I came across a sher by Muztar Khairabadi that stayed with me long after I had finished reading it. Not because I could claim to understand every shade of its original meaning, but because it reminded me of something I have observed in organizations: the peculiar loneliness of holding a position of responsibility while gradually becoming irrelevant to the decisions that shape its future.
न सवाल में, न जवाब में, न हिसाब में, न किताब में
इसी दहर-ए-ख़ाना-ख़राब में फ़क़त एक कद-ए-फ़ुज़ूल हूँ।
Neither in the questions nor in the answers; neither in the calculations nor in the records. In this troubled world, merely an unnecessary figure. That is my reading of its emotional force, rather than a claim to offer the definitive literary interpretation.
The designation and the person
We spend the early part of our careers proving that we deserve a designation. We work, learn, take responsibility and hope that a title will finally acknowledge what we contribute. Then, strangely, we may spend the rest of our careers trying to prove that the designation still deserves to exist.
A designation tells the world what you are responsible for. It does not necessarily tell you what you can influence. You might be a manager, director, president or head of a function. The institution is struggling. Important conversations happen elsewhere. Strategies change without your input. Nobody asks you a question, seeks your answer or includes you in the calculations. Yet your name remains beside the responsibility.
You are not needed for the decision, but you may be needed for the consequences.
Accountability without authority
This is where the experience becomes more than an injured ego. An organization can quietly withdraw your influence without formally withdrawing your accountability. You continue to attend meetings, protect customers, guide teams and meet commitments, often out of professional conscience rather than any illusion of power.
Perhaps the institution keeps the designation because, should things fail, it needs a name against which responsibility can be recorded. The people who made the decisions, the people who carried the responsibilities and the people who eventually pay the price are not always the same people.
And if a convenient moment arrives to remove the position, the person who was not considered important enough to consult may suddenly become the first considered dispensable.
Then comes AI
The IT industry is living through a genuine technological transition. AI can accelerate coding, documentation, analysis, testing and many activities around software delivery. It would be foolish to deny its potential. Equally, it would be foolish to assume that every cost-cutting decision dressed in the language of AI represents a demonstrated productivity improvement.
Imagine a technology business already under pressure: slowing revenue, aging products, dissatisfied customers, technical debt and years of difficult investment choices. Experienced leaders may have spent decades keeping such businesses functioning, often without the authority to change the larger strategy. When results disappoint, the business has to confront uncomfortable questions about its own decisions.
But AI offers another story. Instead of asking why the business struggled, it becomes tempting to ask why so many experienced people are still required to run it.
Experience is relabeled as cost. Institutional memory becomes legacy thinking. Caution becomes resistance. The person who knows why a seemingly small software error can have enormous consequences becomes less exciting than the promise of generating the software faster.
There is a difference between making a role genuinely redundant through better ways of working and declaring a person redundant because a new technology makes the declaration easier to justify.
The counterargument matters
Of course, years of service cannot be a permanent exemption from change. Leaders must learn, question their assumptions and make room for new capabilities. Some roles really will need redesign, and some management layers may no longer add enough value. AI deserves serious experimentation, not nostalgic resistance.
But transformation deserves evidence too. Faster code is not necessarily a better product. A prototype is not a business turnaround. In healthcare technology, for example, the cost of a wrong reimbursement calculation or a poorly understood customer workflow can dwarf the apparent savings in development time. AI may lower the cost of producing an answer without lowering the cost of being wrong.
The fair question is not simply whether a leader knows the latest AI tools. It is whether the organization has made a serious assessment of the value of the role, the knowledge it holds, the outcomes it influences and the capabilities the future actually needs.
Who gets to define failure?
I return to the sher because its sequence feels so precise: not in the question, not in the answer, not in the calculation, not in the record. A person can remain visible on the organization chart long after becoming invisible in the conversations that matter.
The tragedy is not necessarily being asked to leave. It is realizing that the institution stopped treating your judgment as relevant long before it decided your designation was unnecessary.
And perhaps the sharpest irony of this AI moment is that some institutions which failed to recognize the human intelligence already available to them now promise to reinvent themselves through artificial intelligence.
The question that stays with me is simple: when an institution fails, who gets to decide whose failure it was?
For those who have been excluded from the सवाल, the जवाब and the हिसाब, the answer may arrive only when someone needs a name for the किताब.
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