"Some More Jobs Are Gone": Harsh Goenka's Mehendi Machine Video Raises A Bigger Question About AI And Jobs

Add as a preferred source on Google

A woman places her hand under a small device. In seconds, an intricate mehendi pattern appears on her skin, no cone, no artist, no wait. RPG Enterprises Chairman Harsh Goenka posted the clip on X on 9 September with a caption that needed only three words: "Some more jobs gone." Within hours, it had crossed hundreds of thousands of views and pulled India into a conversation it has been circling for a while now, about which jobs machines will come for next.

Photo Credit: X: @hvgoenka

Mehendi is not a small industry to unsettle. It is central to Indian weddings and festivals, and bridal mehendi artists routinely spend six to eight hours creating designs that carry both craft and cultural weight. A machine that promises the same pattern in seconds strikes at something more specific than a job description.

Why This Particular Video Struck A Nerve

Automation debates in India have mostly stayed close to factories, call centres and IT back-offices, the kind of "back-office functions" that companies openly plan to shrink using AI. Mehendi artistry felt exempt, precisely because it depends on hand, memory and personal rapport with a client. Goenka's clip challenged that assumption directly, and social media users argued back just as directly. Some pointed out that a machine can copy a pattern but not the conversation that happens while it is being drawn. Others countered that speed and consistency matter more to a wedding party managing fifty guests than artistic nuance does.

Some more jobs gone 🙈 pic.twitter.com/jKiUzB8gOA

— Harsh Goenka (@hvgoenka) September 9, 2026

There was also a second, quieter argument running underneath the first: whether the video was even real. Several users on X suggested the clip could be AI-generated rather than footage of a genuine machine, pointing to how the design appeared to form and the way the device moved. No independent verification has confirmed the machine is real. That uncertainty did not slow the debate down. If anything, it added to it, since a fake video causing this much anxiety about job losses says almost as much about where public sentiment already sits as a real one would.

Goenka Has Been Here Before

This is not Goenka's first word on the subject. In August last year, he had written on X that AI "will disrupt work and reinvent it," pointing to new roles such as prompt engineers, AI product managers and AI ethics specialists, and predicting that "new winners will be the smartest and most adaptable." He has also previously suggested that AI could eliminate jobs within seven years. The mehendi video fits a pattern rather than breaking one: Goenka has built a habit of turning ordinary, often startling clips into short, widely shared prompts for a much larger conversation.

The Question Underneath The Video

Mehendi artists are unlikely to lose their trade to one viral clip. But the anxiety the video triggered is not really about mehendi. It is about a pattern many Indian workers now recognise, of a task once considered safely human suddenly appearing on a screen, done by something that is not. Whether the specific machine in Goenka's post exists or not, the fear it tapped into is entirely real, and it is spreading well past the professions usually named in AI job-loss headlines.