He was the archetypal yuppie with an MBA, married to a part-time teacher with two kids aged seven and five studying at a fancy school in Noida, not far from his east Delhi home. His home was funded by a neat mortgage, his car was company-owned and he wore his professional pride well with his pin-striped suits.

Last week, fate edited this happy family picture. He lost his job as a management executive with a large conglomerate. He’s still smiling but in complete disbelief. Reality is catching up; the smile dims as he wonders how he will service his mortgage. More importantly, will he be able to keep his kids at school?

It is a vignette reflected in mirrors across the country. Yet a faint mixture of dots, a dull image that is bloodied by the day as a ghoulish dance of economic destruction sweeps through the economy.

Every morning urban India flips open the papers to follow the grisly tale of job losses in packaged daily episodes.

People across the economic spectrum now know someone who has lost or could lose their job.

The job shredders are from the marquee of the corporate world.

Motorola, Goldman Sachs, American Express, Merrill Lynch, Reliance Retail, Jindal Steel, real estate major DLF, L&T Infotech, Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways… the pattern is similar. A rumour, an SMS followed by a speculative report that is eventually confirmed by the company.

The rumours are further fuelled by an unending stream of bad news.

Barring the fall in crude oil prices to below $57 per barrel, there has hardly been any good news. In fact, all macroeconomic indicators show a marked deterioration.

Industrial output for the first six months of this fiscal, as measured by Index of Industrial Production (IIP), stood at 4.9 per cent compared to 9.5 per cent a year ago and manufacturing, which accounts for 80 per cent of the index, grew by 4.8 per cent in September, from 7.4 per cent a year ago.

Exports for October dipped by 15 per cent and excise collections dropped by 8.7 per cent.

The automobile sector, already battered by the domestic slowdown, reported negative growth across segments for October vis-à-vis the previous year with goods carriers— the barometer for cross-country movement of goods—performing the worst.