The Minister of Education talks of 'skill development' and 'global standards'—as if those words will fill the stomach of the young man I saw last week at the Jorhat bus stand, selling oranges by the kilo because his father’s tea garden job was 'rationalised' in the nineties. My own son sits in Bangalore, and every evening I watch the red pen in my hand hesitate over the margin of the newspaper, wondering if the algorithms will eat his job before the rains stop. We build new bridges of jargon, but the old ones—the ones that let a boy from a small town study history or Assamese literature and still find a living—those we let rot without a thought.