Numbers don't lie, but they sure do exaggerate.

The Sensex just crawled past 82,490, up another 215 points. Meanwhile, the Nifty is sitting pretty above 25,538. It’s the kind of steady, upward movement that makes retail investors feel like geniuses and fund managers look like they’ve actually earned their bonuses. But if you peer behind the curtain of the Mumbai trading floor, the machinery looks a lot less like a rocket ship and a lot more like a well-oiled, slightly cynical spreadsheet.

The engine room today? IT. The so-called heavyweights are doing the heavy lifting again. We’re talking about the usual suspects—TCS, Infosys, HCLTech—the massive outsourcing machines that keep the back-end of the global economy from imploding. They’ve decided it’s a green day. When these giants twitch, the entire index moves. It’s not about some sudden burst of innovation or a secret breakthrough in quantum computing. It’s mostly about the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Investors are betting on a rate cut in the States. If the Fed drops the hammer, the dollar weakens, and suddenly those massive multi-year contracts sitting in Bengaluru and Hyderabad look a lot more profitable. It’s a game of arbitrage played at a massive scale. It’s bored money looking for a safe place to sit while the rest of the world waits for Jerome Powell to say something—anything—about September.

But there’s a specific friction here that nobody wants to talk about during the champagne toast.

While the Nifty hits record highs, the ground reality for the people actually writing the code is getting weird. We’re seeing a massive gap between the stock price and the talent pool. Entry-level salaries for software engineers in India have remained stubbornly stuck around the 3.5 to 4 lakh rupee mark for nearly a decade. That’s roughly $4,200 a year for a CS degree. Try finding a studio apartment in suburban Mumbai or a decent flat in Bengaluru on that budget without four roommates and a heavy reliance on instant noodles.

The companies are bragging about "operating margins" and "efficient utilization." That’s corporate-speak for "we’re doing more with fewer people." They’re squeezing the bench. They’re delaying onboarding for thousands of freshers who were promised jobs months ago. It’s a classic trade-off: the ticker goes up because the human cost is being optimized out of the equation. The "IT heavyweights" are getting leaner, but they aren't necessarily getting better.

Then there’s the AI elephant in the room. Every one of these CEOs has spent the last three quarters mentioning "Generative AI" every five minutes to keep their P/E ratios from tanking. They’re desperate to prove they aren’t just the world’s help desk. They want us to believe they’re building the future, not just maintaining the legacy systems of mid-tier American banks.

But look at the deal flow. Most of the revenue is still coming from cloud migration and basic digital maintenance. It’s the plumbing of the internet. It’s necessary, it’s lucrative, and it’s incredibly dull. The market is pricing in a future where these firms become AI powerhouses, but right now, they’re mostly just selling the same old labor, just with a "Copilot" subscription tacked onto the invoice.

The retail crowd doesn’t care, though. They see 82,000 and they see a trend line that only goes in one direction. They’re piling into mid-cap funds and index trackers, fueled by a mix of FOMO and the lack of any other decent place to put their cash. Real estate is a nightmare, gold is for grandpas, and crypto is... well, crypto. So they buy the Nifty.

So here we are. The index is at an all-time high, the IT giants are flexing their muscles, and the spreadsheet looks perfect. It’s a beautiful, synthetic reality where the numbers keep climbing regardless of whether anything actually changed in the real world this morning.

How long can you keep a rally going on the fumes of a promised rate cut and a bunch of unpaid interns?