Outwardly Mobile

In a sense, the suburb was born in post-war United States. It was a happy, if complex, confluence of a rapidly expanding middle class, which wanted to move from 8216;rent8217; to 8216;ownership8217;, an automobile boom that made cars more accessible and a long commute part of everyday, and a desperate search for individual space, away from the crowded inner city, into the vastness of the hinterland.

The story reached India almost 50 years late, but played out fairly similarly. Ask school principal N.M. Bhatia who, having moved from a two-bedroom matchbox apartment in west Delhi to Gurgaon as early as 1991, is a bit of a suburban pioneer.

At prices that would seem a steal today8212;Rs 22,000 a square yard8212;the Bhatias built themselves a house on a 270 square yard plot. 8220;My first impression of Gurgaon,8221; remembers Bhatia, 8220;was one of unlimited space, of calm, and of pollution-free air8230; something Delhi was fast losing in the 1990s.8221;

Gurgaon too lost some of that calm at the turn of the millennium. In 2001, interest rates began to drop; in three years they had dropped so much that people were taking multiple loans, 30-somethings already looking at their second property, their second EMI8212;that abbreviation having become, really, the mantra of suburbia.

So began the surge to Gurgaon, a village that, as per the census of 1901, began the 20th century with 4,765 residents but has now become an aspiring technopolis of 2.2 million. As such, it8217;s acquired a momentum that now seems unstoppable.

8220;Gurgaon8217;s growth,8221; says Anshuman Magazine, MD of real estate consultancy C.B. Richard Ellis, 8220;is now price-insensitive. There is already a strong base of residents and graded communities8230; young people can now afford a home here that they couldn8217;t in Delhi. That8217;s empowering.8221;

Home ownership, especially for individuals whose parents never owned homes, can be an enormously elevating experience. That is not all there is to the Gurgaon appeal. By introducing the idea of skyscrapers to a north Indian landscape where the definition of 8216;high rise8217; was hitherto limited to the barsati on the second floor, it laid down the building blocks of community living.

This may appear paradoxical, because most Gurgaon residents talk of what the move to the city has done to their sense of individual identity, and privacy. If you ignore the less-than-perfect city roads and the fact that the car-to-resident ratio sometimes appears to be 1:1, Gurgaon8217;s enclaves8212;named after rivers in Cairo, generals who won at Waterloo, Ivy League universities, Buddhist concepts of afterlife tranquillity8212;are self-contained universes.

The gym and the swimming pool, the local market and the club8212;often these come attached to a set of residences. Is this empowerment then limited to, to quote Kaplan, 8220;islands of stability in seas of chaos8221;? Indeed, is the geography of urban Gurgaon a parable for India8217;s empowerment experience?

Such existential questions don8217;t bother Samiran Chatterjee, 38, till recently living with his mother in a rented house in north Kolkata8217;s decidedly decrepit Sovabazar area. He8217;s just moved to a 8216;condoville8217; in New Town, Rajarhat, surrounded not by the genteel poverty of decaying 19th century mansions8212;a description for large tracts of north Kolkata8212;but by the brash glass-and-chrome artifacts of a Gurgaon wannabe.

Why did Chatterjee leave the only home he8217;d ever known? He too responded to an inner voice: 8220;I felt the urge8230; the need to buy my own place. Especially when I found I could afford it.8221; Declining interest rates had, really, left him with no excuses.

Every city grows out of an economy. The cities the British left us were built portsiders. The suburban cities are, by definition, in the hinterland. They are products of the service sector boom. Gurgaon and Noida are call centre cities; Koramangala, somewhat higher on the infotech value chain, is a sort of Silicon Alley.

In Chennai, as real estate agent Usha Chandrashekhar points out, clients for the East Coast Road ECR properties she has put on the market are invariably and inevitably IT professionals.

8220;Prices in the city are skyrocketing,8221; she says. 8220;Posh areas like Boat Road or Cenotaph Road, closest to the IT parks on the outskirts, could see 2,400 square feet of property being sold for Rs 80 lakh to Rs 1 crore. In contrast, on the ECR, you can built a palatial home for Rs 40 lakh.8221; Live in the suburbs, drive to work in the city: the formula is now common enough.

In Mumbai, Andheri is now the hip suburb for trendies, luvvies and rest of the young media and entertainment crowd. Further down, at the edge of the local rail network8217;s Harbour Line, is Navi Mumbai8212; the city without slums. The well-off live on Palm Beach Road, another carrier of Indian suburbia8217;s three-headed DNA8212;golf course, NRI money and Hafeez Contractor.

Affordability and space make for a lethal combination. Ask the Manikoths, graphic designer Rajeev and his design consultant wife Alakh. They now live in a sprawling, self-designed 4,500 square feet home on Sarjapur Road, one of Bangalore8217;s hottest suburban addresses.

It8217;s been quite a journey. For three years, the couple lived in Koramangala, the old new suburb that is now, by their admission, a traffic nightmare, a suburban signature tune played from Gurgaon8212;the expressway to Delhi is still two years away8212;to Chennai.

For hospital manager Dinesh Madhavan, neighbour to the Manikoths, the shift to suburbia was necessitated by passion. Nope, chartered accountant wife Kadambari and he weren8217;t looking for just a labour of love when they put together an expansive 8,000 square foot home.

They wanted to move out of their tiny rented apartment in Cox Town8212;an old- world residential area now described in real estate parlance as 8220;off-prime CBD8221;8212;to indulge their canine craving. The Madhavans own a pitbull, a Rotweiller and a labrador. 8220;When it comes to dogs like these,8221; says their mistress, 8220;it is important that they are never changed and have lots to space to run around.8221;

As we leave, the dogs bark. Yup, even they like this juicy new bone called The Great Indian Suburbia.

Reporting by Baisakhi Roy, Karn Kowshik, Jaya Menon, Johnson T.A., Shibhu Jagdevan, Ateeq Shaikh, Aninda Sardar