The neighborhood’s nightmare began one evening around three AM, dragging us out of our slumber with what sounded like a piece of sheet metal being hit with a hammer.

Our first thought was that the very worst thing imaginable was happening: our air-conditioner must be malfunctioning.

I roused myself and went to the window, raising the heavy fabric shade, expecting to see smoke belching from the unit or a monkey tearing it apart is its bare hands. That’s when I saw the armored cars, the men, and the guns the men were holding as they watched other men remove metal boxes from the armored cars and toss them on the ground with sleep-shattering crashes. Still other men picked up the boxes and carried them into a bungalow that was otherwise unremarkable but for the small ICICI bank logo above the doorway—a doorway that had always, until three AM on this weeknight, been covered by a metal shutter.

A few weeks before that colossal three AM racket, we’d noticed some renovation work in the upper floors of the ICICI-labeled building. This building was located on the main road between our house and Hauz Khas market, just a stone’s throw away, and although the potted plants on the building’s windowsills had always been kept trimmed and watered, the building had never before shown any signs of life. As with all construction sites, the workers renovating the building were given the privilege of living on-site for the duration of their work; what had drawn our attention was their shadows thrown against the upper-floor walls as they bent over their indoor cooking fires, defying all existing fire codes and fire prevention logic.

Now there was this colossal three AM racket, which lasted until five AM. The next day, the racket began again at a slightly more reasonable six AM, and repeated itself two or three times a week thereafter for the duration of our stay in India; although never again did they decide to go at it earlier than sunrise.

Until we learned to sleep through it, this wake-up call often had us out of bed and into the shower at ungodly hours. Sometimes I’d walk out on the balcony and study these men while sipping my coffee, these ICICI employees who were slowly taking on “mortal enemy” status in my sleep-deprived brain. Their operation involved a disproportionate number of thin older men standing around the armored cars, doing their best to look intimidating and alert, holding ancient rifles with worn wooden stocks that wouldn’t have looked out of place firing on the British in Meerut, watching a smaller number of thin younger men to make sure they didn’t run off with the cash as they lifted and threw the boxes, casting longing glances at the chaiwallah in the shade of the nearby tree.

The metal boxes would land with spectacular thuds, the kinds of sound that thin metal boxes dropped from a truck make when they’re full of thick, juicy stacks of rupees.

Once the trucks were empty, the men would emerge from the building carrying the multiple metal boxes with ease, implying that their contents had been emptied into what I presume was a big pool of money in which ICICI executives would routinely bathe. They’d toss the boxes lackadaisically into the trucks, where they’d roll about like coins dropped into an empty soda machine. Only far louder.

And then, with a great show of glancing around for bad guys, the guards and the men would stand around scratching for a few minutes. And then they’d hitch up their pants, spit one last time, and pile into the trucks to drive away.

A few of our favorite shots from our recent weekend in Saigon. I think the third one may be the best photo I’ve ever taken. You can see more on Flickr.

Check out Flickr for the full set! More on India coming this week.

Several eagle-eyed readers have, while taxiing down the Heathrow runway or descending into the hot Bahraini sun, spotted some familiar faces gracing the pages of their in-flight magazine: ours.

Gulf Air recently commissioned a retelling of the saga of our famous Bollywood poster — including some rare behind-the-scenes photos! — to grace the pages of their in-flight magazine, Gulf Life. Click here for the staid online version, or check out the dazzling two-page spread below.

It was during a walk we took just beyond the northwest reaches of the Old City—where the chaotic lanes give way to streets at right angles and middle-class trappings, but still retain the capacity for surprise: an ice factory? a cluster of stores selling test tubes, electronics kits, and other supplies for science teachers? a tree draped with movie film that, upon closer examination, reveals frame after frame of Shah Rukh Khan?—when a boy on a bicycle decided to practice his English on us.

Spotting Jenny and I from halfway down the street, he peddled furiously towards us. He slowed as he came near and whispered as he slipped by.

“Fuck!”

A few feet beyond us he stopped, put his feet down, and turned to gauge our reaction. He was eight years old, riding a new bicycle that still had its factory shine. His hair was neatly combed.

Jenny and I kept walking.

Emboldened by our lack of shouting and that we showed no signs of chasing him, he tentatively peddled by us again, making sure to pass a few feet beyond arm’s reach. “Fuck you!” he whispered again as he passed, this time with more confidence.

Laughing to ourselves, we continued onward. In front of us, he circled around for another pass.

“I want to fuck you!”

This time we gasped, a reaction that clearly pleased him. He stopped behind us with a smug look on his face.

“Me?” I asked, pointing to my own chest in mock horror.

“Yes!” he hollered, standing on his pedals and launching himself down the street behind us. When we looked back a few steps later, he had stopped again, and was clearly deliberating with himself. Finally his deliberations ended, and we could hear him approaching from behind, gravel crunching beneath his tires.

“I want to fuck you-oooo!!!”

“Me?” I asked him once more. “ME?!? Are you SURE?”

He skidded to a halt and stared at us, taking a deep breath and then screaming loud and high and sustained: “YEEESSSSSSS!!!!”

His shout trailed off into cackles. He turned and rode around a corner, and was gone.

My office in Gurgaon didn’t exactly provide the most ideal working conditions. The municipal power was completely unreliable, so we had a shipping container-sized generator running almost full-time in our driveway, spewing diesel fumes into our office when the wind was right. We had no microwave, no refrigerator, and nowhere appropriate to wash our dishes. Worst of all, the improperly-installed urinals emptied into the same drain-line used to drain the floor, essentially creating a stagnant open-air sewer that filled the office with the stench of urine. But we made do.

And this is the most important concept we learned during our time in India: jugaad. Making do.

The nearest English equivalent is “jury-rigging”, but that translation doesn’t do jugaad justice. My coworker Anurag translated it as “a duct-tape arrangement.” Artist Sanjeev Shankar describes it as “attaining any objective with the available resources at hand”. Jugaad is about improvising a solution. It’s about ingenuity in the face of adversity.

Backup power for our server room, jugaad style.

Many of our friends, when we asked them about it, said that the concept is best illustrated by a common rural sight that people actually refer to as “a jugaad“: a homemade vehicle made by cobbling together a wooden cart with the kind of diesel water pump farmers use for irrigation.

Picture by Flickr user Stuart-Cohen.

Fitted with makeshift steering and braking mechanisms, these jugaad vehicles are used for everything: for transporting people from one village to another, with dozens of riders crammed together tighter than the bundles of sugarcane they are also used to transport; for trips to regional markets; and for transporting the pump itself. Farmers share or rent these pumps, and this arrangement lets the pump actually transport itself to wherever it’s needed next.

Picture by Flickr user lakshman_M.

No two jugaad vehicles are the same, because each one is an improvised solution using unlikely parts. These vehicles are the purest representation of this spirit of ingenuity, and everyone we spoke to swelled with pride at India’s capacity for jugaad. “We are like that only,” my boss Murali would tell me when describing solutions to situations that would send most goras scurrying for the nearest five-star hotel.

The variety of solutions to seemingly intractable problems we saw supported this patriotic esteem: motorcycles chopped in half and welded to carts to create centaur goods haulers. The way families would fit mother, father, and three kids onto a single scooter. The clever repurposing of used water bottles as cooking oil containers. Rope spun from discarded foil packets. Cricket wickets made from precariously balanced stacks of rocks. And, as Anurag sardonically pointed out in a political statement I don’t understand but assume to be insightfully hilarious, Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government: a duct-taped coalition of thirteen political parties.

As one blogger put it when describing those diesel water pump trucks, “these vehicles reflect the true spirit of innovation in rural India.”

But we think the spirit of jugaad is actually broader than clever mechanics.

Jugaad is the philosophical outlook necessary to make it work, regardless of what “it” is. It’s about solving problems with what you have, not with what you wish you had. For the office workers who would wait on Delhi corners for rides to Gurgaon in private cars driven by drivers looking to make a few bucks, jugaad is obviously the human Tetris that fits ten people into a car built for five for a shared commute to Gurgaon; but it’s also the stoic patience that’s essential for total strangers to sit on each others’ laps and breath in each others’ sweat for a ninety-minute sauna down MG Road. Jugaad is the ability of families to endure thirty-two hours on the train from Mumbai to Amritsar, when the three-hour stretch Jenny and I rode it from Bharatpur to Delhi left us exhausted and claustrophobic. It’s the hope for the future that lets a woman and her son spend two days waiting on a median for someone to pick them up.

Jugaad is how everyone gets by.

Jenny and I come from a tool-addicted culture. Before we came to Delhi, we couldn’t function without a certain baseline of modern conveniences: we needed adequate light, temperate air, comfortable chairs, and personal space; and if we lacked any of those, we’d be unable to do our jobs.

But the jugaad philosophy suggests a different approach: modern tools and technology are appreciated when they’re there, but they are not cardinal requirements for existence. Technology is a comfort, but not a necessity, and a lack of technology doesn’t change the fact that the job’s got to get done. Under the jugaad philosophy, only we Americans whine that the air conditioning has gone out; everyone else rejoices in the good fortune of having had air conditioning at all, and gets their work done anyway.

Picture by Flickr user Primus D’Mello.

Though we have a new blog entry scheduled for later this week, readers of the Hindustan Times in Delhi (and maybe other cities) got an early glimpse of us in this morning’s HT City. Does this mean we’re officially “iconic”?

You can read the story behind the poster — ok, fine, behind the iconic poster — here.

The new omelette wallah appeared out of nowhere one day. We were walking down the street towards the market, expecting to pass the same omelette wallah who had been selling cooked eggs from his folding table every day since we’d moved to Hauz Khas. But where there had been one omelette wallah, on this day there were two. Both had a table full of eggs, a small stove, and a few canisters of chilis and spices.

Both stared straight ahead. Neither acknowledged the other.

We didn’t think competition could get any more cutthroat than that. Until we found Roopak and Roopak.

There on the left, that’s Roopak in Karol Bagh. And there on the right, well, that’s also Roopak, in Karol Bagh. Both sell spices, nuts, dried fruit, chutneys, that sort of thing. Judging from the wear and tear on the signs, both Roopaks look like they’ve been around for a while.

Even in a city where direct competition is shockingly direct, how do two businesses end up with the same name and the same inventory right next door to each other?

Maybe it’s nothing more exciting than a family schism, but I’d like to think this is the second omelette vendor’s brazenness on a massive scale—except it turned out that Karol Bagh was big enough for the both of them. Whereas the second omelette vendor disappeared a few days after he arrived, the original Roopak and the new Roopak have maintained their cold war for years. Imagine the scene every morning: the two owners arriving to open the shutters, each angrily unlocking and lifting and slamming with all the ritual stomping and preening and chest puffing of the flag lowering at Wagah.

One thing I’d like to know: which Roopak came first?

We could never believe the rumors, despite the variety of sources who assured us it was fact: Khan Market is, everyone told us, the most expensive shopping real estate in the world.

Photo by Kersy83

When we finally decided to research it, we uncovered a truth that was slightly less grand but no less implausible: Khan Market is actually the 16th most expensive shopping real estate in the world, according to Cushman and Wakefield, with a rent of $280 per square foot in 2007. It’s more expensive than the most expensive shopping districts in Moscow, Beijing, Oslo, and São Paulo, and only 14% less expensive than Orchard Road in Singapore.

Singapore’s Orchard Road is incessantly mobbed, lined by the world’s most modern malls, and filled with luxury and excitement. It’s easy to imagine its revenue driving real estate prices into the sky. As for Khan Market—the Delhi economy works in mysterious ways, true, but it’s hard to imagine Khan Market generating the kind of revenue that puts it on par with Orchard Road, even with its reputation as Delhi’s most cosmopolitan shopping area.

Photo by elluliini

Khan Market is an elongated U-shaped collection of buildings, with storefronts running around the U and an underdeveloped inner alley dividing the middle. Its main entrance is flanked by magazine vendors, an electronics and music store, and a crowded and chaotic bookseller. A steady stream of tourists gape at the inner alley, rich foreign mothers wearing jeans and salwar shirts steer their children towards Chokola, and young men in pink polo shirts with popped collars head towards the sunglasses stores. Many of Khan Market’s tenants—appliance stores, plastics stores, butchers, chemists, stationary stores—are indistinguishable from those in every other market but for marginally inflated prices.

There are a number of clothing boutiques and upscale restaurants in the inner alley, but there are just as many drooping, dust-covered power cables and tourists crowded around open manholes watching men clear sewer blockages by hand. There is a McDonalds and a Subway, a few coffee shops, and a few luxury housewares stores, but Delhi’s Louis Vuittons, Christian Diors, Fendis, and Armanis are all ten miles down the road at the Emporio Mall in Vasant Kunj. There are vegetable sellers and imported grocery stores selling the same stuff found at every other import grocery store, for only slightly more money. Khan Market is crowded on the weekends, but no more so than any other market.

Photo by engineer

It’s a nice market, but it’s not nearly as nice as one would expect the 16th most expensive real estate in the world to be. It’s not selling particularly high-ticket items or generating unusually high volume—a latte at this Cafe Coffee Day costs the same as a latte in every other Cafe Coffee Day. With the exception of tailors who speak perfect English and design shirts and suits for Western tastes at Western prices, its selection isn’t terribly unique. So how can it be the 16th most expensive real estate in the world?

Photo by fluxsingh

Khan Market certainly has its reputation working for it—it was, along with INA Market, one of the few places where one could buy imported goods in the decades before liberalization. Combine that with its location near many exclusive neighborhoods with heavy expat presences, Khan Market was probably where the rich and foreign used to spend their leisure time, before the air-conditioned malls began springing up and legalized imports rendered under-the-table cheddar cheese smuggling obsolete.

So did reputation alone land Khan Market on Cushman & Wakefield’s list? Or is it somehow possible that the vegetable sellers and restaurants and butchers, despite the fact that they charge pretty much the same as every other upscale market, really are paying some of the world’s highest rent?

Every morning I’d call the local taxi stand for my ride to Gurgaon. And every morning they’d send a different driver to pick me up. One of them was Ajay. Another one was Ajit.

Ajit was wild, square-jawed, terrifying behind the wheel, with a perpetual scowl on his twenty-year-old face. He spent his first day as my driver shouting gleefully at me the entire ride home: “Me you Hindi! You me English! Straight! Seedha! Left! Baayein! Right! Daayein! You request me every day, I you Hindi you me English! You my only friend!”

When we would reach a breakthrough in vocabulary—“Cow! Guy!”—he would get excited and begin dancing in his seat, taking both hands off the wheel to point upwards in punctuation of his hip thrusts, closing his eyes in ecstasy and throwing his head back and somehow managing to open his eyes and grab the wheel and slam on the brakes at exactly the right instant to avoid a herd of guyain trotting casually down the road.

One day, half-drunk on some after-work beers, I got the bright idea to teach him curse words. “Choothia! Bastard!” I told him. “Lund! Dick! Gaand meh le lo! Kiss my ass!”

Ajit laughed and howled and danced and screamed and repeated my words in deeply-accented shrieks, each new abuse eliciting an equally elaborate reaction from him. And then, suddenly, he grew quiet and contemplative. He turned to me, looking me in the eyes as I sat in the back seat with the car still barreling down MG Road. “You, you wife. Lie bed?”

I knew what he was getting at. I also knew that he took Jenny on errands from time to time, and I was uncomfortable with the idea of him glowering at her in the rear-view mirror with this prurient fact confirmed in his mind. I played dumb, hoping he’d get the hint. “Kya? Huh? I don’t understand. Tati! Shit!”

Ajit refused to be drawn back into the vocabulary lesson. He screwed up his face in concentration, searching his mind for a phrase he desperately wanted to find. “You, wife! Bed! Lie bed? You—” And then he made a gesture I didn’t recognize but understood immediately, pounding his hands together with an unmistakable crudeness of rhythm. “You, wife?”

What else could I say? “I suppose so, yes.”

Ajit howled and danced his victory dance, honking and weaving and pointing his fingers towards the heavens in celebration of my good fortune.

I always brought my shirts to Tej & Co. Drapers and Tailors, until the Monday morning when the proprietor (Mr. Tej?) denied that I’d given him my shirt on Saturday afternoon.

I had to return to his store every day for the next four days, engaging in increasingly acrimonious accusations (“You stole my shirt!” “You lie!”) until he finally enlisted the owner of Bhagwan Fancy Store three storefronts down (Mr. Bhagwan?) to translate and mediate.

I described the shirt. Mr. Tej denied he’d ever seen it. We went back and forth until Mr. Bhagwan suggested that I look around the store and satisfy myself that my shirt wasn’t there.

I found my shirt in the first bag I opened.

While Mr. Tej scowled and looked away, Mr. Bhagwan grinned broadly—he knew he’d just acquired a new customer.