India Part 1: Streets of Gurgaon

New Delhi is hot- really hot. It’s about as hot as walking around in dress clothes in McAllen, Texas in August. The high is in the triple digit degree range day every day for the forecastable future and I haven’t seen a cloud since my arrival.

My experience with the landscape thus far has been confined to the city of Gurgaon, which is a suburb of New Delhi in the way the East Orange is a suburb of Newark; a division between municipalities impossible to discern at the ground level. That being said, much of Gurgaon is a very new city. My understanding is that 15 years ago, Gurgaon was a dusty little agricultural village. Business leaders in New Delhi, sensing the business opportunity in Information Communications and Technology (ICT), but realizing the severe constraints of redeveloping New Delhi itself, realized it would be easier to erect a city-sized office park next door. Their gambit was extremely successful; Gurgaon is now home to the international headquarters of companies such as McKinsey, Corporate Executive Board (where I used to work), Louis Berger Group (where I am working for the summer), and many others.

Contrary to what one might anticipate, however, the old Gurgaon never went away. On your way to the McKinsey headquarters you will pass, for a brief moment, a humble agglomeration of stores and impermanent shelters. Young men hunched over metal bars welding without masks, a vendor crushing sugar stalks with a mobile grinder welded onto a bike frame, merchants with shining vegetables spread out on a cloth, a mender of bicycles with tires hanging by the dozen, pyramids of raw red pottery for sale, and mini-bodegas selling individual cigarettes and bags of snacks hung vertically. The morning and afternoon are both absolutely teeming with Indian people of all descriptions: young women with their faces wrapped in neon print handkerchiefs with sunglasses like the invisible man, kids as dirty as kids get, Muslims in shalwar kamiz, young IT professionals and engineers in dark slacks and blue oxford shirts, and traditional women of all ages but the very young draped in radiantly colorful saris. It’s a beautiful throng of people.

The poverty is very real, but there isn’t the furtive sense of danger I have felt when visiting big Latin and South [and North] American cites. While part of this, I am sure, is part of my viewpoint as an six-foot, two hundred-pound white man, I see professional Indian men walking home with an easy unguardedness of somebody who doesn’t need to be prepared for anything on the street, which is distinct from the confidence of a young social media or finance professional who lives in Brooklyn and prides himself on being ready for any conceivable confrontation. Maybe it has to do with Hinduism’s teaching of non-violence [don’t ask the Pakistanis though], or maybe the vestiges of the caste system bestow an implicit order and hierarchy that is philosophically the opposite of the American dream. Whatever the salad of influences at play, be they ancient or modern, for the moment the people seem to be at equilibrium; the glass and stone monuments to progress are a dusty mirage over the shoulder of the man washing himself with a plastic bucket.