Dreams on a lease

Gurgaon was never supposed to be a city. It was scrubland, blue cows, and dusty farms. But as India flung open its economy in the 1990s, the wild west of Haryana was carved into plots, gated into possibility, and sold as the new face of Indian modernity. Today, skyscrapers glint under a harsh sun, malls outnumber municipal parks, and Mercedes-Benzes run over potholes that run deeper than the city’s sense of irony.

I didn’t move to Gurgaon for its charm. No one really does. You come here for work, for the convenience, for a certain kind of life you think you’re building. But Gurgaon doesn’t woo you like Bombay or lull you like Bangalore. It grows on you sideways - like the city itself, a little out of order, a little improvised.

Here, dynamism wrestles with dysfunction. Call it the ‘United States of India,’ where private companies run their own power grids, ferry their employees in fleets of SUVs, and treat sewage on-site because the city forgot how to. Gurgaon is a patchwork of self-sufficient islands - Cyber City, Golf Course Road, DLF Phase this and that - stitched together by improvisation.

This is India off the grid, and yet fully online.

There is no functioning citywide sewer. Water is drilled from borewells, electricity hummed out of diesel generators. A million aspirations live here, off paper plans and outside government grasp. Gurgaon is a capitalist utopia built on borrowed land, borrowed time, and no small measure of blind faith.

And yet, even in this engineered jungle of glass and chrome, nature insists on growing.

A sapling finds its way through the cracked tiles of a footpath I walk on daily. Creepers tangle around the corner house I’ve never seen anyone go into. A tree leans into a flyover’s shadow, stubbornly alive. Just like the memory of what cities once were - slower, greener, more forgiving.

I think of my childhood - how we played outside without thinking twice, how the sky seemed more visible, how we knew our neighbours, not just our watchman. That city, like many others, was slowly paved over. Not with malice, but with momentum. Marshes drained, trees felled, cul-de-sacs erased. In their place: the bypass, the tower, the gated promise of ‘modern India.’ Gurgaon, too, rose like this - not from careful curation, but from the vacuum of governance that allowed builders to run faster than the blueprint.

But greenery will find a way to grow, anywhere.

In Gurgaon, a biodiversity park now replaces what was once an illegal dump. Private citizens plant trees, organize agitations, form vigilance groups. I’ve seen them. I’ve walked through those slightly overgrown parks, feeling a quiet relief. They know they’re living in a paradox - a place that showcases India's economic ascent but also its civic abyss. Where growth is visible, but governance is invisible.

The contradictions are stark. Gurgaon is home to Louis Vuitton and slums, to Cyber City and open sewage, to billionaires and borewells. It is, as one journalist put it, a “microcosm of Indian dynamism and dysfunction.”

Still, it grows.

Because growth finds a way.

India’s cities - from ancient Uruk to modern Gurgaon - are stories of aspiration etched into geography. Sometimes, those stories are written with care. Sometimes, they are scrawled in haste. But always, cities speak. In their skylines and in their silences.

Gurgaon is speaking. Loudly. Through diesel generators, honking traffic, and quiet protests. And quietly too - through the single shoot of green rising through a crack in the pavement, reminding us that even in cities built off the grid, life refuses to be.

And somehow, so do we.