Escaping India within India is an exorbitant exercise

The wealthy in Gurgaon pay mind-boggling prices to keep real India out of their lives. But it doesn't happen

- MANU JOSEPH

A good thing about the winter smog in Gurgaon is that you do not see most of Gurgaon. It is an ugly, dismal city and home to some of the richest Indians. Now and then, in the winter, I see its most famous residential building standing in the smog. People tell me that some flats there cost ₹100 crore each. For no fault of mine, a few days ago, a broker sent me a news clipping that said a 16,000-square-foot penthouse in the building sold for ₹190 crore.

That apartment building makes me chuckle, especially when I see it in the smog. I chuckle in my head. I don't think anyone chuckles aloud when they are alone. But I don't know yet why it is funny, at least not very clearly. Maybe it is because the building reminds me that the experience of being super-rich in India is one of the most overpriced things in the world.

In the best areas of London or New York, you pay a premium for what the city offers, and what the city offers is available to everyone. In India, it is the opposite. The city is the problem, and you pay to shut it out, along with most Indians.

I wonder what it is about money that it does not help one escape the miseries of this country—the air and traffic congestion of its vast urban cancers that keep growing. Could class have helped them? Class is many things, and for an Indian, it is also the ability to be at home in the West, enduring its alien food and surface equality of all. Even though the world has changed, even though new money does not aspire to class anymore, there is plenty of the good life that can come only with class.