The Slumdog Millionaire Architect - NYTimes

The offices of Hafeez Contractor, India’s most commercially successfularchitect, are on Bank Street, just around the corner from the Mumbai Stock

Exchange. The prestige of the address, however, is undermined by thebeleaguered state of the Raj-era building. In the reception area, a flat-screendisplaying a loop of Contractor’s futuristic projects is mounted on a cracked,stained plaster wall. Upstairs, hundreds of designers sit shoulder to shoulder atlong rows of computer monitors, packed in almost as mercilessly as on the

commuter trains that ferry them to work each day. The office has struggled tokeep up with the firm’s expanding work force and is perpetually underconstruction. Staff members were known to walk 15 minutes to the five-star TajMahal Palace Hotel rather than brave the employee-restroom line. Contractor

has vastly increased his square footage by building a loft, but a day at the officenow entails ducking through archways, dodging stray wires and ignoring thewail of power saws.

From this unlikely office, Contractor is helping to create the face of

21st-century India — a nation of flourishing wealth and entrenched poverty thatlooks, according to the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “more andmore like islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.” More thananyone else, it is Contractor who is responsible for building those “islands.” He

has done this in part by designing elaborate corporate campuses on theoutskirts of cities, like his projects for Infosys, the Bangalore-based technologygiant that employs more than 160,000 people. For Infosys, he built a software-development park outside Pune that features two avant-garde office orbs,

which Contractor calls his “dew drops,” and a 337-acre corporate educationalfacility near Mysore that is laid out around a columned structure Contractordesigned to look like St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. In New Delhi’s D.L.F.CyberCity, Contractor constructed a sprawling office development for blue-chip

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companies including Microsoft, KPMG, Lufthansa and American Express. His

most famous project is Hiranandani Gardens, in suburban Mumbai, not farfrom the airport, where Contractor designed the domestic terminal. The250-acre mixed-use neighborhood achieved some measure of fame when itserved as the backdrop for India’s breakneck development in the 2008 film

“Slumdog Millionaire.” In one of the movie’s more famous scenes, a charactergazes out at the neighborhood’s skyline, dominated by what appear to be Greektemples stretched 33 stories into the air, and declares, “India’s at the center ofthe world now.”

The neighborhood, named for the billionaire real-estate-developingHiranandani brothers, certainly bears its architect’s signature flamboyance. Butwhat defines a Contractor project is the feeling that you are in a world apart. Ithouses more than 15,000 people and includes offices for more than 150

companies; it has its own school, its own hospital and its own recreationalamenities, like Nirvana Park. All of this is supported by a vast system of backuppower generators and sewage-treatment facilities that free the community fromIndia’s notoriously dysfunctional infrastructure. At Hiranandani Gardens, you

can almost forget you’re in a nation where 300 million people lack electricity.You certainly don’t have to worry about bathroom lines. Inside HiranandaniGardens — taking a meeting at Colgate-Palmolive, lunching at Pizza Hut —there is little, save the auto-rickshaws buzzing down Technology Street, to

remind you that you’re even in India. And that is precisely the point.Contractor’s projects constitute a kind of alternate India, an archipelago of

green zones in which Indian professionals inhabit a first world behind wallsand security checkpoints, insulated from the chaos that has long hamstrung

their homeland. Unlike most developing countries, India has pursuedprofessional-services-led economic growth, opting for office parks oversweatshops. India “looks like no other developing nation,” the Mumbai-bornpundit Fareed Zakaria has written. “India’s G.D.P. is 50 percent services, 25

percent industry and 25 percent agricultural. The only other countries that fitthis profile are Portugal and Greece — middle-income countries.” Contractorhas found his niche in building the offices where India’s professional servicesare produced and the residences, hotels and shopping malls where Indian

professionals spend their time and money.While the world wonders whether India, under the incoming pro-market

government of Narendra Modi, can return to the blistering growth rates it was


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consistently posting before the global financial crisis, Contractor only obliquely

acknowledges that the recent sputtering of India’s economy has affected hispractice. Certain projects that would ideally be built quickly, he concedes, areinstead being built in stages. Regardless, he prefers to look forward. The totalacreage of an upscale satellite city he’s currently building near Delhi (when

combined with a neighboring nature preserve) “will be larger than Central Parkin New York,” he crowed. “Now that’s called creating history.”

In February, Contractor took me to see one of his newest projects, an85-story Y-shaped condominium tower called Minerva that is being built atop a

former shantytown. As we rose in the steel-framed, open-air constructionelevator, the oft-obscured fact that Mumbai is a tropical island revealed itself,with the Arabian Sea stretching out beyond the lush, green oval of theMahalaxmi Race Course. We ascended to the 26th floor, just a slab of concrete

that was poured 10 weeks earlier. From this vantage point, we had an excellentview of the kinds of buildings Contractor is known for building in city centers —luxury high-rises set in the middle of India’s slums. To our left, next to the mostexpensive home in the world — the industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s $1 billion

personal high-rise — were Contractor’s sleek Imperial Towers, built on the siteof one of the city’s first slum redevelopments. Moving from left to right,Contractor pointed to the Four Seasons Hotel, which he worked on. “Atria Mallis us,” he continued, “and we’re doing three towers in that slum” next to a

modern building with a pitched roof. Squinting out over the metropolis fromthis altitude, it was easy to spot the skyscrapers, but the teeming, low-riseslums — just undulating mounds of tarp and corrugated metal — were harderto locate. When I spotted the shantytown, Contractor added, “That pitched roof

is also us.”To call Hafeez Contractor Bollywood’s starchitect would not do justice to

his fame. He is more like a luxury brand. The entire headline on a billboard fora new housing development in Kolkata read, “Designed by the famed Hafeez

Contractor.” The architect does product endorsements for companies as if hewere a movie star: computer makers (HP) and airlines (Swissair). WhenIndians talk about Contractor, they generally call him simply Hafeez.

Stylistically, Contractor’s buildings have no signature, save a penchant for

glitz. “I always say . . . that you definitely like a woman with lipstick, rouge,eyelashes,” he told me. “So if you make your building more beautiful with someappliqués, there’s nothing wrong.” Instead of a style, what most unifies


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Contractor’s projects is that they actually get built. Architecture has long been

described as the most political of the arts, and the key to Contractor’s success isas much his mastery of the policy levers of the world’s largest democracy as histalents as a designer. Combining the skills of an architect with those of apolitical operative, Contractor can read new regulations and immediately find

exploitable loopholes and work behind the scenes to shape legislation thatserves his business. He cultivates friends in high places, and he has learned totime his public statements judiciously. “There are several good ideas that I haveannounced at the wrong time,” Contractor told me. “Just before [the] election,

some party accepts it and — with good fortune or bad fortune — the other partycomes, and he kills it.” Most crucially, he has mastered the art of rhetoric, ofphrasing his private interests in terms of the public interest.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Contractor’s effort to redevelop

Mumbai’s slums. When India became independent in 1947, only a smallsegment of Mumbai’s population lived in shantytowns; by the 1990s, after waveupon wave of job-seeking domestic migrants arrived, roughly half the city’sestimated 10 million people lived in them.

The local government has long been vexed by the problem. Until 1970, thecity held that informal settlements were illegal, and it sent the police to clearthem in periodic crackdowns. Then it switched gears and endorsed so-calledslum upgrading, adding basic amenities like streetlights and public toilets to

informal neighborhoods. But between the government’s penury, endemiccorruption and the ever-growing size of the problem, progress was limited.Today Mumbai’s best-known slum, Dharavi, packs a population comparable toSan Francisco’s into less than one square mile of urban space. Its jerry-built

structures can rise several stories, the upper floors accessible by ladders thatextend down into darkened alleyways. Though families are large and child laboris rampant, the average household income in the neighborhood hovers around$60 a week.

Contractor had long supported a grand bargain in which developers wouldbe given the opportunity to build market-rate projects on valuable land coveredby slums in exchange for providing new, free housing for slum dwellers. Heargued for such a policy in the media as well as in private conversations with

politicians. In 1995, when the conservative Shiv Sena Party took power inelections in Maharashtra state (Mumbai is its capital), Contractor saw anopening. But it required cozying up to one of the least savory figures in Indian


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politics: Bal Thackeray, the leader of Shiv Sena and a political cartoonist by

trade, who openly admired Hitler and rose to power by pitting Mumbai’s ethnicgroups against one another. His followers called him by the honorificBalasaheb. The local press dubbed him “the uncrowned king,” becauseThackeray was not an elected official but a party boss. He controlled Mumbai

through a devoted following of Hindu youths that he could call upon to paralyzethe metropolis with protests — or riots — if he didn’t get his way.

Shiv Sena came to power on a platform of “free housing for slum dwellers”but lacked a concrete policy for putting it into effect. After the elections,

Contractor says he set his staff to work on a comprehensive study of Mumbai’sslums. His team came up with a plan to allow market-rate development ofskyscrapers with extended height limits in exchange for rehousing the slumdwellers. In a closed-door meeting, Contractor recalled, he presented his

proposal and got Thackeray to endorse the grand bargain over the objections ofhis deputies.

As Contractor spoke with me, he couldn’t hide his disdain for Thackeray’spopulist pretensions. But he had a grudging respect for his ability to get things

done — specifically Contractor’s own agenda. “You need a strong guy,”Contractor said.

Although he credits Thackeray, Contractor calls himself “the real architectof slum-redevelopment policy.” It’s an audacious claim, given that the policy

details were worked out by a committee on which Contractor did not serve. Butwhatever the extent of his role, in the years since enactment, Contractor hasbecome the go-to architect for transforming shantytowns into plots thatcombine low-income apartments and ultraluxury condominiums. Inside the

high-rises, several million dollars buys not only granite countertops andArabian Sea views but also electricity that never goes out and water that alwaysruns.

Given Mumbai’s surreal inequality, Contractor’s market-based plans have

made him the architect that Indian intellectuals love to hate. P. K. Das,Mumbai’s best-known radical urbanist — he is known as an architect-activist —is the nemesis of market-friendly architects like Contractor. Das rails againstslum-redevelopment policy as a ruse to privatize prime plots of real estate,

tarring it as the “greatest bluff ever perpetrated on the city’s poor.” WhileContractor claims his structures, with their reliable utilities and sewagetreatment, model best practices for the rest of India, critics like Das worry that


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giving India’s most influential citizens high-quality infrastructure amid India’s

poverty removes the political will to make basics like reliable power and potabletap water universal. Providing basic services to the rich and not the poorbespeaks “a state of underdevelopment, not a state of development,” Das toldme in his studio.

Following the tour with Contractor of his Minerva project, we headedacross town in his chauffeured white S.U.V. to have lunch at an upscale Indianchain restaurant in a shopping mall. The busy street life passing our windows —fruit sellers hawking their produce, young rag pickers filling their giant tarp

sacks with scavenged recyclables, women in abayas going about their dailychores — seemed to be far removed, as if we were watching a documentaryabout Mumbai’s poor from the comfort of a well-appointed theater. At theJacob Circle roundabout, a teenager gunned his motor scooter the wrong

direction around the one-way traffic circle, his helmetless friend hanging ontight behind him. “Look at this guy!” Contractor offered, more in amusementthan in anger. “Bombay” — he still calls it that — “has gone wacko.”

As the surname suggests, Contractor’s family has deep roots in the

building trades. Family lore has it that his great-great-grandfather helped buildwhat is now the University of Baroda, 250 miles north of Mumbai in the state ofGujarat. The Contractors were part of the tiny Parsee community in WesternIndia privileged by the British. By the early 20th century, Contractor says, his

ancestors were wealthy industrialists, well diversified into power plants andliquor.

Hafeez was born in Mumbai in 1950, part of the Midnight’s Childrengeneration that never knew the British Raj. Despite the joys of freedom, it was

an inauspicious time to be born — and not only because Hafeez’s father diedunexpectedly just 13 days before his birth. The family was foundering. Thenewborn Republic of India looked with disdain on the Contractors’ industrialconcerns. Private power plants would have no place in Jawaharlal Nehru’s

state, and alcohol would be banned in Gandhi’s spiritual nation.But if politics destroyed the Contractor family’s fortune, under Hafeez’s

savvy guidance, politics would rebuild it. After barely securing a spot inarchitecture school, the young Hafeez excelled. His senior project was displayed

at Mumbai’s leading contemporary art museum, and he won a postgraduatescholarship to Columbia University, where he earned a master’s in 1977.Contractor came to find Manhattan seductive, but unlike many Indian


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professionals, he vowed to return to India rather than use the fellowship as a

ticket out. “The temptation was so great,” he recalled, “that I said, ‘Graduate inthe afternoon, catch a flight in the night.’ And I literally meant it. I left for myflight from the farewell dinner.”

In the India he returned to, apartments meant for low-income residents

were hemmed in by a square-footage limit that was part of the Urban LandCeiling and Regulation Act, passed while Contractor was in New York. Thelegislation capped some apartments at just 40 square meters (430 square feet),but nearly as soon as the regulations were enacted, Indians found a simple way

to flout them: Husbands and wives would buy adjoining units and then removea wall to combine them. That was just the first step. The race was on to come upwith a design that could conjure the feel of luxury within the still-modest860-square-foot flats.

In the impeccably air-conditioned glass-and-steel sales office of theMinerva condominium tower, Contractor recalled how the Mumbai developerKirti Kedia approached him and demanded apartments that included 10-by-14bedrooms and 20-by-20 living rooms, straining the limits of the regulations

before even considering necessities like hallways and bathrooms. “I said, ‘Comeon, Kirti, I can’t beat arithmetic,’ ” Contractor recalled. “Kirti said, ‘Raja’ . . . hecalls me Raja — raja means king — ‘that is why I have come to you.’ ”Contractor took out his red felt-tip pen and legal pad and showed me how he

did it.Starting with the living room, Contractor drew a 20-by-20 square — 400

square feet. Turning the height of the square into the diameter of a circle, a bitlike Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Contractor shaved off the top two

corners. This little move cut some 40 square feet off the room. He applied thesame trick to the rectangular bedrooms. “And I got it. I beat the arithmetic. Ishowed him the plan the next day. . . . This was the rage of that time!”Contractor had outsmarted the regulations by literally cutting corners. The

result was the Megh, Malhar and Raag Towers, a set of organic-shapedbuildings. The towers weren’t finished until years later, but commissions forother buildings rolled in, and Hafeez became a household name. A 1987 printad showed him standing atop his latest bullet-shaped high-rise holding airline

tickets. It said simply: “Hafeez Contractor Flies Swissair.”In 1991, when an economic crisis forced India to adopt I.M.F.-imposed

free-market reforms, Contractor was perfectly positioned to benefit. Foreign


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capital poured into the country, and domestic companies boomed. One day,

Contractor was sitting in the restaurant of the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhiwhen he spotted Narayana Murthy, a founder of the software outsourcing giantInfosys. In 1981, Murthy started the company with six partners and $250 inpooled capital; now he was a billionaire. Though Contractor had never met the

tycoon before, he seized the opportunity to pitch his services. As Murthy tellsthe story, Contractor walked up to him and asked, “Can I disturb you?” WhenContractor introduced himself, Murthy recalls, “I thought, This guy is sohumble, almost a zero-ego person, and yet he is the most creative architect

from India. After just a brief chat, Murthy concluded that he wanted to workwith Contractor.

In the early days of Infosys, the company was headquartered in an officebuilding in downtown Bangalore. But Murthy saw no way to expand there. The

city’s transit system was hopeless. Murthy recalled telling his colleagues: “Look,if we try to expand in the city, we won’t have enough car parks. . . . We willcreate India’s first software campus.”

Contractor was initially enlisted to add “show buildings” to Murthy’s new

Bangalore campus, including the glass pyramid television studio from whichthe company beams its quarterly results to the world. (Murthy told me he likedI.M. Pei’s addition to the Louvre so much that he had Contractor build himone.) Soon Contractor was tasked with designing entire campuses for the

company. “We fight a very tough battle here,” Murthy mused. “We go throughall this pollution, traffic, noise, and we reach our campus, and in a jiffy we areexpected to satisfy the needs — the technological needs — of the most advancedcustomer from the first world all day. We have to create an environment where

it becomes easier.” To this end, Murthy demanded all the amenities of a largecity behind the gates. “It has to have bookstores, it has to have food courts,” hesaid, “it has to have a swimming pool, it has to have a cricket pitch.”

As Sadaf Khan, an Infosys communications staff member, told me bluntly

when I arrived at the gates of the Bangalore headquarters: “This campus is adifferent world compared to the rest of the city. When you’re inside thecampus, you might as well not be in Bangalore.”

If the goal is to conjure a “different world,” Infosys’ campuses are

indisputably successful. But not everyone is happy with the results. VarunSingh, a 30-year-old middle manager, was enjoying a smoke with his team ofprogrammers outside the gates of the company’s Pune campus when he told me


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that employees didn’t have much access to the recreational facilities, “because

we’re loaded down with work.” His underlings stood by nodding, impressedwith his candor. Working in a chic, Contractor-designed “dew drop” wowed hisparents when they came to visit, Singh continued, but on a day-to-day basis,the campus irked him. The location on the edge of town was inconvenient, and

after the long ride from his apartment each morning on a company bus, he stillhad to walk a third of a mile from the campus gate to his office. (The golf cartthat I traveled in, he informed me, was reserved for visiting clients andjournalists.) Singh said he would prefer Infosys to operate out of a more

ordinary office building in the city center. But Murthy tapped Contractor tobuild exurban campuses precisely because he concluded that expanding inIndia’s dysfunctional downtowns wasn’t feasible.

Contractor is changing the makeup of those dysfunctional downtowns by

building luxury residences alongside the slum redevelopments he advocated forwith Shiv Sena. In those constructions, the two Indias sit side by side, but stillpainstakingly sealed off from each other. As the architect explained to me, hisfirm lays out the redevelopment-site plans with an eye toward keeping the slum

dwellers and the condo buyers segregated. Each group is from a “separateclass,” he said. “If you had it combined, neither the slum guys nor theprospective clients would like it.”

According to Contractor, prospective clients and slum dwellers alike

support his efforts. At the ribbon-cutting for what would be the firstslum-rehousing apartments abutting the site of his Imperial Towers, thetenants who inhabited the 2,500 huts that covered the 13-acre site conducted areligious ceremony to mark the opening. Contractor says the women put on

their finest saris and approached him and the developer reverently with an oillamp. “They were taking our aarti,” or making an offering, Contractorrecounted, “giving us as much honor as they’re giving to a god. So I asked thislady, ‘Why are you doing this?’ She said: ‘Do you know what you have done to

our lives? We, all ladies in the slum, cannot go to a toilet after the sun rises andbefore the sun sets, but you are giving us tap water, 24-hours water.’ ”

The day after meeting Contractor, I visited the low-income housing next tothe Imperial Towers. Beside the nine-story concrete parking garage that

constitutes the condominiums’ base, teenage boys were absorbed in their gameon an improvised cricket pitch. Inside a building bearing a spray-painted muralof Bal Thackeray and other local heroes on its facade, an old man was busy at


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an ironing board he had set up in the stairwell as an informal laundry business.

Up one flight and down the dimly lit hallway, I met the seven members of theKhan family in the 225-square-foot apartment they received after thecommunity voted to give developers the right to build the multimillion-dollarflats.

The Khans’ original home had been on the footprint of the building wherethey live today. Back in the 1950s, the family patriarch moved to Mumbai asthis community was being carved out of steep, flood-prone jungle land thatnobody else wanted. Until their slum was razed, the Khans were living in a

90-square-foot hut with only corrugated metal sheets to keep out the rain.When I asked the Khans if they were satisfied with the redevelopment,

every member of the family agreed enthusiastically. Even when they becomeeligible to sell their flat — after 10 years of residency, as mandated by the

redevelopment policy — they told me they planned to stay. The access to jobs,markets and services afforded by their central location outweighs thetemptation to part with their 225 square feet of Mumbai, which was worth, theyestimated, $65,000.

In order for a developer to secure the rights for a coveted plot, 70 percentof the shantytown’s occupants have to vote in favor of that builder. Developersvie to win over influential community members, sometimes promising tosweeten the deal with add-ons. Contractor mentioned providing a free

refrigerator in each unit. When I noted the rampant rumors that developmentcompanies pay cash bribes for votes, Contractor didn’t deny it. “Every countryhas to go through this kind of a phase,” he said. “In your country, it was the1920s and 1930s.”

In their apartment, however, the Khans told me that there had been onlyone developer making an offer for their slum and that there were no handouts.The community simply accepted the baseline offer to redevelop the parcel tothe minimum standards required by the law. Contractor points out that under

the law, the slum dwellers’ costs are covered by the developers for 10 years. Butthe Khans said there were additional fees associated with the elevators and thefluorescent lighting in the common hallways. Before redevelopment, they hadto pay only a 50-cent tax to the government each month; now they have to

come up with nearly $9 a month. Covering that cost takes nearly every memberof the Khan family pitching in to augment the $50 a month that 37-year-oldAmina earns as a maid.


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As for Contractor’s story of being thanked for 24-hour running water, the

Khans told me they get running water for only one hour a day — 30 minutes inthe morning and another 30 minutes in the evening. When the water goes on,they fill up buckets to use for the rest of the day or night. Just next door, in theImperial Towers penthouse (asking price: $20 million), the swimming pool is

the size of seven slum-redevelopment apartments combined, and it is alwaysfull. Still, the Khans insisted, they were satisfied with this situation.

Contractor sees his slum redevelopments as studies in communal harmonyin which both rich and poor “enjoy their own freedom, but they don’t disturb

the other guy’s freedom.” But Sheela Patel, the director of the Society for thePromotion of Area Resource Centers, an organization that advocates for theurban poor, considers the rehousing units “vertical slums.” In manyredevelopments, she said, “the space between the [buildings] is six feet, so the

first three or four floors don’t even get sunlight during the day.” Patel served asthe sole NGO representative on the committee that helped redesign theslum-redevelopment policy after Shiv Sena won the 1995 elections on itsfree-housing pledge. “This thing of 70 percent of the community agreeing to do

it, that was our contribution,” she said. “The developers were violently againstthat.” But, she says, in the decades since the policy was enacted, greed andcorruption have rendered it “one more thing that it is done in the name of thepoor but hasn’t improved the quality of habitat for the poor in the sense that it

was meant to be.”“If you ask me what am I most happy about, I wouldn’t say I made a

building for the richest man or that I made one of the tallest buildings in thiscity,” Contractor told me in the Minerva sales office, puffing his chest and

flexing his biceps for comic effect. “What I’m really happy about is one fine day,I got an idea for slum redevelopment. I used to say that until we do somethingabout the slums, we’re not going to have anything. We must have a good social-housing policy.”

But critics like the Mumbai writer Naresh Fernandes dismiss Contractor’senthusiasm for market-based policy as self-serving folly. “Instead of buildingthe sort of public-housing projects that have proved effective in London, HongKong and Singapore,” Fernandes wrote in his 2013 book, “City Adrift,”

“Mumbai decided that its housing crisis should be left to the whimsies of theprivate sector.” As a result, only those slums located on the most desirable plotsof land have proved tempting to developers. When Shiv Sena enacted the


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redevelopment policy, Fernandes wrote, it estimated that it would rehouse

800,000 slum dwellers. Now, nearly two decades later, it has served only127,000.

Contractor stands by the policy and insists that even his high-end projectsare not exercises in excess but models of best practices. They set standards for a

developed India that the government must emulate. In talking about thepotable tap water on the Infosys campuses, Contractor offered: “If Infosys cando it, why can’t the Bangalore city do it? Why can’t the Mumbai city do it?”

His voice took on a pleading tone: “If we can do it, why can’t you do it?”

Indeed, in America’s development, what began as private amenitiesavailable only to the rich — indoor plumbing, electric lighting — wereeventually incorporated into public building codes and universalized. Inneighboring China, the pro-market reformer Deng Xiaoping argued, “Let some

get rich first,” and in the decades since his reign, even average Chinese haveseen remarkable improvements in their living standards. Today 99 percent ofChinese have regular access to a toilet; in India, the figure is only 49 percent.

Some argue that if India really is following this well-trod path of

development — just with a late start — the concerns of Contractor’s critics aremisplaced. But China’s rise out of poverty was based on an authoritarian modelthat is a nonstarter in democratic India. And even America’s broad middle classis beginning to look like a 20th-century anomaly. Besides, Contractor’s projects

suggest India is on a different path altogether.India’s social commentators dismiss Contractor’s gaudy creations as

real-life Bollywood sets. But taste aside, they are nothing to sneer at.Developments like CyberCity and Hiranandani Gardens are more than just

symbols of India’s rise; they are a key part of it. Inside Contractor’s corporatecampuses, with their private, reliable infrastructure, it’s always business asusual; outside the gates, you’re at the mercy of the nation that hosted thelargest blackout in human history, which left 600 million people without power

in 2012. When, for example, the Bangalore authorities initiate a multidayshutdown of their municipal water system for “maintenance,” as they have beenknown to do, you can still make tea with the tap water at Infosys headquartersand get back to your spreadsheet. And by permitting Indian professionals to

approximate a Western standard of living without emigrating, Contractor’sresidences can lure Indian executives back to world-class businesses inMumbai and Bangalore instead of New York and Silicon Valley.


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Discussing the blackout, Amartya Sen told an audience in Jaipur last

January that the media neglected an important fact. “Two hundred million ofthose 600 million people never had any power at all,” he said. Equally notable,though, is the converse: That for the privileged few working on an Infosyscampus or living in one of Contractor’s residential compounds, the generators

kicked in and the lights stayed on. The Indian poor live in perpetual darkness,and the Indian rich live in perpetual light.

Sen concluded by exhorting his countrymen to “start making intelligentuse of the resources that economic growth generates” to close India’s

unconscionable social gaps. It is a sensible prescription. But it is not apolitically pressing one in the world’s largest democracy, because the nation’sproblems are no longer an issue for its most fortunate citizens. They live in adifferent world now, even when they are right next door.


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The Slumdog Millionaire Architect - NYTimes