Tales from Gurgaon: Dark, mysterious

WRITERS’ MUSE Once a mofussil town, Gurgaon’s bewildering transformation into the Millennium City with swanky buildings and its consequent social tensions are inspiring many a writer

guy, has no time for her. The woman, he points out, is essentially lonely and looking for an emotional anchor, the reason why she gets into an affair with a man who starts blackmailing her and is later found dead.

“Gurgaon seems to be throbbing with so much energy, but at the same time there are many lonely people in the city hunting for an emotional anchor,” says Dubey. “A lot of people here do not have a sense of belonging, they are always trying to fit in, looking for approval, trying to find their social space.”

Siddharth Tripathi, the author of Blowfish, says his book essentially brings out how the core of Gurgaon is capitalist. “It is a city where your success is measured in terms of which brands you wear, which car you drive , which apartment or condominium you live in, how fast you are rising the corporate ladder,” he says. “It can change your value system.”

The city, Tripathi adds, is very unidimensional—a place that can be difficult for those who have an alternative idea of success. “It is not a place where you can say you want to be a writer and hope to win kudos; it has a very diverse population but not everyone who live here can relate to it,” says Tripathi, who is from Varanasi and has been living in Gurgaon for the past nine years. Gurgaon, he says, is also a city which has been exploited by too many vested interests: “It is all about how much one can derive out of a piece of land close to the Capital.”

Dubey’s latest book -- A Murderous Family-- is a psycho-sociological study of modern Indian urban life. It captures five days in the life of Ranjana Agarwal’s family which shifted from Delhi to Gurgaon seeking a new life. The woman has intellectual pretensions and feels Gurgaon has more cultured and sophisticated people. But the plans to start a new life do not quite work out the way she had expected. The family is constantly trying to fit in and there is a lot of peer pressure. Her husband Kamal fails to warm up to Gurgaon and the cool parents’ group from their son’s new school. “You see Gurgaon is changing fast, and not everyone can keep pace with it. It can be deeply agonizing,” says Dubey.

In Podder’s crime thrillers such The Millennium City, Cancer, The Anniversary Killer and Beware of the Night, most action happens in the city ‘s malls,

metro, its gleaming highrises. “Gurgaon is a pretty unique in that it has skyscrapers, forests, hills and agricultural fields that provide interesting locales for my stories. It also has a unique social chemistry-- the very poor live next to neighbourhoods of the filthy rich,” says Podder.

There are, Podder says, also two classes of wealthy people in Gurgaon living in close proximity —the highly

educated professionals and farmers who sold agricultural land and became millionaires overnight. Both lead the same flashy lifestyles, but they come from vastly different socio-cultural backgrounds.

“There is constant tussle between the old and new Gurgaon, the modern and the traditional, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. The fact that it is so close to the country’s capital only

makes it a more interesting place to pen political conspiracies. A writer can never run out of inspiration here,” says Podder.

Dubey agrees: “Despite its transformation into a mega corporate hub, parts of Gurgaon still has mofussil feel and values, and that create tensions. If you look closely, there is a culture of misogyny here,” says Dubey.

Prasoon, a management professional

whose latest book The Imperfect is set in Gurgaon and Lucknow, compares Gurgaon with Mumbai. “Both the cities have a great skyline, a vaulting ambition for money; both the cities assimilate people from all socio-economic backgrounds. And like Mumbai, Gurgaon is a city of dreams for many youngsters seeking to make it big in life, and like Mumbai it is a city full of stories, a maximum city,” says Prasoon.