People tell me that some flats there cost ₹100 crore each. For no fault of mine, a few days ago, a broker sent me a news clipping that said a 16,000-square-foot penthouse in the building sold for ₹190 crore.
That apartment building makes me chuckle, especially when I see it in the smog. I chuckle in my head. I don’t think anyone chuckles aloud when they are alone.
But I don’t know yet why it is funny, at least not very clearly. Maybe it is because the building reminds me that the experience of being super-rich in India is one of the most overpriced things in the world.
In the best areas of London or New York, you pay a premium for what the city offers, and what the city offers is available to everyone. In India, it is the opposite. The city is the problem, and you pay to shut it out, along with most Indians.
I wonder what it is about money that it does not help one escape the miseries of this country—the air and traffic congestion of its vast urban cancers that keep growing. Could class have helped them?
Class is many things, and for an Indian, it is also the ability to be at home in the West, enduring its alien food and surface equality of all. Even though the world has changed, even though new money does not aspire to class anymore, there is plenty of the good life that can come only with class.
Some people tell me that not all the people who have bought flats in that tower actually live there. But many do, and among those who don’t, most of them still live in India, in similar places. In any case, no one disputes that most of India’s wealthiest people do live in India, even though a few may have bought Western citizenships.
People also tell me that the kind of people who live in that building in the smog have many homes across the world. But this characterization of the rich comes from those who are not as rich.
People may own many houses, but they usually have one home. The perception of home is the same across people of varying wealth levels. A home, by definition, need not be a single house, but it usually is. It is made up of people, love and compulsions.
And these are not as portable as people think, even for the rich. A home is where you are stranded. Only a home can have good reasons to keep you there. It can even keep you in a dismal grey town from where you escape now and then, but only to always return.
Also, India’s super-rich get to feel like monarchs only in India and in other poor countries.
I have been inside that building. Its residents invited me once to speak there—in a plush theatre. They showed me their unmatched spa and heated pools. It is a place designed to escape India within India. Good life in India is an archipelago of private islands. Even the upper middle classes live like this—on islands.
When affluent Indians pay for a home or lifestyle, they do not pay for the value of the thing but for the promise that India cannot enter it, at least not easily. India enters as GST, but otherwise, the human embodiment of real India is highly regulated. That is what most of the multi-crore price is for.
It’s not just homes, but also schools, resorts, restaurants and even cinemas that are in reality clubs that keep real India out.
But the price is just about right for the upper middle class. For ₹5-10 crore, one can find a home in a beautiful Gurgaon colony where most of India is stopped at the gates.
Women can walk without worry and children find safe ground. Even this is slightly overpriced because it is comparable to the price of a home of similar size in, say, Brooklyn.
But the super-rich have to pay inordinate amounts, not only to claim to be rich in India, but also to live and feel like rich people and exorcise the spirit of real India. They either build an entire skyscraper for themselves or live in those buildings in the smog, paying atrocious amounts. After paying so much, they still cannot entirely escape India.
The upper middle class has developed ways of exclusion that cost nothing or very little. They use what is called “culture” and a bit of sophistication to exclude most Indians from their daily lives. In the Madras of my childhood, for instance, it was classical music and dance.
The upper middle class also uses high education and narrow specializations to nurture exclusive clubs where the other India simply has no chance to present itself.
The super-rich, on the other hand, only have money. And money has long divorced class, so some old-money people with class do not see the luxury in having to share their enchanting social circuits with others who have money today.
The super-rich across the world face a general problem. Capitalism, ironically, does not serve its true masters well. There are simply no real products for the very wealthy that only they can afford and enjoy. The best phone, cinema or even holiday is available to the merely affluent.
So the super-rich are sold outlandish lemons—like a risky journey to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere packaged as “space,” or to the depths of the ocean to see an old wreckage.
But at least the billionaires of the West can dabble in longevity science or bet on politics without facing ruin if their bets turn bad. The super-rich of Gurgaon only have a building in the smog.
