Gurgaon – The City of Progression and some Regression!

As I walk on the cobbled pavement early morning past a lavish signature condominium, this city is constantly on my mind. I enter the 24X7 coffee shop seeking the perfect brew and anticipating some desolate spot to assimilate my thoughts, but alas the place is buzzing with people who mean business and wanted to start early or those who have just come out of their graveyard shift and now want to awaken their senses with a cappuccino before heading home or somebody who works not from a traditional office but from this very café at his own pace following his own heart. This is Gurgaon! My city! This is not City of Dreams or City of Gardens or City of Lakes. I call it the City of Progression. This city offers me a progressive life pattern without being batted an eyelid upon or care a damn attitude even if frowned upon!

Gurgaon became home more than a decade back. The city of birth, Lucknow and other cities which I inhabited in my growing up years have become little dormant but sit staunchly in the sub-councious. This one mirrors the 21st century India with a cosmopolitan population, glass and concrete facades, dotted with umpteen microbreweries catering to the millennials who work hard and chill harder. However, the upwardly mobile Gurgaonite is as much in sync with the roots. As fas as I can remember, I look forward to four frantic days of Durga Pujo Pandal hopping, they are no where as grand or intricate as the Kolkata ones, but do embody a spirit, which is hard to escape. Also trending here is Halloween when the city kids visit neighbourhood for a ‘trick or a treat’.

Gurgaon lets you be and its quite a breather being able to follow own instinct in an Indian city. The milieu has changed for the entire urban India. All of us now are technologically driven, with the highest young population ratio in the world, surviving or chasing goals and dreams. A Gurgaonite lives to outdo himself or herself each day and that’s the spirit which is truly commendable. Opinionated, aware and more importantly being vociferous is what makes a Gurgaonite apart. It’s a city of well-read and well-travelled people who don’t shy away from giving opinions.

As I walk again on the same cobbled pavement another morning, soaking in the cool breeze and few chirpings of a Myna or even more sprightly peacock, interspersed with honking from the fancy and top-end models of queuing cars, I suddenly see the traffic going standstill as a herd of woolly sheeps are passing through. There is no honking anymore and the sheeps are given the passage with utmost dignity! There are still traces and glimpses of the Gurgaon that was. It was a sleepy, dusty another Haryana city on the verge of mystical Aravalis, waiting to explore its proximity to the capital and soon it did. Maruti Suzuki, the Indo-Japanese venture brought the turnaround ushering in many other multinationals setting shop here. What ensued was the popping up of a millennium city Gurgaon dotted with plush malls (Gurgaon kick-started the mall culture in India), glitzy condominiums and state-of-the-art offices which were never seen on the landscape of another city before. The city soon began functioning 24X7 with BPOs (which were call centers in common parlance) mushrooming all around. Now the city unabashedly boasts of co-working spaces or shared workspaces where you work according to your flexibility yet find yourself in an office like professional environment!

However, all was not hunky dory . On one side of the coin was this exponentially rising Gurgaon, a world apart, a nouveau riche city taking all its citizens forward with its sweeping growth, and on the flipside was the poorly laid infrastructure that was unable to keep pace with the burgeoning population. Soon, the fissures and holes in the infrastructure started becoming too apparent. This city soon found competitors like Bengaluru and Pune, well established cities with better infrastructure and probably a more professional working culture. But Gurgaon still stands out. The freshness of the city and its citizens and an out-of-the-box perspective and each one finding his or her own zone, gives hope. A city is not gauged by its length and width, but by the broadness of its vision and the height of its dreams. They also say, one should not give too much importance to the place we stay in. But Gurgaon has rubbed on. Hope is alive that the trajectory is always a progressive one for this modern and urbane center.