Gurgaon

When I first got to Delhi, I actually stayed in a city called Gurgaon a little distance from Delhi. The Lals, the friendly family I was with, live in a modest-sized but solidly built two story house with two cars in the driveway and a suburban green lawn with landscaping, next to a row of other such buildings on the same side of the street. Lining the other side of the dirt street is a far more typical Indian village, dusty, poor, with packed dirt yards, open front buildings of unadorned concrete construction with concrete or maybe a piece of steel sheeting for the roof. These are mostly businesses such as a tiny bicycle shop (serving bicycle rickshaw drivers as well as fewer regular bicyclists), a "steel fabrication" shop, restaurants and tiny shops selling a wide variety of goods. The streets are filled with bicycle rickshaws and cars and autorickshaws and women in colorful saris and men in permanently dirty looking pants and shirts. In the distance, you can see blocks of new gleaming high-rise apartment blocks.

The reason for the sharp contradictions is that Gurgaon is India's pioneer offshoring city--the place you talk to when you call Gillette's 800 number with that burning question about your shaving cream. 70% of the call centers in India are still in Gurgaon, though there are also now a lot in other places too. When you drive around Gurgaon, there are large gleaming corporate call center buildings all over, even as there are also cows wandering the streets and quite a few beggars. Puja Lal explains to me that the area near their house remains a dusty Indian village because though there's a master plan to develop all of Gurgaon to be more like the gleaming parts, the villagers have so far refused to sell out. Much of their former farmland has been developed but now probably they are able to make a living giving services to the fairly well off people who have moved in along with the call centers.

The Lals themselves are what Rahul calls "upper middle class." Rahul works as a buyer for a fashion design firm, which contracts with a lot of western companies who want to outsource production. They find factories within India able to produce the goods needed, provide the raw materials and act as middleman. I showed Rahul my yellow Izod shirt with the "Made in India" tag and said, "Look, I brought it home to you." He looked at it and said, "Actually, that's one of our shirts--we got the contract for that." Many of the factories they use are in Chennai (aka Madras), so it's interesting to think that my friend Hanna, who's done anthropological field work with female garment workers in Chennai, might know the woman who stitched the shirt that my host's company helped produce. Who knows?

Two views of Gurgaon

Above is the house of Puja and Rahul Lal, where I stayed. Below that is a typical scene from the village across the street from them. Note the high rise apartments in the distance.