If Gurgaon is India's future, can I opt out please?

I travel to Gurgaon only because it reminds of just how lovely a city Bangalore still is. If Gurgaon has a soul, it is well hidden, beneath the monster towers that stick out of the sparse landscape like a sore forefinger. All these buildings – the glass-and-steel offices and the cement laden housing towers – reach for the sky in a travesty of justice, for just outside them lie low, flat, decrepit, asbestos roofed slums of those who provide the menial labour for the elite in the towers. They live in conditions – no water or sanitation worth its name - that can be only described as appalling and soul-wrenching, but then, let me remind you, Gurgaon has no soul to be wrenched.

If you take a walk outside the gated superblocks, the stench of decay and waste – human, animal and vegetable – hits you, but then you would be the only ‘person-like-us’ taking such a suicidal walk. For Gurgaon has little public transport and its ‘community autos’ carry ten humans on average at most times – the cattle class transport model. For the denizens of the towers, there are cars. And cars. And more cars.

Such hyper-development has unwelcome consequences. Not least, as Harrison Fraker, an architect at the University of California at Berkeley, argues, superblocks in effect become gated communities of privilege. The social consequences of such isolation (for those inside and out) take time to make themselves felt; there is however no doubt that such inequality creates deep and lasting divisions, that perpetuate themselves.

Most travellers to Delhi speak with bitterness of the rudeness, brazen guts and absence of manners of the average Delhi-walla (these attributes belonging largely to the city's post-partition residents, who now comprise three quarters of the population). Yet, even Delhi has some culture going for it - in its train museum, its art, the Delhi Haat and numerous other events that mark an urban space. Gurgaon has nothing.
So what do people do there?

Bill Bryson says in his entertaining book on the US : We used to build civilisations. Now we build shopping malls. .....and here's the Gurgaon story again. Each of its numerous malls are about the same - the stale air of Chinese food wafting along the numerous corridors of upmarket clothing stores. On my first visit to Gurgaon, I went to a couple of these malls in the evening, there being absolutely nothing else to do in the corporate guest house where I stayed. They were filled with teenagers and the yuppies of the city hanging around, in a rather poor imitation of post prandial bestial indolence. I am not one to sermonize to teens on building character or any of that sort of thing, yet it seemed somehow so wasteful, to live one's best years away in a mall, simply to belong to a group that did the same thing. All, while their parents made money, so that they could spend more time at the mall.

A proud resident of a gated superblock told me on my second visit that Gurgaon is the future of urban India. As I look around Bangalore and see the seventeen story supertowers in early stages of construction, he seems vindicated. If he is right, then I want to opt out. For now though, Bangalore stays my city.