Bangalore is booming, I told my visiting friend, looking my glummest. He looked his most quizzical and replied, that's good, but why do you say it as if it is the end of the world?
You don't realise what it means, I explained. Leela Palace hotel here has the best average room rate in the country. Lufthansa's Bangalore-Frankfurt route is the most profitable one from this country. All the hotels here have more guests than they know how to take care of.
My friend's perplexity turned to irritation and all he could say was, so what's wrong? I promptly retorted, look at all the traffic jams. Look at the haze that hangs over the main roads in the middle of the day when the view should be as clear as the sky above.
Look at the endless tall buildings coming up on narrow roads. Imagine how much messier the traffic will be like when people start living and working out of them. Think what such auto pollution levels will do to a city where the asthmatic are already vulnerable.
My friend nodded grudging but insisted, yes, these are all problems but congestion and auto pollution are there in all cities, even those that are not booming. Look at the positive side, all the new shops and multiplexes coming up. It is not for nothing that this is called the happening city. Above all, look at what this is doing to property prices.
For that last line I could have struck him in the face. Property was indeed booming, but for whom? Certainly not for those unfortunate souls who had decided to pack bag and baggage and move to the city recently and made the mistake of trying to acquire a roof over their heads.
If you had behind you the experience of living in Gurgaon and coming to work in Delhi's ITO, which took over an hour one way, you would shun the pleasures of suburban living in a city where the roads were far narrower and traffic moved much slower than in Delhi.
And should you have grown-up children who were too big to sleep on bunk beds, you would be looking for a decent amount of floor space. And should bank interest rates be down and housing loans to be had for the hinting, you would see no problem ahead.
But Bangalore's builders have other ideas. The better ones among them know how to do a decent job but better still, how to reap a premium that their good names command.
So for what you need and at what you can afford, you find yourself mostly trudging endless bylanes to reach developments that are a couple of kilometres from the main road "near" which they are advertised. How long it will take to get to work from such a place is anybody's guess, not counting some of the near slums that you have to go past.
Even this did not totally deter my friend. As any visitor who immediately falls in love with the city and its weather, he dismissively argued, with our kind of money, you can hardly expect to live off M G Road. Take your time, do some legwork, see lots of places, shortlist some and finally choose the best you can afford. It is all so simple, the look on his face said.
I knew I finally had him by the scruff of his illogic. That is precisely what I tried to do, I retorted. But when I went back to that builder a month after my first visit, cocky with the bank sanction in my pocket, they almost shooed me out of their office. The flat's value had gone up by almost a couple of lakhs!
No, they had not changed the design halfway through the construction and increased the floor space. No, you simple-minded fellow, their look said, the rate we first offered you is history.
Most of the flats are booked and you have the option to grab one of the few still left at a mere Rs 100 more per square foot. So the situation is completely dynamic. By the time you make up your mind on a flat, its price has gone beyond your reach.
It was time for my friend to commiserate. Bangalore is probably not your kind of place. Leave it to the NRI engineers and scientists who are making up the reverse brain drain and find a more modest city that is not on the international map and booming. Ruefully, I had to agree and looked back on the ever illusive holy grail that I had been pursuing for almost 20 years.
Delhi seemed the right kind of place for an aspiring business and economic scribe when in the late 1980s I left Calcutta, as it was then called, and set up house in neat and tidy, not too-pretentious Nizamuddin West.
All went well at first, but soon changed. Delhi's property market boomed and by the mid-1990s, my rent had gone up three times. It is not my kind of place, I decided, and moved to suburban Gurgaon in 1996, just when property prices and rents began to move south in Delhi.
Never mind, I told myself, I am getting the best of urban working and suburban living, with the journey time to office being no more than 40 minutes. But the gods were their usual selves. Before we really settled down, Gurgaon began to "develop" and got its status-symbol traffic jams.
They even put a traffic light right in front of our complex. That made us wait endlessly every morning even before we could get onto the road as an unending stream of cars brought to work people from Delhi over as long a distance as I was about to traverse.
Gurgaon is not my kind of place, I thought, and shifted to Bangalore. Everything went well until the US and the rest of the developed world decided that the tech downturn was over, software development was in again and both software and BPO companies began hiring as if there was no tomorrow.
Bangalore is not my kind of place, I told my highly-amused friend, who promptly asked me if I wanted to move to Bihar. I surprised him no end by replying, yes, eventually.
Remember all those Calcuttans who in the old days would go to Deoghar, Giridhi and Rajgir for a change of weather and recuperation? I will be like them and move there after I retire, my spirits lifting at having at last found a solution. Surely, Bihar could not start booming as soon as I arrived there.
But my friend looked at me pitifully and delivered the final put-down, you were never good at geography. All those places you mention are really nice but they are now part of Jharkhand, not Bihar. And Jharkhand is booming!