Gurugram: When Jogun Bae arrived in Gurugram from Seoul in 2024, the city looked like a postcard from the West at the first sight. As his car passed Ambience Mall and Cyber City, their towering glass facades, dazzling lights and broad, manicured roads left his children staring out of the window.
“It’s not India. It looks like Las Vegas or New York,” Bae recalled his wife’s remark. Bae, a Korean expat, was pleasantly surprised with his new address.
But the illusion didn’t last long. Months later, in November, Bae and his family had to step out in masks to protect themselves from the city’s toxic air so that they could visit the same mall that had once fascinated them.
“All my Korean friends find it difficult to deal with the air pollution in winter. A few even return to Korea during that time. Earlier, I used to wear two masks when I stepped outside. Now my body is getting accustomed to wearing just one,” said Bae, who was transferred to Gurugram to lead the Indian branch of KB Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s largest bank.
For the expats living in Gurugram, the city offers two very distinct worlds. One is behind the glass facades of their DLF penthouses — with pristine lawns, high-end clubs and round-the-clock security. Their weekends are spent at the exclusive golf club where they hobnob with the who’s who of Gurugram and exchange business cards. The other is outside their comfortable dwelling — congested with traffic, heaped with garbage, inundated in monsoon and shrouded in toxic air. The apartment walls briefly soften the city’s rough edges but can’t erase them completely. The greater damage, however, is to India’s global image.
Gurugram’s global picture
Gurugram is a hub for Global Capability Centres (GCCs), which are overseas offices set up by multinational companies to handle specific business operations. These centres have drawn a large expatriate population to the city, primarily C-level officers, Vice Presidents and Directors.
Each expat living in Gurugram is a postcard for India’s urban collapse and the failed promise of the millenium city. Now, they are speaking up more and more on X, Instagram and Reddit, pushing Indians into a place of shame. When a foreigner criticizes Gurugram, India truly feels the hurt.
Last year, a French expat labelled Gurugram a “massive landfill,” triggering a public debate over the city’s civic conditions. In a post on X, she wrote, “As a French expat living in Gurgaon, I am horrified by the actual state of the city. I have never seen so much filth, trash, and broken roads in any other country I have visited.” She went on to compare India with other emerging economies, and said, “Africa, Asia, and South America are 100 times cleaner. It is sad for Indians. And for India.”
Months later, Lazar Jankovic, a Serbian national living in Gurugram’s Sector 55, posted videos of him clearing garbage from the roads.
In another post on Reddit, a Frenchman who had landed a job in Gurugram, anonymously sought advice on where he should stay. A comment read, “Many foreigners come and live in luxury societies on the Golf Course Road. They are safe inside. Yes, Gurgaon is not safe at night so try to have a day shift in your job and prefer not to get out of society much at night. Considering pollution and temperature you can use air purifiers at your home and AC… (sic)”
For Jankovic, the problem with Gurugram’s garbage is not just the lack of an efficient waste-management system but also the general attitude of people who live here.
“It’s not only about the government. It’s about the people. If the Government of India cleans the entire country somehow, do you think it won’t be littered again? The GOI doesn’t eat chips and throw the packets on the roads,” Jankovic told ThePrint. “The entitlement that someone else will come to clean is the main reason behind the problem,” he added.
Jankovic, who is a professional model and has been living in Gurugram for the past two years, said he has started several garbage collection initiatives, one of which drew international attention simply because a foreigner had taken to cleaning up India’s streets.
Under ‘Ek Din, Ek Gully,’ Jankovic cleaned one lane every day for seven days across Gurugram. It was this experience that convinced him that the city’s garbage problem runs deeper than municipal mismanagement.
“My expat friends from Japan tell me that there are hardly any roadside dustbins in their country. Yet the roads are clean. It’s because the residents carry the empty packets with them and throw them in the dustbins at their homes,” he said.
Taking civic issues in their own hands
The French expat moved to Gurugram three years ago, and has been living in DLF Phase 1 since then. She claims to have done everything under the sun to get a huge mound of garbage removed from outside her building: visiting the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram’s office, writing emails, and coordinating with the local residents. Yet the garbage keeps returning.
“As a foreigner, I am depressed. I don’t understand the level of chaos and garbage,” she said, requesting anonymity. “I go to MCG with residents; they clear the garbage for a week and then it’s back again,” she added, her voice laced with frustration.
She finds solace in knowing that the feeling is shared by others in her expat circle. For many of them, Gurugram was their first, and hence defining, experience of India.
“Because of Gurugram, my expat friends think that India is filthy, chaotic and unmanaged,” she said. “Even those living in some of the city’s most expensive gated communities, including Camellias and Magnolias, are reluctant to renew their rental contracts.”
But for her, the picture of India is not so bleak. Before moving to Gurugram, she spent seven years living in South Delhi. The contrast, she said, was impossible to miss.
“I was shocked by the difference between the two cities. South Delhi was beautiful and really well maintained,” she said, recalling her time in the national capital. But since she moved to Gurugram, she has been finding it difficult to accept the city’s condition and get on with her life.
When she asked fellow residents what she could do about the state of affairs, she received a two-word advice from them: stay indoors. “I was asked to stay inside my gated society as I can’t do much,” she said.
Jankovic relates to her pain. Last monsoon, when Gurugram was reeling under bouts of heavy rain, acute waterlogging had turned the road under the Dronacharya metro station into a lake of dirty water. At the time, Jankovic met the French expat and the duo decided to take matters into their own hands.
“We decided to clean the drain,” Lazar recalls. “I found that packets of chips, food items, and gutkas had choked the drainage. It was probably the doing of the people, who wait for the metro train and throw away plastic packets on the roads instead of the dustbin,” he said. Within 30 minutes of them clearing out the litter covering the drains, the lake disappeared.
Lazar and the French expat have spent a couple of years navigating life in the so-called millennium city. But for some, the transition has been far more recent and far more jarring.
The Gurugram way of life
Shuichi Shinohara was transferred to Gurugram from Japan last year to head the Indian branch of Toyobo, the Japanese manufacturing giant.
In 12 months, he has found his own ways of dealing with the city’s notorious traffic situation. Although his workday finishes at 6pm, Sinohara stays back in his office every evening and watches Japanese serials on his laptop, waiting for the clock to strike 8.
“At 8 pm, the traffic is a little smoother. You are not stuck in a traffic jam,” said the 46-year-old. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment on Golf Course Extension Road, and commutes using his own car.
It is a routine born out of necessity. The home-to-office route usually takes him 15 minutes. When Gurugram was lashed by heavy rain last year, he covered the same distance, about seven kilometres, in nearly two hours. It was Shinohara’s first, and a rather harrowing, experience of the monsoon in Gurugram.
Shinohara was new to the city then but now he learnt his lesson. Now, whenever heavy rain is forecast in Gurugram, he leaves for work much earlier, hoping to beat the waterlogging and traffic chaos that inevitably follows a downpour. And he mostly succeeds.
But not all is bad for expats residing in gated communities along Gurugram’s Golf Course Road. Numerous restaurants and supermarkets offer authentic dishes and ingredients for the 8,000-odd Japanese and 3,000-odd Korean nationals living in the city. Expats flocking the South Point Mall and Global Foyer during lunch has become a common sight.
Restaurants like Kuuraku Japanese Cuisine, KoreaTown, and Bonzai, mostly run by Japanese and Korean nationals, offer a slice of home away from home. For many chefs and small eatery owners from Japan and Korea, Gurugram has emerged as a profitable business destination.
46-year-old Yoshi Taka Tagawa, who is a director at Kuuraku restaurant, had come to Gurugram roughly six years ago. He stays in Sector 53 while his family is still in his hometown in Yokohama, where Tagawa used to run an eatery by the same name.
He recalled one of his friends telling him about the rising Japanese population in Gurugram and that he must set up a restaurant there. That’s how he came to India.
“Now, we have Japanese and Indians both coming to my restaurant and enjoying authentic Japanese food,” he says, slurping a ramen bowl.
Gurugram has opened up
This was not the same ten years ago. Saguri left Japan in 2016 and came to Gurugram with her husband, who was sent here to lead a multinational company. At the time, the city had little to offer to its growing expat community. But with time, Suguri saw Gurugram opening up to expats.
Earlier, when she would make an annual trip to Japan, she would ensure that she returned with authentic ingredients such as Miso sauces, Umeboshi (pickles), even if that meant paying extra customs duty.
“Now, I barely buy anything from Japan. I have everything available here,” she says. This change has warmed up Saguri to Gurugram.
Saguri lives with her husband and two children in a gated colony in Sector 48. She employs two nannies to look after her children, which lets her focus on scaling her digital marketing startup. The nannies, originally from Odisha, have not only learnt to make Japanese food through YouTube videos, but have also bridged the language barrier by helping Saguri pick up the English language.
Hiring domestic workers or live-in nannies may be commonplace in several Asian countries, including India, but Japan stands out for seeing the practice in poor light.
“My mother would say if you can’t take care of yourself, how will you take care of others,” she said.
Saguri works from home, so everyday office commute is not on her list of inconveniences. But she is aware of the hassle, particularly when it rains. “I tell my nannies to not come to work when it rains. I know how bad the situation can get in Gurugram. This is my way of offering them some relief in that situation,” she said.
Saguri, in many ways, has adopted the Gurugram way of living. The cushions in her sitting area were bought from Banjara Market, a place frequented by the city’s residents but avoided by Japanese expats as they find it too dirty. Although her children go to an international school, they have learnt to speak Hindi fluently. Saguri says she doesn’t want to leave India anytime soon.
After almost a decade in Gurugram, there is one thing that continues to intrigue Saguri – the stark coexistence of the wealthy and the poor. “I live in an upscale society. I walk a mile and I see slums. The coexistence still fascinates me.”
The bittersweet spot
For Jogun Bae, beyond the infrastructural and civic issues, not everything is bad in Gurugram. Before he came to India, Bae had a very poor impression of the country.
“Every time I watched videos on India, they would show the crowded Banaras or the narrow streets of Paharganj. And each time, I would secretly pray that I never land in India,” he chuckled.
But Bae’s impression has changed since he landed in Gurugram. Bae has a close circle of rich businessmen; who he meets regularly for golf sessions on weekends. “I don’t play with Koreans but Indians,” he said.
He invites them home and goes to their plush apartments for lunch. He loves the suited and booted India of the Ambience Mall and Cyber city. “Everyone in these areas is dandy, neat and clean,” he said.
There are more things he loves about Gurugram – such as horse riding with his 12-year-old son or karting at Ambience Mall. Bae often visits South Delhi either to visit the embassy or meet other expats. From these visits, Bae has drawn a comparison.
South Delhi, he says, reminds him of Hanoi – cosy and warm. Gurugram, on the other hand, is more like Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam’s economic hub.
Shuichi is still finding his ground in the city. Every night, he texts his wife, who is in Seoul, about his day. Some days, he tells her about a group of dogs and cows he saw on the roadside; other days, the garbage dumps and young children begging. To him, being in Gurugram is a bittersweet experience.
“The roads in Gurugram are too bumpy. It gives me motion sickness. Also, Indians talk a lot,” he recalls, writing to his wife in a message.
(Edited by Aakriti Handa)