Castles In The Air

Gurgaon is a bubble of glass and steel, money and aspiration, whose affluent residents believed they never needed the sarkar. Has this year’s multiple deluges finally washed away that illusion?

The polished marble floor gives the lift operator, with his squeaky, worn-out shoes, away as he steps out momentarily to let us out on the eleventh floor. Below, the landscape appears spacious and green but so few people are visible that we could well be looking down at a ghost town.

Vineet Katariya, 41, meets us in her spacious and minimalist drawing room, awash in a burst of daylight from French glass doors. “Can you imagine finding a place like this in Delhi?” asks Katariya, a consultant with a Cambridge-based biodiversity firm, who has lived most of her adult life in the UK. The silence around is a jarring contrast to the derelict street a few kilometres down the gated enclave. Even the roads, scraggly entrails of a city weathered and beaten, had abruptly smoothened up to the driveway to Uniworld City, Sector 30, Gurgaon. “When we moved back to India, to Delhi, in Pashchim Vihar, where we lived with my in-laws for two years, the difference was apparent — you go out, people are ready to bulldoze you. There was so much aggression on the streets,” she says. “We thought it was a better option for us to come to a contained society.” Katariya, who works from home, gets her basic amenities within her gated enclave — there are cafes, stores, playgrounds, clubs and activity hubs, as well as 24-hour power and water backup and security, three crucial issues that ails the city.

“I barely have to step out,” she says. She admits she does not like leaving her bubble. “I avoid it,” she says, a crease of worry on her forehead. “Even if I have to step out, I do it during the day. Sometimes, I take my son along. Many women do head out at night, to places like Cyberhub and Sector 29. But I find the streets of Gurgaon intimidating.”

Gurgaon’s appeal to Katariya resonates with other residents. It is a city whose promise and premise was to be a place sealed from the chaos and crowds of Indian urban life; an enclave of and for high-achievers and high-net-worthies. This monsoon, however, has brought multiple deluges and many days of reckoning.

The jagged skyline, the sharp crest of highrises emerging from fragmented settlements, old houses and villages, is a frank statement of Gurgaon’s ambition. Its futuristic buildings and plazas — and the millennials working hard, partying harder inside them — seem to LOL at any need for history. Even its founding myth appears, like the city, self-made and self-invented. “Ask any person sitting around, and they’ll likely say, “Yaha Guru Dronacharya rehte the, yaha unka military school tha, atom bomb bante the (Guru Dronacharya used to live here, his military school was here. They used to build atom bombs here)’,” says historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg. “I have read the Mahabharata carefully and there is no such mention. It’s an urban legend.”

Seated on a sofa in the study of her 20-year-old home in DLF Phase 3 in Gurgaon, the 69-year-old 2016 Fulbright-Nehru senior scholar is in the final stages of her coffee table book, The Chronicles Of Gurgaon: From Mythic Hamlet To Millennium City, scheduled to be published next year.

In the book, she traces the modern history of the city — from the Partition to the acquisition of land for Maruti Suzuki Private Limited in the mid-’70s, to the arrival of DLF, the real estate company that founded an empire in Gurgaon.

Her home is a testimony to what Gurgaon can offer — a sprawling house that opens up to an aangan and disperses into various quarters; furniture carved out of blocks of tree trunks, a lush green garden and a private pool. Shuttling between New York and Delhi in the Eighties, Oldenburg found potential in what was then marketed as “the south of south Delhi”. “Nobody wanted to take Gurgaon’s name back then. All these localities on the border were given new names so that the foolish consumer, such as me, would believe that you could be living in Delhi. It was cheap. When I came here in 1984, I bought the land for Rs 6.5 lakh. Today, I can flag it for Rs 15 crores. As starting academics, my husband and I didn’t have proper jobs and the places to rent were grotty in Delhi. And then this extension, also called Delhi, presented itself,” says Oldenburg.

Shobhit Mahajan, 55, remembers the city from even before DLF City came up in the late 1980s. “I was born here in 1961,” says the professor of physics and astrophysics at the Delhi University, who is a resident of Sector 4 (“The oldest part of Gurgaon, the original Gurgaon”).

Mahajan charts the city from the point when his own neighbourhood, a “pilot project”, was carved out under united Punjab, to when it became a part of Haryana.

From the “poorest district in the back and beyond”, the region picked up after the Maruti factory came up, and the land acquisition and real estate development by DLF, Ansals and Unitech. “Old Gurgaon came up organically; the new city is synthetic,” says Mahajan. “The change is remarkable also because it took just 35 to 40 years to change what was acres and acres of fields to the concrete jungle owned by DLF.”

The “boom” in the corporate and housing sector in Gurgaon is the stuff of real estate miracles, looked back at with awe. “It’s partly a utopian dream, this city. Delhi had become unaffordable. The kind of houses that you see here, even the upper-middle class wasn’t able to afford in Delhi. So people moved,” says Mahajan.

As BPOs and call centres mushroomed in the 1990s, a whole new set of affluent professionals and entrepreneurs moved in, drawn by a new housing infrastructure that matched their aspirations and lifestyle. “You ask me what the lure is? These are the lures,” says Oldenburg, “This place has a very brash, consumerist ‘Yes, I live well and am not ashamed to say that’ attitude.”

In its meteoric rise, Oldenburg sees reflected the can-do spirit of post-liberalisation India, and in its urban solutions a dismissal of an already absent state. “This is what I call the ‘Gurgaon model’. Whatever is not there, they built it here. Every highrise has its own generator, so there is 24-hour backup. No water? They built bore-wells and tube-wells.”

The lure, says academic Sanjay Srivastava, 55, has diminished considerably now. The author of Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, Srivastava says, “There was a complete lack of belief that the state can do anything, at least for the middle class — that the private sector could do something. And so, it was based on this withdrawal from the state. That initial lure was the one that made you feel like you are living in Singapore or New York.” Mahajan agrees, “You often see advertisements for Sohna road, that paint an idyllic landscape with hills and lakes, asking people to take up plots there. This was exactly how Gurgaon was promoted a few decades ago.”

Dinesh Khanna, photographer, who has been living in Gurgaon since 1995, fell for that dream. “I was initially captivated by this sarso ke khet and a lovely pond in my backyard,” says the 59-year-old, pointing from his verandah to what has become a shabby cluster of houses in Nathupur village. “It took exactly five years for that to be destroyed.”

But while the faith in private enterprise was plausible once, the limitations of the “Gurgaon model” is painfully evident now—in endless traffic jams and the water and drainage crisis. Arvind Hoon, a photographer who now lives on MG Road in a gated enclave called Heritage City, remembers the time when, in 2002, he lived in DLF Phase 3 and had ordered for a tanker because of the acute shortage of water. “But someone stole it on the way!” he says with a laugh. “Fights would break out in the middle of the streets just for water.”

The recent flooding on the Gurgaon roads has brought to the fore the massive failures of infrastructure, particularly its drainage. “In places like Noida, the government builds the infrastructure first, then it builds localities. Gurgaon has seen the opposite. Wherever there was land available, DLF would build there. There was no idea about who would look after the infrastructure later,” says Srivastava.

The problem of the drainage goes deeper still. Cocooned within DLF Phase 3 is a patch of wilderness that Gurgaon almost lost, a patch of the Aravalli range. The Aravalli Biodiversity Park emerged from what had become a mining site, and has, in the last six years, transformed into a forest garden comprising bio-reserves, wetlands, ponds and walking/cycling tracks.

Vijay Dhasmana, its chief ecologist, squints against the sun as he looks past the boswellia and barna shrubs, to a skeleton of a half-constructed skyscraper. The history of Gurgaon’s water problem, he says, began with the encroachment of bundhs or natural drainage channels. There are around 30 bundhs in the city that date to the colonial and post-Independence era, meant to protect villages from floods and help in groundwater recharge. “Those got destroyed after DLF came in. First, the new Gurgaon came, which became old, and then another new Gurgaon was built. No one cared about drainage. You would think DLF would do something but, unfortunately, it was just a real estate and township company,” says Dhasmana. The NGO, I am Gurgaon, has tied up with the Gurgaon forest department and Haryana Urban Development Authority to revive the Chakkarpur bundh by developing a 5-km city forest alongside it.

The 350-acre biodiversity park has survived, but the rest of Gurgaon’s natural landscape might not. The Basai wetlands on Sultanpur Road, which used to see a large number of Saras cranes and flamingoes, has been swallowed up by urbanisation. “Gurgaon is fast losing its wilderness,” says Dhasmana, “There is enough land with the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, which can be converted unto wild spaces for people to explore, like this area. Here, people come for birdwatching, they bring their children, they enjoy the landscape.” Villagers from the neighbouring Nathupur join in too. They had, at first, protested against the park, but now they use the pathways to walk around and hold meetings in.

Like a mirage in a desert, the Cyberhub plaza shimmers on a dusty evening, making you forget the dusty, potholed road that brought you here.

It signifies all that Gurgaon stands for — around 250 Fortune 500 offices work out of here (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, BMW, Agilent Technologies, to name a few). Some of the most popular and expensive restaurants of the country (Dhaba by Claridges, Olive Bistro, Burma Burma and so on) have set up shop. It sizzles with the optimistic energy of the young and the restless. You see them, leather satchels slung over their shoulders, walking down the stretch for a quick lunch on a weekday, or sundress-clad young girls retiring for the day with a drink or two at the bar. Retro-pubs throb with DJ music by night. All of this exists strictly within a conclave that has heavy security and a well-organised parking system.

Life at Cyberhub, says Zitin Bhan, 22, a client servicing executive with Edelman India Pvt Ltd, begins the moment it opens. “It’s always buzzing with people, especially because of all the offices. But by 5.30 pm – 6 pm, it really picks up,” she says. She frequents places such as Hard Rock Cafe and Soi 7 Pub and Brewery on happy hours after work. On weekends, Cyberhub attracts comedy acts and its open-air amphitheatre often hosts live performances.

While the streets of Gurgaon are not known for its safety, it is in these cocoons that it comes to life, and carries on well into the night. “I have hung out at Cyberhub even at 2 am. It is always crowded,” says Bhan. “Once you step out on the streets, it’s a different world – no public transport or people, and darkness all around.”

Diana Mathai, 27, is an urban planner from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, who moved to Gurgaon a few months ago. She lives in a studio apartment in DLF Phase 4 and hangs out with friends at Sector 29. “It’s always alive with people and music,” she says. “But women here mostly commute by cars,” says Mathai, who uses autos to get around. “You see women running, walking, cycling in the morning. But not at night. After dark, this city has a different character.”

It’s afternoon and Siris Road in DLF Phase 3, sandwiched between impressive bungalows and apartments, is almost empty. A few kilometers ahead, however, the road turns craggy and we halt with a jerk in front of an open courtyard. The houses have disappeared and in front of us is Nathupur village. A garbage dump on the right gives off a foul smell, and Ramesh Singh, a municipal worker, has just dumped more garbage on the heap. “This entire area’s trash is here and the truck never comes to remove it,” says the 24-year-old.

The monsoon has been even more merciless on urban villages such as Nathupur. Before the concrete jungle colonised its lands, the Nathupur drain used to flow to Najafgarh drain in Delhi, while the Badshahpur drain ran up to Rewari. Now, those drains do not exist.

When roads were flooded, trapping commuters in gridlocks, Nathupur turned into a swamp. “There has been a dengue outbreak in the area since then. Residents in rows after rows of houses fell sick,” says Fathima, 25, from Murshidabad, West Bengal, who works as a domestic help in several houses and lives in Nathupur. “I fell sick too. I am still recovering,” she says.

Nathupur village is a leftover from yesterday’s construction boom. Once a peaceful and sparsely plotted area, it burgeoned into a congested urban village, a place where the original farmers sold land and moved out, and where, now, homes have given way to shanties. Roads do not exist. Neither do the aspirations that Gurgaon seems to excite in its well-to-do settlers. “Sure, the money is decent; it is definitely more than what we could earn back home,” says Fathima. “But this city doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Once I regain my health, I am moving back home.”

Villages such as Nathupur are also reminders of the old settlers, the original farmers. “There are two kinds,” says Mahajan. “The ones who sold their land and moved a few miles away and bought more agricultural land, and the second kind who blew up that money. And you see the latter in the crimes that take place in Gurgaon. You see them in big, expensive cars, carrying guns. This is the other side of Gurgaon”s aspirational underclass. For many of them, the opportunities are running out.”

Their presence is everywhere, adds Hoon, who has encountered this conflict on the streets right outside his house on MG Road. “I don’t want to stay here anymore. It’s not safe. We have displaced a lot of local people. They still live here, in villagers such as Sikandarpur, Nathupur or Chakkarpur. You see this conflict on the streets, where the original settlers will be walking around, acting like they own the place. They brush up against you and the next thing you know, an iron rod has been brought out. This kind of aggression is rampant,” he says.

In Nathupur, a group of migrant labourers from West Bengal holler to us in broken Hindi, warning us of “those who roam in big cars”. “We live in constant fear,” says one, “They are ready to assault even if we make eye contact.”

In the smoggy distance, as it gets dark, the steel-blue Cyberhub looms over the ramshackle houses in Nathupur. Men go back to work and women disappear inside the houses. A pall of darkness descends upon Nathupur, but one by one, the lights are turned on. From far away, the sounds of traffic and faint music soars from Cyberhub.

Published by: The Indian Express
Reporter: Pallavi Pundir