Be not afraid of Metros. Some cities are born as Metros, some achieve the status, and some have it thrust upon them.
That's right,he did not say this. I desecrated one of his famous quotes to come up with this.
Anyway, Gurgaon, the city of my current dwelling, falls into the third category. In fact, it fuckin spawned the fuckin category! It used to be a sleepy town in Haryana filled with angry Haryanvis who were pissed off at all the attention they did not manage to get despite being within stone throwing distance of New Delhi(If the stone was thrown by Mahabali, i.e.). Its hip cousins like NOIDA, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and even Meerut used to mock it to death. Which is when one particularly angry resident decided to make a difference! And overnight, Gurgaon boasted of sprawling golf courses, flashy malls, swanky office buildings and nice (I ran out of adjectives) houses!
Well actually, the tranformation was triggered by bigshot corporate houses and filthy rich individuals looking for cheap land near an actual metro, but where is the element of romance in that story?
Anyway, this instant-metro recipe made the humble town a virtual battleground for the real estate wars. The real estate giants grabbed their own portions of the city and went development crazy!
The result: The city boasts of a fuckload of insanely tall apartment buildings despite no apparent shortage of land. The office buildings still make sense. But the cake with the cherry and all other paraphernalia (I've waited so long to use that word), is taken by the 15 fuckin shopping malls, all on the same fuckin road! Last I heard, 15 more are coming up, because malls are the 'coolest' place to 'hang out', aren't they?
All this time the state development authority, with a painfully funny name like HUDA, has been busy not being busy.
The result: The apartments came up first, followed by the offices and malls. And finally they're trying to build roads and provide power and water facilities to people. So the city has all the essential ingredients of a metro now, except for the fact that some of the essential ingredients of a regular city have gone a-missing! The roads that lead to the various hip places in the city are still reminiscent of a typical Haryana village. Power shortage has been marginally overcome by power backup in the apartment buildings, offices and malls, so the government considers its work more or less done.
This leads me to my next point: The city has NO FUCKIN MEANS OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT! You have to walk a couple of kilometres to reach a place where you can hope to get the uniquely Indian ride called a cycle rickshaw, which will take you another couple of kilometres to a place from where you can catch the only intra-city bus or the other uniquely Indian ride called a tempo!
Of course, there are on-call taxi services, which for some mysterious reason are called 'Radio Taxis'. However, the government is contemplating closing them down, because apparently it is slightly useful to the people, and whoever heard of a non-pissed-off Haryanvi?
By an incredible stroke of luck, this leads me to my last point: The people in Gurgaon totally rock! First of all, everybody has a heavy Haryanvi accent. This astute observation of mine may sound redundant to the point of being ridiculously obvious, but just imagine for a moment being surrounded by a bunch of Udham Singhs and you'll know what I mean!
And they're all mighty pissed off! If Maddox ever decides to visit this place, he will be absolutely delighted to see the realest of real men, who are ready to kill you if you accidentally step on their shoelace! With a shitload of vehicles and pathetic roads, there are on an average 1500 incidents of road rage every day, which are a true delight to watch if you're not actually involved. Having lived all my life in a laid back place like UP, where the people have infinitely more reasons to be pissed off but are too lazy to actually do something about it, Gur-fuckin-Gaon is like a breath of fresh air in my life!
As Ronald McDonald (the dumbfuck pederast clown) would not say, I'm hatin' it!
Epilogue: The city does have its share of nightlife, or perhaps more appropriately, 'late evening life'. There's a cafe-cum-pub called Chinese and Thai Cafe that specialises in cheap beer and decent rock music. Very recently (read 'immediately after my Godforsaken self set foot in the city), they decided to ban stag entry in the pub. Think about it, beer and rock music, doesn't this sound like the kind of place where guys would never go in groups but couples would love to hang out? See, it makes sense!
