IN A muddy lane in Gurugram, I approach a speed breaker that is half a metre high. I am not being figurative; it really is half a metre high. It’s not a mound or any other natural feature of the ground; it is a man-made speed breaker on which a low-clearing Ferrari can become a seesaw. My heart aches in fondness watching its primordial bearing. Some minutes later, I see a road sign in English that has been nailed inverted. I feel the tug of home. Another day, I see a tough dacoit-like man, his towel masking his face, enter the porch of my villa and fiddle with something. He is from the electricity board—no badge, no uniform, no ringing-the-bell, he goes where he wants to. I feel like a villager whose porch belongs to the whole village. As you can see, I am suddenly in love with Gurugram.
People who take psychology seriously may say I have developed ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ a condition in which a victim has a crush on the tormentor. I don’t have that, chiefly because it a bogus phenomenon, like many popular ‘syndromes,’ which was invented by a police psychiatrist after a 1973 hostage crisis to diminish a woman who had accused the police of endangering her life more than her captor had. I am enjoying Gurugram, finally, because I am quitting it. I am done.
I can now live where I want, in clean air, running through nature, walking through urban beauty, living in private austerity and public splendour. This means I have to leave India. Because most of the country is a mofussil hellhole in the smog.
Bangalore is as much an urban catastrophe as Gurugram. Also, that city belies the myth that south Indians are peace-loving darlings. It is an aggressive place today, especially if you challenge a local guy who is driving on the wrong side. It has some lakes here and there, especially on the fringes, where I can run, but should such a simple desire to run be such a trek? The way the insufferable locals go on about Cubbon Park, you would think it is a great urban masterstroke like New York’s Central Park or London’s Hyde Park. Yes, it has some trees, but its fame is yet another creation of the poor standards of Indians.
Mumbai was once a truly great city, not liveable but great, but Maharashtrian politicians have successfully converted it to a giant small town. A great city has the right to torment because it offers something no other place can. But Mumbai has not been that for decades. I can live in South Mumbai, though. I used to live there, and it is the only urban centre in India where life has actually improved. But at those house-rents, it is overpriced compared to Mediterranean havens. Escaping India within India is now more expensive than escaping it by leaving it.
The creeping pestilence that Indian politicians call “development” has infested the mountains too, unless I find some isolated cliff. I haven’t come across a more overrated place than Manali, and that is not only because the mid-Himalayas are filled with a monoculture of pine trees. ‘Development’ in India is a form of introducing hardship to a place where life was better before.
My well-meaning friends point to this city or that, especially Hyderabad, but they do so only because they have been impaired by living too long in India.
I cannot move to Kerala, not because there are too many relatives there. I never take their calls. It has many things I respect; it has beauty and clean air and its locals live in dignity. But it is a boring place. It does not get the idea of modernity. It is a republic against fun. I know the young there who live in expansive homes, in the midst of great natural beauty and a whole street that loves them, but they cannot wait to leave for some cursed place like Bangalore. It is not only to escape the spy network of the Malayalee family, which is an army of underemployed relations in every town informing parents of the sightings of their children, but also because Kerala is too judgemental to let the young be.
I do not need fun but I need to be in a place where other people are having fun, where people ingest ethanol and saturated fat late into the night and dance, so that I can safely experience city life without slowly dying with them. Another reason I cannot move to Kerala is that I am much younger than I look; I cannot retire. I have to be in the thick of things, in a place that may not influence the future but at least lives in the present.
That leaves Goa, probably the most ‘cosmopolitan’ part of India today. But if you don’t count its beaches in the deep north and south, there is nothing it offers that makes my life remarkably better. Still, I can devise a life there that is more enjoyable than anywhere else in India. I can live in a small place by the beach, run barefoot on clean beaches, venture out to meet the drinkers only once a month or so in an overpriced unionized cab. But then, living in Goa would be inferior even to a beachside town near Bangkok. And, for just as much, or a bit more, I could live in Valencia in Spain.
The next few months, I will just wander around the world in cold deserted places where I look like their delivery guy. No one would keep me for more than a few months on a visitor’s visa. That’s another thing about India. It never makes it easy to escape either.
The rupee is so weak, the price of even coffee in London looks comical. And my passport is one of the least powerful in the world. So I must reassure any immigration officer reading this, I fully plan to return home, which is any place with broken roads and no pavements, and vehicles driving on the wrong side, and a building where every flat costs more than a hundred crore standing in the smog.
(Manu Joseph’s latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.)
Man this was a depressing read. Don't u have a day job man and other troubles which make u ignore all these
Manu Joseph says he wants to leave India for a cleaner, more fun place like Valencia or Bangkok, but what he really wants is a nice city built by other people that he can just enjoy without dealing with the messy parts. Every city he admires — London, New York, Valencia — became great because locals stayed and slowly fixed their problems, not because critics left. He rejects Kerala for being "judgemental," but that same close-knit community is what makes the Mediterranean towns he loves feel warm and alive; you can't have one without the other. He also forgets that living cheaply abroad usually means a small flat in a dull suburb, not the postcard version of Europe he imagines. In the end, he isn't really escaping India — he's trying to escape the harder job of belonging to a place and helping fix it.