It happens in every conversation with a new person, and I meet at least fifteen new people every week, sometimes as many as a hundred.
Here's how it comes up: I'll be hidden away in one of those brightly-lit nooks at the Taj hotel, which contain two armchairs canted cozily towards each other and a coffee table so small and decorative that it seems more like an afterthought than a piece of furniture. I'll be drinking from a cup of masala chai - watered down, of course, to suit the Taj's discerning "foreign" clientele - and observing the parade of young, earnest men in suits going to and from the green tech conference in a nearby room. One of these men will notice me and sit down, and I'll take out my notepad to conduct an interview, but inevitably by about question three I'll become the subject.
"You don't sound like an Indian," the young man, probably a graduate of the prestigious chain known as the Indian Institutes of Technology, will say. I'm not, I'll admit.
Or I'll be at one of those fashionable Delhi "expat" parties. Back home, when I say "expat party" my friends from college imagine a garden brunch or a literary soiree, chaired by a gruff Will Dalrymple-type, where everyone drinks spiked nimbu paani and talks about Manmohan and the latest story in the Economist. Or else a rooftop menage-a-million where I briefly sweat side-by-side with Colin Farrell, who is in India to promote his latest film. But actual "expat parties" remind me more of fraternity-sorority mixers from college, where you drink excessively to disguise your raw disappointment that although you have now met that cute British lawyer at five separate "expat parties" he still has no foggy clue who you are, and the floor is sticky with something that probably isn't blood, but it's really too dark to tell.
And during a break in the relentless music - a mix of Billboard's Hot 100 occasionally spiced with Bollywood item numbers - someone will lean over and holler in my ear.
"So..." they'll say. "Why did you come to Delhi?"
I've answered this question about 500 times, but no one seems to understand what the hell I'm doing here. My Indian extended family has greeted my return with affection and surprise. In a society where families still mortgage their homes to send their children "abroad" to study, my decision to return to India is both validating and inexplicable. Some people worry about my mental state, others mutter darkly about the American economy.
Well, I didn't come to India because I couldn't find a job back home, thanks. India is too far - and too strange - for that. Nor did I come here to find a man. Indian men are - on the average - too far and too strange for that, too.
I've taken to answering with a casual shrug and the words "Why not?" which I like to think is provocative, rather than flaky. Indeed, why not? The world is my oyster. Carpe diem. Je ne sais quoi.
But anyway, it's the wrong question. The real question to ask any expat is "why are you staying in Delhi?"
Many, many of us come here without knowing what to expect. The whistling roads, the devastating summer blackouts, the general attitude of malaise displayed towards the idea of "efficiency" - who accounts for this? In fact, the sheer horrors of Delhi are a common and overplayed joke among foreigners in this city. Tales of police shakedowns, absconding servants, and public masturbation are de rigueur. I know people who have been kidnapped by Naxals and stomped on by elephants. It's a game of one-up-man's ship, won only by he who has slept in the smallest tent with the greatest number of beasties.
So why am I staying in Delhi?
The other day at dinner a young investment banker from New York - currently working at an office in India - told me that there are two types of foreigners in this city. Those who come on fixed contracts and those who come indefinitely. He's in the first group and I'm in the second, but I'm not sure I buy his theory that there's such a big divide between the two. Contracts are extendable - nobody who comes to Delhi plans to stay forever. I originally planned for two years, but I've lingered like a bad head cold, and today, while reading a column on TechCrunch, I finally realized why. The column, called "Thoughts on Falling Out of Love with the Valley" was written by a tech writer who's clearly come to the end of his tenure in Silicon Valley.
"There was a time, not that long ago, when each new day in the Bay area seemed to dawn with the arrival of a game-changing web service. A Facebook, or a Twitter or a Google or a Tesla. Today it all seems so – I dunno – derivative."
Reading Carr's column is a window into a nostalgia that I have no right to feel. There might have been no place as cool as Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. I'm sorry to have missed it, but then again, I was finishing high school and didn't have much choice.
But today I do. Delhi is infinitely seductive. Moving to Delhi is deciding to begin the world's most brutal, most passionate, most intense and arguably most one-sided love affair. It is the utter stimluation of all the senses, it's completely absorbing, and it's the exact opposite of boring.
There is something liberating, also, about running away from home. About fleeing responsibility, convention, expectation. There was a depressing moment, in 2008, when all my friends from high school and college suddenly seemed to realize that the fun times were over, and the future had arrived. It all came to a head one night when I went to see a best friend from college. She'd moved in with her college boyfriend. They had a beautiful 1 bedroom apartment in Chicago in a building with an outdoor pool, a barbecue patio and in-built parking. They had couches, drapes, linens and an espresso maker. They were preparing for grad school.
Everyone I knew had become infected by adulthood and its attendant insecurities.
It wasn't just that I felt like I didn't belong in this universe. I didn't even want to. My girlfriends' greatest dreams seemed to be to snare an investment banker - this was before the Lehman bankruptcy - and a wedding announcement in the New York Times. I didn't want to snare an investment banker - I'd only narrowly avoided becoming one.
At the same time, our need to establish ourselves in the future led to a palpable discontent with the present. My friends who were at Harvard, Yale or Goldman Sachs secretly began to feel like they were better than the rest of us (although they were too stressed to enjoy it!), and those who were still living in their parents' basements and working one dead-end job after another had hours of time and nothing worth spending it on. No one seemed happy with his or her life, and no one seemed to be where they wanted to be.
I came to Delhi partly to live out my quarter-life crisis, but mostly to escape everyone else's.
But that isn't why I stayed.
When I came to Delhi, the screen was lifted. I began to meet people - as a journalist and an expat, I've actually exchanged names with thousands of people since I moved here two years ago - people who were doing fascinating things. People who were living the dream.
Let our parents have their arranged marriages, their steady jobs, their modest ambitions, they all seemed to say. I met a girl who'd written a chick lit book on a lark, and in an India desperate for the new and the modern her book sold so well that she quit her journalism job and made it her career. At age 26. I met tech bloggers who spent their days advising people like Steve Jobs on how to adapt to the mobile Indian market. I met bankers who were funding the types of companies that would have lit up the room in the Silicon Valley of the 2000s. I met a kid who sailed into the naxal-infested jungle to count the number of endangered narwhals left in the wild. I met a girl who'd left school to sail for India in the Olympics - a sport that didn't even exist here ten years ago. I met a guy who was preparing a virtual reality university that President Obama toured when he came over in October. "This is the next generation of reality," he told me. "Think Avatar, but interactive."
And sure, because India has a traditional culture, some of these kids are also living in their parents' basements. But they're not at all depressed about it - if anything, they're thrilled to save money to spend on all the new things that are suddenly available in every shop, mall and sidewalk.
I met other interesting journalists, politicians and writers, too. People who had slept in tents, who had roamed the earth, who had wandered in and out of conflicts and written great articles about it. And I remembered that there is a lot of news in the world that doesn't fit on the New York Times wedding announcements page, and that at least half the world's population has never been in a conversation with someone who went to college "somewhere in New Haven." It's easy to forget how big the world is, especially when the world you live in is such a narrow one.
And that's why I stayed in Delhi. It's a selfish reason, I admit. But then again, I am a twentysomething.
Here's how it comes up: I'll be hidden away in one of those brightly-lit nooks at the Taj hotel, which contain two armchairs canted cozily towards each other and a coffee table so small and decorative that it seems more like an afterthought than a piece of furniture. I'll be drinking from a cup of masala chai - watered down, of course, to suit the Taj's discerning "foreign" clientele - and observing the parade of young, earnest men in suits going to and from the green tech conference in a nearby room. One of these men will notice me and sit down, and I'll take out my notepad to conduct an interview, but inevitably by about question three I'll become the subject.
"You don't sound like an Indian," the young man, probably a graduate of the prestigious chain known as the Indian Institutes of Technology, will say. I'm not, I'll admit.
Or I'll be at one of those fashionable Delhi "expat" parties. Back home, when I say "expat party" my friends from college imagine a garden brunch or a literary soiree, chaired by a gruff Will Dalrymple-type, where everyone drinks spiked nimbu paani and talks about Manmohan and the latest story in the Economist. Or else a rooftop menage-a-million where I briefly sweat side-by-side with Colin Farrell, who is in India to promote his latest film. But actual "expat parties" remind me more of fraternity-sorority mixers from college, where you drink excessively to disguise your raw disappointment that although you have now met that cute British lawyer at five separate "expat parties" he still has no foggy clue who you are, and the floor is sticky with something that probably isn't blood, but it's really too dark to tell.
And during a break in the relentless music - a mix of Billboard's Hot 100 occasionally spiced with Bollywood item numbers - someone will lean over and holler in my ear.
"So..." they'll say. "Why did you come to Delhi?"
I've answered this question about 500 times, but no one seems to understand what the hell I'm doing here. My Indian extended family has greeted my return with affection and surprise. In a society where families still mortgage their homes to send their children "abroad" to study, my decision to return to India is both validating and inexplicable. Some people worry about my mental state, others mutter darkly about the American economy.
Well, I didn't come to India because I couldn't find a job back home, thanks. India is too far - and too strange - for that. Nor did I come here to find a man. Indian men are - on the average - too far and too strange for that, too.
I've taken to answering with a casual shrug and the words "Why not?" which I like to think is provocative, rather than flaky. Indeed, why not? The world is my oyster. Carpe diem. Je ne sais quoi.
But anyway, it's the wrong question. The real question to ask any expat is "why are you staying in Delhi?"
Many, many of us come here without knowing what to expect. The whistling roads, the devastating summer blackouts, the general attitude of malaise displayed towards the idea of "efficiency" - who accounts for this? In fact, the sheer horrors of Delhi are a common and overplayed joke among foreigners in this city. Tales of police shakedowns, absconding servants, and public masturbation are de rigueur. I know people who have been kidnapped by Naxals and stomped on by elephants. It's a game of one-up-man's ship, won only by he who has slept in the smallest tent with the greatest number of beasties.
So why am I staying in Delhi?
The other day at dinner a young investment banker from New York - currently working at an office in India - told me that there are two types of foreigners in this city. Those who come on fixed contracts and those who come indefinitely. He's in the first group and I'm in the second, but I'm not sure I buy his theory that there's such a big divide between the two. Contracts are extendable - nobody who comes to Delhi plans to stay forever. I originally planned for two years, but I've lingered like a bad head cold, and today, while reading a column on TechCrunch, I finally realized why. The column, called "Thoughts on Falling Out of Love with the Valley" was written by a tech writer who's clearly come to the end of his tenure in Silicon Valley.
"There was a time, not that long ago, when each new day in the Bay area seemed to dawn with the arrival of a game-changing web service. A Facebook, or a Twitter or a Google or a Tesla. Today it all seems so – I dunno – derivative."
Reading Carr's column is a window into a nostalgia that I have no right to feel. There might have been no place as cool as Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. I'm sorry to have missed it, but then again, I was finishing high school and didn't have much choice.
But today I do. Delhi is infinitely seductive. Moving to Delhi is deciding to begin the world's most brutal, most passionate, most intense and arguably most one-sided love affair. It is the utter stimluation of all the senses, it's completely absorbing, and it's the exact opposite of boring.
There is something liberating, also, about running away from home. About fleeing responsibility, convention, expectation. There was a depressing moment, in 2008, when all my friends from high school and college suddenly seemed to realize that the fun times were over, and the future had arrived. It all came to a head one night when I went to see a best friend from college. She'd moved in with her college boyfriend. They had a beautiful 1 bedroom apartment in Chicago in a building with an outdoor pool, a barbecue patio and in-built parking. They had couches, drapes, linens and an espresso maker. They were preparing for grad school.
Everyone I knew had become infected by adulthood and its attendant insecurities.
It wasn't just that I felt like I didn't belong in this universe. I didn't even want to. My girlfriends' greatest dreams seemed to be to snare an investment banker - this was before the Lehman bankruptcy - and a wedding announcement in the New York Times. I didn't want to snare an investment banker - I'd only narrowly avoided becoming one.
At the same time, our need to establish ourselves in the future led to a palpable discontent with the present. My friends who were at Harvard, Yale or Goldman Sachs secretly began to feel like they were better than the rest of us (although they were too stressed to enjoy it!), and those who were still living in their parents' basements and working one dead-end job after another had hours of time and nothing worth spending it on. No one seemed happy with his or her life, and no one seemed to be where they wanted to be.
I came to Delhi partly to live out my quarter-life crisis, but mostly to escape everyone else's.
But that isn't why I stayed.
When I came to Delhi, the screen was lifted. I began to meet people - as a journalist and an expat, I've actually exchanged names with thousands of people since I moved here two years ago - people who were doing fascinating things. People who were living the dream.
Let our parents have their arranged marriages, their steady jobs, their modest ambitions, they all seemed to say. I met a girl who'd written a chick lit book on a lark, and in an India desperate for the new and the modern her book sold so well that she quit her journalism job and made it her career. At age 26. I met tech bloggers who spent their days advising people like Steve Jobs on how to adapt to the mobile Indian market. I met bankers who were funding the types of companies that would have lit up the room in the Silicon Valley of the 2000s. I met a kid who sailed into the naxal-infested jungle to count the number of endangered narwhals left in the wild. I met a girl who'd left school to sail for India in the Olympics - a sport that didn't even exist here ten years ago. I met a guy who was preparing a virtual reality university that President Obama toured when he came over in October. "This is the next generation of reality," he told me. "Think Avatar, but interactive."
And sure, because India has a traditional culture, some of these kids are also living in their parents' basements. But they're not at all depressed about it - if anything, they're thrilled to save money to spend on all the new things that are suddenly available in every shop, mall and sidewalk.
I met other interesting journalists, politicians and writers, too. People who had slept in tents, who had roamed the earth, who had wandered in and out of conflicts and written great articles about it. And I remembered that there is a lot of news in the world that doesn't fit on the New York Times wedding announcements page, and that at least half the world's population has never been in a conversation with someone who went to college "somewhere in New Haven." It's easy to forget how big the world is, especially when the world you live in is such a narrow one.
And that's why I stayed in Delhi. It's a selfish reason, I admit. But then again, I am a twentysomething.
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