There is a particular humiliation that comes from watching luxury real estate reels from inside an aging apartment complex with peeling paint, questionable plumbing and surroundings that seem like the result of a particularly optimistic municipal meeting.
But I scroll anyway, and the questions come apace – ‘What’s your rent?’ ‘Can I come into your apartment?’ ‘Come with me for a tour of this Rs 100-crore home in Gurgaon‘
And, just as suddenly, I am shown a residential complex with four restaurants, manicured lawns, professional running tracks, Pilates studios, swimming pools, and drainage systems that have never heard the phrase ‘Delhi NCR waterlogging’.
I watch these reels from my perfectly ordinary society – where our version of luxury infrastructure is when the lift works on the first try. We lower our AQI the old-fashioned way – by planting trees and hoping they survive the summer.
There are no water cannons aimed at buildings, no private wellness centres, and certainly no Michelin-adjacent restaurant downstairs. If you want dinner, you leave the gate, encounter traffic, negotiate parking, and return having aged approximately four years. But perhaps this is what makes these reels so fascinating.
They are not really ‘apartment tours’ anymore. They are tours of an alternate urban reality – a version of Gurgaon where the roads work, the air is manageable, the lawns are enormous and everything you could possibly need exists within the perimeter of your housing society. At some point, luxury real estate stopped selling square footage and started selling escape velocity. You don’t have to leave India; you just have to earn enough to live somewhere that doesn’t feel like the India outside its gates.
Welcome to India Premium, where the maintenance charge is eye-watering, the amenities are borderline absurd and the city – mercifully – is someone else’s problem.
Welcome to the city inside the city
I should probably clarify I am not watching these real estate reels from some crumbling tenement where the ceiling fan doubles up as the only ventilation system.
I live in a fairly decent residential society in Delhi. By the city’s standards, it is quite respectable. My parents bought our flat when it was for roughly Rs 20 lakh – a number that now sounds like an error in a WhatsApp forward.
But if you wanted to buy a flat here today, you need to be an actual crorepati… which is a mildly offensive thought considering what you would be getting for the money.
Because the amenities in my society are, at best, functional.
The water that comes out of the bathroom tap has occasionally been a shade of brown that makes you question whether you are brushing your teeth or marinating them. Our ACs go haywire approximately three times a season because apparently living near the Yamuna comes with its own climate package. We have a park, some parking and enough security to make you feel moderately confident about leaving your house.
And the neighbourhood is, well, NCR. You learn to distinguish between the sound of a garbage truck, a generator and something exploding in the distance.
Two Cities. Two Realities.
And then I watch a Rs 100-crore apartment tour in Gurgaon and realise: girl, what the hell are these people buying?
Because these are not homes in the traditional sense. They are ecosystems.
But by this point I am not even jealous. I am anthropologically fascinated.
I had always assumed a ‘luxury’ apartment is basically my apartment… but with nicer marble, a bigger balcony, and a kitchen where nobody has ever stored a pressure cooker directly above the gas cylinder.
I was wrong.
Capitalism’s ultimate cheat code
There is something deeply capitalist about the idea that the solution to a dysfunctional city is not to fix the city, but to build a better one inside it. It is the ultimate cheat code.
Gurgaon – infamous for gridlocked roads, waterlogging, and infrastructure that routinely struggles to keep pace with its population – is perhaps the most obvious example.
The same logic exists in Mumbai, only vertically.
In Bandra and South Mumbai, the Rs 1.5 lakh or Rs 1.8 lakh you pay as rent for a one-bedroom has little to do with the number of bedrooms. You are paying for altitude.
You are paying to rise above the traffic, the horns, the smells of the street, the crowds, the monsoon puddles, and the general sensory assault of living in one of the world’s densest cities. The higher the floor, the further you are, quite literally, from the city.
Perhaps that is also what luxury real estate is now selling: distance.
Distance from the broken road. Distance from the overflowing drain. Distance from the noise. Distance from the smell. Distance from the people who make a city feel like a city.
There is an odd irony here.
Cities are supposed to be the great democratisers of urban life. You live alongside strangers, share roads, parks, public transport, water systems, and the occasional pothole. But the more money you have, the less of that you need to participate in.
You can move into a private enclave, avail private parking, exercise on a private running track, eat at a private restaurant, and swim in a private pool. You can spend the day surrounded by people and still experience remarkably little of the city you ‘live’ in.
Who can enter the ‘paradise’?
Being rich is not a sin. If you have Rs 100 crore for a flat in Gurgaon – and honestly, I can only assume you are a drug lord or have discovered a particularly lucrative branch of capitalism – please, go right ahead.
The problem isn’t that some people can afford extraordinary luxury.
It’s that we have made ordinary things extraordinary luxuries.
Clean air shouldn’t be a premium amenity. Clean water shouldn’t be a feature in a brochure. A functioning drainage system shouldn’t be a selling point. A decent park where you can walk without dodging cars, garbage or open drains shouldn’t cost a maintenance bill higher than someone’s monthly salary.
And there is something more insidious about living inside these little sci-fi cubes. When your entire existence can be contained within a gated society you can become remarkably disconnected from the city outside. Eventually, the things that feel like daily survival to everyone else can begin to look like mere inconvenience.
That is where ‘work harder, earn better’ enters the conversation.
The pothole becomes someone else’s problem. The filthy water becomes someone else’s problem. The unbearable commute becomes someone else’s problem.
Middle-class struggle becomes middle-class cribbing.
The Rs 100 crore flat, then, isn’t troubling because someone can afford it.
It is troubling because it represents a city where basic dignity becomes a purchase instead of the government’s guarantee.
So perhaps the question isn’t how much does your flat cost? Perhaps the question should be how much should a city charge you to experience a decent life in it?
Because clean air, clean water, functioning infrastructure, and a patch of green should not be ‘India Premium’. They should just be India.
Welcome to India Premium, where the maintenance charge is eye-watering, the amenities are borderline absurd and the city - mercifully - is someone else's problem. (AI generated image) 
Two Cities. Two Realities.
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