Tuesday, July 25 Drinking in Gurgaon

I spent the morning reading The World Is Flat, and then I went down to lunch. I’m loving relaxing for now, it’s hot and stormy outside. I came up with the idea of filming an episode of Cribs at our palace house. I’d do the British voice, of course. I took a three-hour nap and read some more before having dinner. I went to Jantar Mantar to go meet up with Ishan, who I met at Mussoorie. I had to be elusive because I didn’t want the others to come, because I wanted to hang out with them first without anyone else to see what they were like. So I waited forever in the 90-degree heat and got a thousand mosquito bites. Then he came late on his motorcycle, and he forgot a helmet for me. So I had to ride 30 minutes to Gurgaon, without a helmet with my contacts in, in the middle of a dust storm on one of the sketchiest roads in the world. It’s actually really fun riding on a motorcycle after you get over the initial panic that at any moment you could run over a pothole, thus ending your life. We drove through New Delhi, with its large avenues and green spaces, five-star hotels, and corporate headquarters, then on the freeway shot Southwest past the orderly lights of the Indira Gandhi International Airport. Gurgaon is an amazing sight; even in the dark it was completely lit. It’s the IT hub of Northern India, so there are dozens of call centers, offices, malls, pubs, discos, and the people that work in and patronize them; a young bourgeois middle class of young, educated, Westernized Indians. This is the New India that I am so interested in. The call centers are all sleek, modern buildings with Ericsson or Nokia signs on the top. They dominated the skyline, and any space that wasn’t a call center or construction on a new call center was occupied with pricey apartment high-rises or posh four-storied apartments. We got to this small outdoor restaurant, and bought some Seagram’s and drank it with him and his Punjabi friend Sebi and Sebi’s brother. It was fun boozing and talking with them. They completely embody the new India. They make $300 a month, which is exorbitant by Indian standards. They refused to let me pay, too. The dust from the ride over kept irritating my eyes, and I had to go flush them out and eventually I just took out my contacts. After three hours or so, we rode back on Ishan’s bike and he dropped me off at Jantar Mantar. I put on his helmet after realizing, after we started going, that he was drunk driving a motorcycle with me on it. As I was walking back, I had to literally step over a slough of homeless people whose beds were the traffic median. There were dozens of homeless Delhites strewn about everywhere, it was really sad. Especially because it’s so hot and the monsoon is so harsh. Also as I was walking back, there were a bunch of idle dogs, who thought it would be fun to scare the living daylights out of me. So all five of them woke up and started barking and snarling at me, following me to my hotel before I had to run to the gate and luckily I dove inside the gate without contracting rabies.