not merely about losing an income. The salary stops, of course. The money no longer arrives at the end of the month. But what disappears with it is much more difficult to calculate.

There is a loss of worth. A sense of shame, even when there is nothing to be ashamed of. A feeling of failure. Fear about the future. Anxiety about bills, children’s education, ageing parents, home loans, medical expenses, and all the other responsibilities that do not disappear merely because your source of income has.

And then there is the quiet question that can be the hardest of all: Who am I now?

In many families, our identities are partly defined by the roles we play. Parent. Spouse. Caregiver. Provider. Breadwinner. In urban India today, the sole breadwinner may be becoming less common. In many households, both partners work because one income is simply not enough. This is true across income groups. The burden of making a living increasingly rests on two pairs of shoulders.

Yet there are still many families where one person—man or woman—carries the primary responsibility of earning. When that person’s livelihood suddenly disappears, the shock travels through the entire family.

I know something of that shock.

If you are middle-aged, working in India’s IT sector, and suddenly laid off, the world can become remarkably unforgiving. Experience, once considered an asset, can become expensive baggage. Seniority narrows opportunities. The very years that took decades to accumulate can suddenly work against you.

My former company offered the services of a third-party vendor to help with the job search. It was presented as assistance during the transition. The Karnataka government, similarly, has spoken of providing vendor IDs so that displaced street vendors can continue selling their goods or food—not necessarily on the main road, but perhaps on side streets or in designated areas.

On paper, both solutions sound reasonable. In reality, they can be painfully inadequate.

A job-search consultant cannot create a job market eager to hire a middle-aged, mid-management employee who has just been laid off. A vendor ID cannot create customers on a side street where few people walk.

The support exists. The opportunity may not.

Sometimes, such solutions feel less like rehabilitation and more like a way for institutions to reassure themselves that they have done their part. A corporate outplacement service. A vendor ID. A counseling session. An alternative location.

Boxes are ticked. Processes are completed. Consciences are perhaps made a little lighter. And the person whose livelihood has disappeared is left to figure out what comes next.

Perhaps every decision that destroys a livelihood deserves something more than procedural correctness. It deserves an awareness of the human being standing on the other side. Because for that person, life may never be quite the same again.

A job can be lost in an email. A cart can be removed in an afternoon. A milk booth can disappear from a street corner. What took years to build can vanish with astonishing speed. The harder question is what happens afterwards.

How does one survive such a crash landing?

There is no elegant answer. No inspirational quote can restore a salary. No motivational speech can bring customers to an empty side street. No promise that “something better will come along” can guarantee that it actually will.

In the end, the person has little choice but to gather whatever remains—the fragments of confidence, experience, savings, skills, relationships, and hope—and begin again. It takes diligence. Optimism. A refusal to surrender. And, perhaps more than anything else, a sense of responsibility towards those we love.

Sometimes resilience is not heroic. It does not announce itself with courage or confidence. Sometimes it is simply getting out of bed the next morning, despite having no idea what comes next.

Sometimes it is opening the laptop and searching for another job. Sometimes it is pushing the cart to another street and hoping someone will stop to buy.

Perhaps that is what remains when a livelihood disappears—the instinct to keep going, even when the road ahead is uncertain.

The worlds may be different. The fear is not.

Neither is the fight to begin again.

A related reflection

The people who shape Bengaluru often ask the same questions its citizens do. But who is responsible for finding the answers? Read The Minister Who Asks the Same Questions We Do.