Off the Grid

Around 2am on monday morning, I woke up drenched in sweat realizing the room, as well as the neighbourhood, had gone eerily quiet. The lulling hum of the ac and the steady rattle of the ceiling fan had gone quiet. Power cuts are not uncommon anywhere in India, but as I looked out of the window I realized that the whole colony had gone pitch black. Wiping sweat I headed back to bed. Just another power cut, I thought.

The next morning the headlines were screaming about the worst blackout in India in over a decade. Apparently around 2.40 a.m. the whole northern power grid had collapsed. Power supply had gone to a halt on eight states in northern India, affecting the lives of over 300 million people, or 28% of the population. Normalcy was claimed to be restored by noon, until on Tuesday not only the northern, but also the eastern grid collapsed, which meant that over 600 million people were affected. Thirsty for more power to maintain the AC's of the people on what has been the hottest summer in 33 years and the driest monsoon in 11 years, neighbouring states sucked power from their neighbours resulting in a tilt of epic proportions. With over half of the entire country's population cut off the grid, India made international headlines by breaking the record of largest blackout ever, 10% of the world's population.

Many international media feasted on apocalyptic headlines, but in a city where power cuts are daily, people continued with their daily tasks, as the New York Times reported:

But despite the scale of the power failure, many Indians responded with shrugs. In the first place, India’s grid is still being developed and does not reach into many homes. An estimated 300 million Indians have no routine access to electricity.

Second, localized failures are routine. Diners do not even pause in conversation when the lights blink out in a restaurant. At Delhi’s enormous Safdarjung Hospital, doctors continued to rush around as hundreds of patients lay in darkened hallways.

Third, so many businesses employ backup generators that, for many, life continued without much of a hiccup. Dr. Sachendra Raj, the manager of a private Lucknow hospital, rented two new generators two months ago, and they were keeping the hospital’s dialysis machines running and the wards air-conditioned. “It’s a very common problem,” Mr. Raj said. “It’s part and parcel of our daily life.”

Meanwhile, as most of Delhi sunk into temporary darkness, beacons of light dotted the vast plains of Gurgaon and Noida, as the privately owned and mostly self-sustaining housing communities were running their power generators outside the public grid. The Silicon Valley returned it-consultant was most likely sipping his morning coffee in his 18^th floor condo unaffected, as must have the young NRI housewife continued her morning yoga routine, with the AC still running, uninterrupted. They must have in their mind patted themselves on the back for making the same decision many educated middle-class and upper-class Indians today have made, opting out of the public sector as extensively as possible.

As India's moneyed and educated have grown weary to the government's inability to update and maintain the country's vast and hopelessly outdated infrastructure, private housing communities that operate almost completely independently have become increasingly coveted modes of living. The wealthy have chosen to withdraw in hordes to gated oasises with lofty names such as Diplomatic Greens, Blossom County, La Premiere of Orchid Petals. These are housing communities built from scratch by builders on the outskirts of big cities on pieces of land that two decades ago would have still been considered wasteland. The communities operate much like holiday resorts, complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, club houses and built-in markets, making it unnecessary for a resident to ever step out. Children can walk to school from home without touching public property even once. 

Unavoidably, a thought passes that vestiges of a kind of a dystopia that Ayn Rand in her book ”Atlas Shrugged” envisioned have started to emerge: tired of the government's red-tape dictatorship and sluggish efforts to serve its people, many of society's most productive members have decided to distance and cut off themselves from it as much as possible. Be it as it may, for Indians, private sector has succeeded in what the public has failed.

Well traveled and ambitious upper middle-class indias have become so weary of the constant inconvenience that lurks behind every corner in the Indian everyday, that they have gone out of their way to create these magical pockets of amenities and 5-star living conditions to make daily life as hassle-free as possible, sans scamming rickshaw-drivers, corrupt babus, beggars, constant smell of urine, and piles of garbage, without fights over parking spaces and constant power and water shortages, without bucket showers, without ”India”.

The Indian middle-class has been repeatedly chided for being apolitical. For many of them, state has become more of a nuisance, which is vicariously kept at bay by the power of private money. This fervent but determined mass-privatization has become a statement in itself. As an article titled "Free from India?" in Outlook-magazine aptly puts it: ”By turning their backs on power outages and water shortages, they probably took the most political step of their lives.“

The private housing communities are gated throughout and heavily guarded to an extent, where one might think one is stepping into a new country and has to go through the local border control. No entry is allowed without an invitation from a resident, which will be scrutinized and double checked. Even staff is under heavy watch to make sure any uninvited people enter the complex. If, for example, a company employee has to be picked up by the company driver for work, the driver must first identify himself at the gate, then leave his driver's license at the gate and pick it up while exiting. People are constantly surrounded by CCTV and dozens of armed security guards to an extent of paranoia of ”India” crawling in from the eaves of the iron-bar gates and barbed wire.

Security and safety is what the residents are first and foremost after. However, the constantly emerging higher and higher walls around the housing colonies have polarized the population of these areas into an almost Eloi vs.Morlock kind of setting from H.G.Wells' "Time Machine", where once in a while one of the helpess Eloi is snatched into the darkness by the Morlock to feast on. The storyline serves as a parable to the fact that the "Millennium City" Gurgaon, a city of well-to-do professionals, has also made it to less flattering headlines as the "rape capital of India", a city of gleaming spires tarnished by rampant violent crime down below. In a great documentary about the daily lives of urban educated classes in the gated communities of Gurgaon, marketing consultant Shilpa Sonal ponders on the seclusion of the wealthy from the rest of the country: “It is so unreal that it is like a bubble which will burst,” she says. “How long can you keep these two things apart?” 

Ironically enough, these same oases on the rural dry sandy plains have been provided to their residents by the same kind of people they want dissociate themselves from – the new rich farmer landowners turned millionaires and real-estate hustlers. People with golden teeth in a foul mouth, butter chicken gravy smeared fingers filled with stacks of cash and silk shirts stained with drops of hair oil from their mullets. Less worldly folk perhaps, but a force to be reckoned with nevertheless. With their abundant means and sharp elbows in the business of land acquisition and real-estate roulette, they have made it possible for the educated class to stay away from them and the kind of India they inhabit.