Don’t ‘Lemp’ it, there’s more to Gurgaon than

The Lemp Brewery incident as it’s now infamously being referred to, has turned a harsh, hurtful spotlight on Gurgaon — satellite city/ aspirant yuppie sibling of the Indian capital.

An import directly from America, as its website claims, Lemp on a good day (which judging by the many angry reviews across the interweb) could very well be the poster child for this yuppified face of young corporate Gurgaon — beer and the Gurgaon’s many microbreweries being the mascot. In the aftermath of the incident, which began with a group of youngsters landing up for an afternoon of unfulfilled promises of Hawaiian food, drinks and dance, and ended with them in jail, a blog post of their experience went viral across social media. Some very rude responses from the restaurant in question (or what seemed like a manager), an uncooperative police that was apparently in cahoots with the restaurant and a healthy dose of Gurgaon-bashing from the cyber world, followed in a span of 48 hours.

I am not going to waste space recounting what went down over the few hours of the altercation. Instead, let’s focus on Gurgaon. That this glass city of steel skyscrapers is aspiring to be another Singapore or Dubai, isn’t news to anyone. Every day newer MNCs expand their roots, and slicker residential complexes mushroom, the face of Gurgaon becomes increasingly, more intrinsically woven into the fabric of a young, affluent India on a quick, speed-infused spiral upwards.

It’s everything we want India to be. Almost. Scratch the surface, and under its glossy façades gross discrepancies seem to exist in Gurgaon. At the feet of the high-rise patterned skyline the Millennium City’s strange juxtapositions are best illustrated by the potholed roads CEOs’ fancy cars have to navigate everyday to their swank offices; electricity and water shortages that plague fancy apartments and cost crores to rent; and garbage heaps that dot the corners of almost every mall. Inside malls and restaurants, people complain of bills being inflated when they shop, managers and bouncers being inhospitable, beside homes with no electricity and hardly any water, and rarely anyone who is ready to help you in any way. Add to this unsafe roads filled with incompetent drivers, who even those in Delhi constantly grumble about.

It can all be quite post-apocalyptic, for those living on the both sides of the border. But we forget in all the venom that so automatically, and for good reason, gets spewed against Gurgaon, that a lot of your average Joe/Ramu/Aslam, just going on with their lives, also live there. We forget that despite this boorish, goonda behaviour that might seem endemic to the entire city, it’s not everything Gurgaon. Young women working in bars as deejays, families who’ve been here for years, children who go to local schools and couples who drive to work in cybercity, also makeup a more domestic familial Gurgaon, and are also classic examples of the “Gurgaon brand of behaviour”. So much so, one news site eagerly declared it as “arrogant, opulent, concrete jungle with namedroppers, hooligans, thugs and crooks of various shapes and kinds lurking in its cement-and-glass wilderness.”

So maybe, everyone should step away from the stereotypes for a minute, and look at the bigger picture. And no, delisting the company from Zomato is not the answer either. The incident has brought to light a huge question of accountability. In this fast paced rush to be a glitzy Singapore lookalike, there is a mammoth void when it comes to people like the goons who own Lemp being answerable for sub-par services.

Badly behaved staff and arrogant bosses get away with their behaviour because we have nowhere to go. Who should irate, harassed and sometimes food poisoned customers turn to? Though court cases take too long, sometimes the hint of one is enough to send restaurateurs jumping hoops to please unhappy customers. However, more often than not, this doesn’t happen. They know as well as you, you aren’t going through all that trouble and their response will most likely be, “please be my guest”. So, in the words of the boss man for the microbrewery — “Mera naam kisi se bhi Gurgaon mein check kar lena,” a not-so-distant cousin of the much ill-famed “tuh janta nahi mera baap/main kaun hain?” This is reflective of an arrogance that translates into many a retail and dining experience, endemic not just to Gurgaon.

I’ve lost count of the number of times restaurateurs and waiters have responded to complaints about the food with a “but sir, yeh aisa hi banta/ taste karta hai”. As if your taste buds can’t ever be trusted. Mr Boss Man of Lemp Brewery, (who quite suits the role of goonda) also apparently went on to threaten his unhappy customers, saying if anyone says anything against his restaurant he will put them in jail. He obviously decided to transform the service industry diktat “the customer is always right”, to “the owner is always right”.

In new India, money talks. But the owner, who in his ignorance thought he would get away with shoddy services and then strong-arm tactics, underestimated the power of the Internet. And that one simple blogpost could cause his restaurant to die such a fast death, even the new name Purple Bar isn’t going to help resuscitate it. People were ready to take this viral, because many sympathised. They’d been on the receiving end of the same treatment either specifically at Lemp (as came through when responses poured in), or other bars in Gurgaon (where bouncers seem to operate under strict nononsense orders), just generally in the restaurant industry, or as just consumers in India.

The concept of after sales services is nonexistent. People selling you products or services seem to think you should be grateful just for the opportunity of spending your money on their esteemed products. Consumer courts have however now become more active and people are more and more emboldened to register cases and hold bigwigs accountable. And where the courts can’t go, the Internet can!

Isha Singh Sawhney can be reached at paperonperfect@gmail.com