Hey, I’m Ronish — an engineering undergrad from Bangalore, India. Quick context before I get into it: I go to what people here call a Tier 3 college. That’s the polite way of saying I didn’t ace my entrance exams, so I didn’t end up at an IIT or NIT. No shame in it — but it does mean I have a front-row seat to something most people in tech circles conveniently look away from.

the rat race has a new co-pilot

When me and my friends joined college, AI was just starting to make noise. The first two years were… honestly kind of blissful. We played games, went out, did the things you’re supposed to do at 18. The syllabus was there — dense, occasionally interesting — but between labs, submissions, and surprise internals, most of us found the path of least resistance: ChatGPT.

I’m not going to pretend I haven’t used it. That would be a lie, and you’d know it. But I also started noticing something that I couldn’t quite shake — the sheer scale of it.

I’d confidently bet half my net worth (😳) that 90% of India’s engineering students are using AI for everything: hackathon submissions, college assignments, semester projects, viva prep, the smallest of doubts at 2am before an exam. And look — I’m not here to call anyone dumb for that. Using tools to work smarter is literally what engineers are supposed to do.

The problem isn’t the tool. The problem is what’s underneath it.

productivity without purpose is just noise

Here’s the uncomfortable part. AI raises the floor dramatically — you can produce something passable without knowing much. But it doesn’t give you a reason to be doing any of it.

And in a country where millions of families push their kids into engineering not out of passion, but because of the tag — the status, the assumed stability, the neighbour aunty’s approval — you end up with a generation of people who are technically employed and functionally lost. They used AI to get through college. They’re using AI to get through work. They’re optimising for output in a game they never wanted to play.

That’s not a dig at them — that’s a structural failure. The system told them this was the path, AI made the path easier to walk, and now nobody’s asking whether the destination was ever worth going to.

who’s actually winning here

Let’s zoom out for a second.

Millions of students generate AI-assisted code, reports, and presentations. Millions of graduates enter the workforce and keep leaning on AI to stay afloat. The humans in this picture are stressed, disengaged, working jobs they feel lukewarm about at best.

And at the centre of all of this? The AI companies — training on our outputs, billing for our usage, expanding their data centres to serve the demand.

Those data centres, by the way, are drinking entire towns’ worth of water to stay cool. We’re not just talking about career displacement or intellectual atrophy — we’re talking about real, physical resource drain accelerating in lockstep with the AI boom.

I’m not worried about the robot uprising. I’m worried we’ll be too thirsty and too burnt out to care when it happens.

so what do we actually do

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m 20-something, in Bangalore, figuring it out like everyone else.

But I think the conversation needs to shift — away from “are you using AI?” and toward “do you know why you’re here?” Because AI used by someone with clarity and curiosity? Genuinely powerful. AI used as a substitute for ever having to think about what you want? That’s just a very expensive, very resource-hungry way to stay stuck.

The engineering dream sold to this generation was already shaky. AI didn’t break it — it just made the cracks load faster.

If you’re a student reading this: it’s okay to not know what you want yet. But please — actually try to figure it out. Use the tools, sure. But also sit with the discomfort of not knowing something. Google a concept at 1am because you’re genuinely curious, not because your submission is due at 9. Build something ugly and broken just to see if it works.

The world has enough people who can prompt their way to a passing grade.

It could really use more people who give a damn.