As the much-vaunted “Spirit of Mumbai” took its annual pummelling from the monsoon this past week, one image perfectly captured the city’s talent for humbling the mighty. A Mercedes floated placidly in shin-deep floodwater on Veera Desai Road, looking as though the fight had gone out of it. People navigated their inexpensive bikes and small cars around the luxury sedan, while the abandoned car seemed to have made its peace with the fact that German engineering is no match for Indian urban planning. In the tussle between “the best or nothing,” the Mercedes had finally chosen nothing.
That Mercedes is a symbol of India’s most expensive delusion. For years, the country’s wealthy have convinced themselves that money can buy sanctuary from the dysfunction around them. They’ve spent decades building elaborate fortresses to keep the chaos out. The finest example of this modern fortress is the gated enclave: a phantasm of safety, with 24-hour power backup, state-of-the-art air purifiers, and round-the-clock security neatly bow-tied in the form of an app that controls access for domestic workers and delivery executives. All this infrastructure is designed to create a parallel India where things actually work.
You’ll hear paeans to this India in dinner-table conversations with extended family, but one X account put it most succinctly: “The purpose of life of an Indian is to escape India, it can either be done by leaving India physically or figuratively by shifting to a gated community. Once the Indian escapes India, India becomes the best country in the world & requires no improvement.”
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Reality: money won’t fix this
Sadly, as any Mumbaikar knows, the seepage of reality is inevitable. Its warm, damp, musty stench pervades everything, no matter which income bracket you tick on a form.
Flooding is as natural as breathing in Mumbai’s low-lying areas like Hindmata and Parel. But earlier this year, a BMC internal report found that 80 of 120 new flood zones were in A and B wards. This includes Churchgate, Colaba, Ballard Estate, Cumballa Hill, and Pedder Road — postcodes beyond the reach of even most upper-middle-class Indians. Yet there they were, as waterlogged as any slum. On this one thing, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram are united. Real-estate speculators — after ensuring that no affordable housing comes up in the beating heart of India’s economy — have sold billionaires Rs 100-crore dreams. But water, as they say, always finds its way, whether from an overflowing river or a sewage pipe in spate.
Life in parallel India follows a seasonal arc, as it must have at the dawn of civilisation. Summer brings extreme heat and water shortages, a problem too unsolvable even for India’s “tech hubs.” Then comes the daily theatre of urban traffic, where social hierarchies collapse into a single, undifferentiated mass of frustration. A viral story distilled that quintessential Bengaluru experience: someone was stuck in traffic for so long that their friend, whom they had just dropped at the airport, had already landed in Dubai.
Years ago, an editor told me about a couple of mining barons in South India with a passion for supercars. Their precious cars, however, couldn’t touch their hometown’s roads. So the duo built an entire racetrack an hour away just to air out their Lamborghinis and McLarens. Still, small mercies: at least the barons didn’t have to worry about parking disputes. In an ordinary Indian city, a fight over a patch of 10×8 feet of concrete can literally kill you.
As the season turns again and winter sets in, there will be no tangible difference in the quality of life between someone who lives in Golf Links and another in Wazirpur. Delhi’s winter air doesn’t discriminate by address. And those Rs 1 lakh air purifiers that promise refuge? According to a World Economic Forum report, the air inside our houses is often far more polluted than the air outside.
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The rich are flying away
All of this is terrible news for India’s one-percenters, who control “60 percent of India’s total wealth,” or $11.6 trillion in assets. “Although growth will continue to create opportunities across the pyramid, we think the rich will get richer,” says stock brokerage Bernstein. But what will they do with it, when the rest of India won’t be kept at bay?
An article in The Economist summed it up: “By walling themselves away, India’s rich secede from society. If the elites don’t use public services, there is less pressure on the state to improve them. Public education and health care are already of such poor quality it would be unthinkable for a middle-class family to use them. Civic disengagement in India is widespread. Last year the statistics ministry complained that Indians in posh apartment buildings refused to respond to surveys—one reason official data in India is wretched.”
The ministry of statistics hit the nail on the head. Wealthy Indians aren’t just averse to participating in surveys; they are also averse to participating in shared civic life. A few weeks ago, I was in a queue outside the American consulate, waiting to be interviewed for a tourist visa. The consulate is one of the few places in Delhi where power and influence become meaningless — and everyone who disembarked from an Audi or BMW came to terms with that disappointing truth firsthand. One woman who had just alighted from a car with black windows, seemingly unaware of the snaking queue in front of her, asked the on-duty guard, “Visa ki line kahan hai?”
I watched many faces fall when they discovered that the regular people queue was the same as the VIP queue. Fidgety young men in Yeezys and older women in Chanel belts looked genuinely bewildered at the prospect of rubbing shoulders with people from the pind. The queue took its own sweet time, moving forward without regard for the obvious distress or wealth of such people.
Several people in the queue were going to leave India permanently, the ultimate fulfilment of a dream. Last month, rumours of a “lifetime golden visa” inviting Indians to the UAE and costing a mere Rs 23 lakh was a source of extreme joy to many Indians, for about half a day. Ultimately, it turned out to be too good to be true, but India has already experienced a massive exodus of its wealthy. According to a Henley & Partners report, over 4,300 high-net-worth individuals left India in 2024. Surveys now show that “improved quality of life,” “better healthcare solutions,” and “resilience to climate change” rank as high as financial considerations in their decision to leave.
It means that the wealthy aren’t just moving money offshore, but abandoning the country because they’ve finally accepted that no amount of money can buy them clean air, functional infrastructure, or basic civic order. It’s an admission that even the richest Indians are unable to inoculate themselves against collapse.
The rest of us have always known that. No amount of money can restore what civic disengagement has destroyed. In collapse, we are all commoners.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)