First published in 2017 on a different platform
He loves taking risks, or let’s rather put it as, he has started to love taking risks because there are no other options left for him. He’s the Superman of Gurgaon (or do I use Gurugram lest some local Raj comes asking for money?). Ah, so yes, this Superman, you wonder… who is he? He’s each one of you who resides in this self-proclaimed Millennium City, which he has fondly renamed as LOLennium City because there is nothing which is short of laughable here other than property rates, which of course tend to take the exponential millennia graph even in the remotest areas.
So you ask: how is he Superman? Well, when a city can self-proclaim to be the heart-throbbing city of the nation and call itself a millennium city, why can’t a person bestow upon himself the title of Superman? You might be enchanted, fascinated and gulped in by that alleged murican superhero, but our Superman is a high-level evolution of Homo sapiens who can survive in this Devil-damn ̶c̶i̶t̶y̶gaon. Murican superman is responsible for saving the lives of people and saving murica from all kinds of weird attacks, but our Superman is Superman because he is responsible for saving just himself. It’s no mean feat to survive in this ̶c̶i̶t̶y̶gaon.
The other day, Superman of Gurgaon (SOG) was on his 110cc super bike, which he cleverly uses on any other day to cut through car-to-car cracks in traffic jams and slither through relatively unknown trails & shady roads, but not this ̶g̶o̶d̶devil-forsaken day. He was taken in by surprise by our all time efficient public ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶a̶n̶t̶s̶ masters (Can we already officially rename them now, please?). A divider had cropped up in the middle of a road out of no-where, without any information, without any 26 months old ‘(con)men at work’ notice board and SOG arriving out of no-where couldn’t see this sudden appearance of a rarely made public structure on the middle of a road where street lights were no-where to be found for a decade now. And up he flew off his bike to the mesmerizing audience who were on with their street shops, Dawaakhaana tents, pissing dogs & humans and of course, the concrete road. An abrupt take-off ended with a dragging touch-down when the friction between body and concrete had created enough force to stop our Superman from crashing into dogs who had witnessed this weird flying object (WFO) and had broken into incessant barking. But in a flash, SOG was on his feet. Gathered people murmuring about his flying streak and he busy checking his bones & joints created a mini-mela already. He had survived, he was alive, and he had already shown a finger to the CCTV camera recording dark objects in this dark, busy road.
Earlier records show SOG taking a tangential dip into a manhole, which was left open (yet invisible) during monsoons. The other record substantiates his claim when these 2 sharing autos were competing on MG Road for ̶s̶a̶w̶a̶a̶r̶i̶s̶ ‘loot ka maal’ & had almost crushed SOG & his 110cc super bike in between. Last but not the least, our SOG was showing bike stunts on a footpath and had galloped down the main path like tumbling cycles in a cycle stand, only to witness some exclusive expletives from a tailing stunt biker for blocking his path.
Superman of Gurgaon (SOG) is called so because he has the audacity to survive against all odds of this ̶c̶i̶t̶y̶gaon. He is thrown into a fireball during summer, but he beats it by introducing double the ACs of last year and then posts about global warming on social media. He is then thrown into man-made floods on the national highway (oh yes, authorities have moved on from local small lane floods and graduated to highways) but he cleverly uses work-from-home office privilege and enjoys hot maggi at home which he bought from a neighbourhood grocery (after fighting for a ‘polythene’ bag for a packet of maggi). As soon as rains drain away, he faces the magnanimous traffic jams during festive seasons, which he comfortably ignores in his 8-seater SUV by watching films all alone on the way.
That’s what a Superman in this LOLennium city means: the one who survives, barely. SOG has acquired the ability to suppress all his fears and loneliness by drowning himself in a tornado of drinks in Sec-29 market. He’s also living the playboy life like Iron Man. He loves big, shiny, reflective glass walls around him and hates the big, shiny, non-reflective ego of his fellow colleagues, who are a product of those glass walls themselves. He’s also called the Superman of Gurgaon because he has successfully acclimatized to the locals, their language, their attitude and whatnot. He knows intuitively that he has to pay INR 100/- to travel a km in an auto. He’s adjusted to the ̶c̶i̶t̶y̶- gaon-life pretty well. He pays half his salary for the rent, the rest 10% for electricity & maintenance, 30% on partying, drinking & smoking and scavenges on the remaining 10% for the rest of the month. At the end of the month, he likes and comments on a month-end post created by a wannabe Fb page and sleeps away, only to wake up to the morning sms of credited salary. He thumbs-ups himself and gets ready to run through the same cycle for the entire next month. I mean, if we don’t call such a person a superhuman, who else falls into this category? He’s trapped in this vicious cycle of life, in this demon-forsaken concrete-only ̶c̶i̶t̶y̶- gaon called Gurgaon and yet appears to be normal, adhering to all the accepted social norms, behaving like a gentleman, calling up his family religiously and maintaining a straight smiling face when in actuality he wants to punch everyone around. It takes a superhuman to endure all this shit and not be able to poop it out.
With changing times, we need to change and redefine what a superman does, and SOG has done that for real; he’s the torchbearer. It takes a lot of inferiority complex, helplessness, social-media-only-activism, hypocrisy and blame-and-merry-go-round attitude to reach the level of SOG, and the real question is: have you reached the pinnacle of this all? If not, you are not yet privileged to be called The SOG.
Pratik Maheshwari 