Gurgaon by Veena Talwar Oldenburg

Author:Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Six

Nathupur: The Village on Steroids

In August 1984, I was staying with my friends Anita and Arun Shourie in the latter’s parents’ home in Delhi. I had told them about my desire for having one foot in Delhi (the other is in New York) and H.D. Shourie, the force behind Common Cause, the NGO that fought for middle-class property owners’ rights, suggested I look at Gurgaon, where the prices were reasonable and the Shouries had already bought two plots, one to build a house on and the other to sell to raise money for the building, in a DLF colony called Qutab Enclave. I was eager ‘to look’ and we proceeded to the DLF office. At the time, Phase III of Qutab Enclave was demarcated in Nathupur and its plots were sold from a modest tent, pegged just off Jantar Mantar in Delhi, the very spot where the grand DLF building now stands. The tent was furnished with folding metal chairs and a table at which K.P. Singh would sit and conduct business. A big blueprint of Qutab Enclave in its three phases hung behind his desk. KPS greeted us warmly and was memorably enthusiastic about the latest phase of Qutab Enclave; in fact, it was he who convinced me that it would be a wonderful place to live in. The first two ‘phases’ of Qutab Enclave had already been sold, he informed me, and the resale of those plots were touching three times the price that was paid for them a year ago. Phase III, which is closest to Delhi, was going to be the poshest colony in a dozen years, he told me. There would be a club, he said—better than the Delhi Gymkhana or Chelmsford (it’s there now—though it doesn’t surpass those Delhi clubs), there would be very fancy shops, and town houses and flats in a multi-storeyed building, all planned to come up in a few years (they all did). You cannot go wrong with this investment, he said, and he never spoke a truer word. There was talk, during that visit, of a light rail being constructed by the Japanese to connect Gurgaon to Delhi, make Phase III ‘an extension of south Delhi’, and that the Japanese were planning a ‘Japan City as a retirement colony for their elderly citizens in the neighbourhood’. He was a persuasive salesman if ever there was one.

The idea that the Japanese, with their spare aesthetics, would have a hand in developing Gurgaon was very appealing to me. Most significant, however, was the fact that the money owed for my plot would be paid entirely by cheque in instalments; no cash payments would be involved (read black money, widely prevalent in real estate deals in India) and a formally registered freehold title in my name would be handed to me after the final tranche was paid. There was to be no disputable or complicated leasehold; a simple straightforward transaction in clean money in rupees or dollars with no middlemen involved.

The clean

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