Constant Rave

It's ubiquitous; the steady thump of the 4/4 bassdrum the autotuned vocalization of a current or a recycled hit song and the following frantic synthesizer loop penetrate the soundscape everywhere. Delhi's public space seems to have fallen victim by a militant spoon-feeding marketing campaign conspiracy of house music producers, where no public space is left without a sound system blasting top 40 house remixes, making your daily activities into a constant rave party, whether you want it or not. Every single public space is filled with loud, abrasive, commercial electronic music.

The other day I went to a mall to catch a new Hindi-film. As I was being frisked by the jaded security guard at the door, one couldn't help feeling as if I was on the queue to a night club. Passing throught the marbled hallways of retail, I had to traipse through the food court, where obese punjabi kids were franticly stuffing their faces with various forms of deep fried matter to the beat of the inhouse DJ. Elbows sharpened I ventured on to the movie hall, hoping to enter a different aural space, only to realize that the soundsystem of the mall seemed to be connected to every single room in the complex, making the party inescapable. Come intermission (it is common in Indian movie halls to have a mid-film break), Mr DJ was immediately back at the decks. Feeling slightly nauseous, I had to seek comfort in the soothing atmosphere of the washroom, only to find myself in boogie wonderland. The volume of the music did not drop a single bar.

A lone toilet attendant, a small man in his late 50s maybe, was standing at the corner waiting to hand out paper tissues to people. The look on his face was resemblant of a thousand yard stare, "a limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier" who has either seen too many piles of dead bodies or been subjected to severe torture. The man's aura was oozing with nihilistic detachment, barely concealed with a token smile.
He had been exposed to this rave party too long to care anymore.

It gets worse in bars. South Delhi sees new bars emerging these days quicker than ever, yet the concept seems to always remain the same. Every bar has to be a "lounge bar" where the amount of staff is usually manifold compared to the clientele, but one still has to make a real effort to get any service. An army of jaded staff is leaning against the counter while the house music party keeps blaring in the back. Any kind of attempt of conversation with your company is systematically terminated by the sheer volume of the music and the spontanious flow of conversation is often reduced to loud bursts of monosyllabic sentences which deliver the maximum amount of information. This needs to be done, because the music is so loud that every sentence must be carefully thought through to avoid wastage of vocal chords.

After two and a half years in Delhi, I have still yet to find a watering hole where one can have a quiet drink alone or a relaxed conversation with a friend or a partner after work over a beer. This seems to be too much to ask in the city of constant rave. Quiet pubs and bars where most of the noise is created by the bubbling conversations of customers is an integral part of the social fabric of western culture. The cliched euphenism "extension of living room" summarizes the way bars and pubs are seen in many western countries. They are welcome to people in suits, coctail dresses, working overalls as well as sweatpants and crocs. They are places where you can have a raging party or where you can sit quietly and wallow in your sorrow. Coming from Finland, where being sad and quiet is your general state of being, it is especially of vital importance to have spaces where one can sit in silence and stare at the bottom of your pint, comfortably basking in your wistful melancholia.

Having tried to market the concept of opening a cozy no-frills pub with only quiet music or no background music somewhere in south Delhi has only resulted in somewhat tepid interest and shrugs among Delhiites. One explanation that has been offered to me is that indians generally are uncomfortable with silence, hence in case of premature death of conversation in company, the silent spaces can be quickly filled by Mr.DJ. Also, the concept of going to a bar for a casual drink whenever generally seems to be still a bit of an alien concept, rather it is always more of a remarkable social event for which one needs to dress up and make an extra effort, perhaps the loud techno and house music is seen as a part of the desired atmosphere. Be it as it may, there is certainly a market in Delhi for a cosy corner with an extensive bar menu, comfy chairs and no music but the ripples of conversations in the background.

Snapshots pt.4

Pigeons at Humayun's tomb.

One man's livelihood.

A barber takes five, while son is keeping an eye on the shop.

Indian IKEA

Fresh tandoori rotis at the Nizamuddin village.

A man takes a nap with his goats as the wife supervises.

"So this is where your chicken tikka comes from, my friend."

Graffiti on the way to my house. These buildings were marauded soon after. The plot is waiting for new construction to emerge, as is typical in Delhi, where land is much sought after.

A goat herder was tending his flock near Tughlaqabad fort, the big goat was called Basanti.

The cornershop in my area sells anything from sim card recharge to fresh samosas.

The other night on our way to a party Meg parked her car in front of a house next to the venue, the owner of the house punctured all tires as soon as we turned our backs. We tried driving, but soon had to leave the car to a random spot and take an auto back home. The next morning we realized we had parked right in front of a tire shop. 

Vernacular

As I have to take the rickshaw every morning to go to work, I have slowly, mostly by immersion, begun to become conversant in a daily variety of Hindi, which, in fact is no single language, but a bundle of Hindi, English, Urdu, Punjabi and the language of whatever state you are from all combined into a sort of common linguistic masala. Every time I encounter a word I need to use but don't know I immediately look up the Hindi equivalent, usually with the result of being told by my Indian companion that nobody would understand me if I actually used that word on the street.

The other day I wanted to calm down a short-tempered rickshaw driver but did not know the word for "impatient", the dictionary offered the word adhīra, which I figured sounded simple enough. My attempt at using the word only resulted in a blank stare by my driver. Before using Hindi words, I usually test them on Meg just to be sure they are words that people actually use daily, this proved to be another word that nobody uses, unless you're trying to be Premchand or Tagore. It might have been a better idea to just use "impatient" in between a Hindi sentence.

A similar anecdote was told by a journalist who had returned to Delhi after many years and spoke Hindi the way it was taught to him at school. While trying to buy a box of matches with his cigarettes, he casually tried to address the cigarette vendor with an appropriately courteous manner: Mujhe ek diyasalai dijiye. 
After nothing but blank stares, he finally blurted "ek matches do yaar!" with instant desired results.

There is a linguistic polar shift taking place in India where English is forced to make way for Hindi in new domains. One manifestation of it is the language used in media. In the December 2012 issue of Caravan Magazine, Krishn Kaushik in his long reportage paints a picture of the current state of the Indian English-language news media. The general observation of the article is that TV-news in English is in fact a losing game and a marginal segment amongst a largely Hindi- and local language dominated viewing public:


According to TAM (Television Audience Measurement), the healthiest segments of Indian television are Hindi and regional general entertainment, which each capture at least 35 percent of overall television viewership.

...contrary to popular perception, English-language news is a fringe genre of Indian broadcasting. TAM’s data indicate that, for the first six months of this year, English-language news was watched by only 0.21 percent of the television audience in TAM markets. That amounts to one viewer for every 500 television-watching people, watching English-language news for less than five minutes per day.

Television news in Hindi or Hinglish and regional languages reached a public that ranges from the street sweeper and rickshaw driver all the way to company CEO's and the members of parliament. English, on the other hand, only reaches the educated few. It is often said that the vast majority of the Indian public are in fact not big readers and therefore TV will reach a much wider audience than any book. Vast majority of the people who watch TV on a daily basis are most comfortable with Hindi or Hinglish. Meanwhile, English remains a stalwart of the printed word, in books as well as in newspapers.

There is no intimacy attributed to English as a language, it remains a language of instruction in elite schools and the lingo of white collar jobs. It is mostly seen as a tool of a sort - an emblem of professional aspiration. Rural and small-town India craves to learn English to get ahead in life, but seems to only value it due to its material benefits and certain lexical borrowings. For some, it has become a stepping stone away from caste-bound roots: BBC Radio 4 reported on a group of former untouchables, who had started worshiping the English language as their liberator from caste-based socio-economic boundaries. It had even inspired them to create new gods into Indian mythology: Their saviour from caste oppression is personified as a goddess, modelled on the Statue of Liberty, in a sari and mounted on a computer.

Meanwhile, Hindi, in various colloquial forms, remains a language of the common man that everybody speaks and understands, but nobody really studies. Learning Hindi at school stops at 8th grade for most people and anything more complex than that will be patched up with English vocabulary. For many, it remains a "kitchen" language, but also a de facto language used most in everyday communication. Beyond a certain point, Hindi as a language becomes too complex for most Indians and too cut off from today with it's sanskritized artificial vocabulary. The national language of India thus seems to be a sort of a bundle of different languages in a basic Hindi frame, not least with the aid of Bollywood and advertising and made nation-wide after the arrival of satellite television.

There is a young generation in Delhi, as well as other big cities in India, that seems to exist in a sort of a linguistic limbo, where a colloquial variety of Hindi heavily laden with English vocabulary as well as expressions of the speaker's local language has become the mother tongue. Meanwhile 100% "pure" forms of either have remained in very confined domains and generally deemed as pretentious, artificial or just too difficult. Many young people reminisce on their Hindi classes at school with horror.

Hindi as a literary language is commonly deemed to be a 20th century political construct and the mother tongue of none. As coexistance of various languages had been the norm for most Indians and Pakistanis, linguistic purism and zealous efforts to eradicate any foreign influences from language on both sides after the partition resulted in a comical situation where nobody actually understood their own national language. Robert D.King in his book on Nehru's language politics illustrates this situation with an anecdote:

Hindi-speaking Indians frequently say that they cannot understand the Urdu of Radio Pakistan, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis say the same of the Hindi heard on All-India Radio. Nehru himself complained that he could not understand the increasingly Sanskritized Hindi language promulgated by All-India Radio. He frequently commented on this in his letters, and on at least one occasion he rose in the Lok Sabha to complain that he could not understand Hindi broadcasts of his own speeches.

Decades later, the situation remains more or less the same. Rashmi Sadana in her article "Managing Hindi", visits the Deparment of Official Language in Delhi and encounters a government office that time seems to have forgotten. Although Hindi in many states is the de facto language of administration, which since Nehru has been according to national language policy, the national capital region encounters a different reality:

In the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the state governments used Hindi “about 100 percent of the time”, and the version they spoke was a “chaste” Hindi, a Hindi laden with Sanskrit vocabulary. But in Delhi this vocabulary became “burdensome”. “When it comes to the capital, Hindi has a very subordinate role to play. The language in the offices and ministries is English.” No one speaks of “difficult” English, but people speak of “difficult” Hindi. “While there is an impetus to learn English, a craze in semi-urban and rural areas, there is a sense that you don’t need Hindi to do well in life.

Another BBC article argues that Hinglish is a pure construct of Indian linguistic innovation, which has become the everyday lingo of a new younger elite as well. The problem, according to the writer, is that for many it has become the mother tongue which lacks variation in different social settings:

The trouble with dysfunctional Hinglish is that it can cause havoc when clear and precise communication is required, whether on a simple taxi ride or in more serious situations like hospitals and law-courts. Young Indians still need better quality, standardised English teaching if they want to access the global knowledge economy and stay ahead of eager new English-speakers in China or Argentina.

For many Indians, especially middle-class, being multilingual is a norm and there is very little differentiation between languages in spoken interaction. As most Indians speak at least two to three languages, jumping between languages is but normal and you might hear a person using for example English, Hindi an Bengali in a single sentence, without it sounding awkward or strange at all. Rather, saying a complete sentence in a single language seems to be actually more rare.

Linguistic purism has its political implications as well. By speaking a Sanskrit-heavy form of "proper" Hindi, one risks of being labelled as a zealot Hindu nationalist and speaking only in English sans Hindi might be seen as snobbery and would only make you able to communicate with a limited stratum of society.

Therefore, the linguistic scene of middle class India seems to be that sticking to one language only is almost as if to make a statement of a kind. As Mrinal Pande in her book "The Other Country: Dispatches from the Mofussil" aptly summarises:

Actually, India's fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words.

A Hinglish McDonald's flyer: The ad roughly reads: "Our treat, arrived at McDonald's for you to enjoy."

Jadu Tona - Black Magic

Last week, as the festivities were at full swing on Diwali night and Nizamuddin East colony had for one night turned into a full war zone, as it is customary this time of the year. The seemingly incessant ratatat made sure no-one was sleeping in the colony and made the local street dogs run around for cover in panic, ears tightly against their heads.

Eventually the youngsters had shot their pocket money to the sky in bright colors and peace was restored. The colony was falling asleep again. As I peeked outside to inspect the mess of shredded paper and gunpowder, something else had appeared  in front of my house. In the crossroads next to the house, someone had poured what appeared to be mustard oil in a circular shape and had carefully placed a packet of Kurkure chips, a diya-light and a packet of biscuits.

My immediate secular western rationalist brain figured that someone had littered outside my house, but I was quickly corrected by my girlfriend Meg that there are dark forces at play here and one should tread carefully, this was a display of jadu tona, i.e. black magic, a spell to wish ill or curse someone else either out of envy or anger. The spell is apparently to be placed in a spot where four roads cross and whoever unfortunate soul happens to walk or drive over it, will be infected with a horrible curse with a long list of various ill effects.
You might be driving across an intersection completely unaware and the next thing you know, your boss texts you that you're fired, your wife has a miscarriage and you drive off a bridge.

Intrigued as I was, I fetched my camera to go and document this display of sorcery. Photographing was still acceptable but walking across the spell could have had catastrophic effects to my life in the future. Needless to say, it was better to be safe than sorry.

The spell is supposed to be placed in a spot where 4 roads meet.

The circle of mustard oil has a crushed diya-light, a packet of Kurkure crisps and a packet of biscuits placed inside it.

The next day at work I was recounting my fascinating discovery to my Indian colleague. Having heard my description of the spell, her face immediately turned several shades paler and she froze and almost dropped the folder she was carrying: "You...didn't step over it, did you?"

Another colleague recalled that her husband had been cursed by someone, as a result of which he was in a total of 17 bike accidents in a span of roughly two years, always a close call. After a while, his mother turned to a holy man, who managed to sort it out. It's been a safe ride ever since. Similar experiences seem to be very common to most Indians and very few seem to have even the slightest hue of sarcasm in their tone when describing their supernatural experiences with practitioners of magic. Dealing with forces of the spirit world here is no laughing matter or something to make fun of. Belief in the existence of some kind of a supernatural realm is quite common in the world view of Indians and there is no need to risk it, so might as well play it safe and not conjure any evil spirits.

Of course, for a reasonable fee, an experienced spiritual consultant, such as Baba Nur-e-Ilahi can remove all spells cast on you in no time. Also, Baba Sidh Guru Ji is your man in case of any spiritual trouble:

The Strange Smashed Car Lady

Delhi, as one may guess, is a city filled with ghosts and spirits and all manner of spooky things. The setting is ripe for ghost stories, as the city consists of layers and layers of history built and accumulated on top of each other. Repeated tales of haunted houses, restless Sufi Saints and women in white saris in the middle of the Ridge forest abound and many are familiar of the headless British horseman of Old Delhi and other stories of epic apparitions. This spooky incident, however, happened quite recently. 

One evening around 10pm, my girlfriend Meg was getting fuel at the Safdarjung service station near Safdarjung's tomb, a station I pass every day on my way to work. As she was ready to head out back to the road, her headlights hit the face of the car coming in. Her eyes met with those of a woman in her mid 50's, hair entangled all over, pitch black kajal all over her face and a ghoulishly penetrating gaze which would discourage anyone to try and maintain eye contact with her. The car looked like it was about to collapse any second; both ends completely crushed, dents and scratches everywhere, headlights smashed as well as all windows save for the wind screen. It was as if she had just miraculously survived an otherwise deadly car crash and with her remaining strength she was trying to make it to the service station.

The gas station attendants seemed unafazed by the sight. Instead, one routinely wiped her windscreen, the only window left in the car, while another filled up her tank. After tanking up, the car started perfectly with one try and headed off to the night. Freaked out by the driver's gaze and the general eerieness of the incident, Meg had left immediately after snapping a photo with her phone camera.

A few days later, me and Meg returned to the station and thought we might catch one or two of

the attendants who were serving this strange car crash victim so nonchalantly and ask a few questions. None of the boys were on shift that afternoon, but the other attendants teamed around us after hearing what we were talking about. Intrigued and visibly bemused by our interviewing, all of them knew exactly who were talking about. It appeared that this was no car crash survivor, rather a regular patron of the station for years. Nobody knows who she is, where she comes from or what happened to her and her car. All they knew was that twice a week, always precisely at the same time, this lady with a completely maimed automobile with plates registered for Chandigarh comes to Safdarjung station and always buys gasoline worth exactly 500 rupees and gets the windscreen cleaned. She is very curt and unpredictable in her demeanor and always insists to be served by the same attendants, no one else is allowed. 

From inside, the car is equally trashed, filled with garbage and in the backseat she is always carrying two empty 20 liter bottles of mineral water, always the same ones as if they've never been touched. It remains unclear where the car is coming from and where it's going but due to it's consistently unaltered state, it seems the car does not stop at all.

The car disappears as quickly as it appears and none of the attendants knew where she was from. All they could tell us that she would always come from the direction of the big temple next to Safdarjung's tomb around the corner. Lately, it seems, however, she had stopped coming. The attendants said they were already missing her and wondering what had happened to her. ”After all, we want to take care of our customer relations”, one of the older employees added without a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

The mysterious smashed car, as captured by Meg

Death of the Maulvi

The other day I saw my first Hindi/Urdu play, a classic piece of Indian theater called "Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya O Jamyai Nai" (One who has not seen Lahore has not lived), where and Indian Muslim family is forced to move to Lahore and are allotted a big house by the Pakistani government, but soon realize it's already inhabited by a cantankerous elderly Hindu lady, left behind by other Hindus and refusing to leave. Both parties face a hard time trying to tolerate each other, but eventually a lesson on religious tolerance is learned, but not without scars. Through a story of one family, the play depicts the fate of the some 10 million people who were forced to leave their homes during Partition of India and Pakistan and were resettled, sometimes randomly, by the governments of the newborn nations. Almost a million people lost their lives when Hindus and Muslims were forced on a collision course.

The next morning news channels were screaming in unison how the U.S. consulate in the Benghazi region of Libya had been attacked by rocket-propelled grenades, killing four people, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. The violence had been allegedly triggered off by an anti-Islam movie "Innocence of Muslims", which depicts Mohammad as a mindless, violent, womanizing fraudster. Nobody had actually seen the movie, apart from a 14-minute preview, which seemed to be more than enough for most. The clip is a surreal mix of blue-screen effects, fake beards and level of acting usually found in adult entertainment movies, all mixed with overdubbed anti-Islamic propaganda.

Soon after, more ripples of rage started sputtering around the world. Groups of young men rioted and screamed bloody murder for death to Americans, once again. Had a fraction of the ludicrous movie not been dubbed into Arabic and aired on an Egyptian Islamist news channel, it would have most likely been lost into the endless stream of video on YouTube. Eventually it seemed clear that the video was just an excuse for agitation. Unfortunately it became a symbol of the current sad state of affairs - religious interpretation has been harnessed by thugs and politicians and the authority of Islamic scholarly debate seems to waning, only to be replaced by the boiling blood of young frustrated and uneducated men.

The constant news feed reminded me of a very definitive moment in the play: Pehelwan, a local goon, has had a heated debate with the local Maulvi, an elderly Islamic scholar, about cremating the elderly Hindu woman according to the correct rituals, to show respect to her remains. He has lectured Pehelwan on religious tolerance and reminded him that the Qur'an teaches us peace and tolerance towards one's fellow man. Infuriated by his words, Pehelwan kills Maulvi in a fit of rage - A fanatic thug murders a religious authority figure and justifies his deed by asserting to be a true Muslim instead. The Maulvi's message did not serve his interests, thus he had to be eradicated.

Written in 1989 and set in 1947, the point made in the play is painfully current even today. Political agendas have no use for rational and tolerant religious self-reflection and discussion. The article "The place of tolerance in Islam - On reading the Qur'an and misreading it"  by Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl neatly goes through the emergence of the politicization of Islam and how the influence of religious erudition and meaningful discourse seems to be on the decline:

Islam is now living through a major shift, unlike any it has experienced in the past. The Islamic civilization has crumbled, and the traditional institutions that once sustained and propagated Islamic orthodoxy—and marginalized Islamic extremism—have been dismantled. Traditionally, Islamic epistemology tolerated and even celebrated divergent opinions and schools of thought. The guardians of the Islamic tradition were the jurists (fuqaha), whose legitimacy rested largely on their semi-independence from a decentralized political system, and their dual function of representing the interests of the state to the laity and the interests of the laity to the state.

In the vast majority of Muslim countries, the state now controls the private religious endowments (awqaf) that once sustained the juristic class. Moreover, the state has co-opted the clergy, and transformed them into its salaried employees. This transformation has reduced the clergy's legitimacy, and produced a profound vacuum in religious authority. Hence, there is a state of virtual anarchy in modern Islam: it is not clear who speaks with authority on religious issues. Such a state of virtual religious anarchy is perhaps not problematic in secular societies where religion is essentially reduced to a private matter. But where religion remains central to the dynamics of public legitimacy and cultural meaning, the question of who represents the voice of God is of central significance. 

Theocratic Islamic states such as Pakistan have been unfortunately prone to harboring critical masses of extremists who are quick to lay claim to a correct interpretation of religious doctrines. Thus, in a theocratic state, religion is easily harnessed for political aims as well. Once in an interview with Perwez Musharraf, the veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave asked for an estimate of the amount of extremists in Pakistan. Musharraf had replied carelessly that it would be roughly around 1% of the population. De Borchgrave was quick to point out that 1% out of 150 million would make roughly 1.5 million people with their fingers on the trigger. Musharraf was stunned and confessed of never thinking about it that way.

In India, Muslims remain a minority, albeit a big one, and Islamic zealotry fueled by young men has remained a relatively marginal phenomenon as the majority of Indian Muslims adhere to moderate doctrines. The society has a long history of religious pluralism and tolerance and thus "the word of God" remains largely a private matter. For example a notable Sufi population finds refuge in India as they have remained the underdogs in the current trends of the Islamic world. Due to this religious diversity, India has remained a secular society and the Muslim youth have been incorporated to the mainstream without reservations.

Political disenfranchisement is bubbling under though and Islamic fanaticism has its supporters in India as well. Responding to the havoc caused by the anti-Islam video, the leaders on Muslim-dominated areas such as Kashmir have tried to reason with the enraged youths, although also condemning the content of the video:

Kashmiri leaders have condemned the killings. “We are not liking these things,” said Mr. Geelani. “Innocent people who are not directly involved in any film or any injuries toward the Muslim community should not be targeted.”

Still, some young Kashmiris found it logical to blame the actions of the filmmaker on the United States. “After all, Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 was blamed on the entire Muslim world,” said Junaid, 23, the third student. “Sam Bacile is one American, but then we can take it as all of America,” he said.

Young people in Kashmir are being influenced by Wahhabism, a conservative form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, said Muhammad Shafi Pandit, the first Kashmiri Muslim to join the Indian Administrative Service in 1969. Kashmir has seen a perceptible rise of Wahhabism, he said, and more young Kashmiris are taking hard-line positions. “Their ways are not part of Kashmir,” he said. “Our pluralistic ethos should not be lost.”

So far, the Nizamuddin basti across the road to my house has remained peaceful though and the American embassy in New Delhi has only nominally increased the amount of security guards outside the compound.

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.