Our Delhi Struggle

What you see above is what I see every morning 45-60 minutes after I leave the house: my office building. Every morning I pass it, sigh, continue down the road another 500 meters (five minutes, thanks to traffic) to the U-turn, make the turn, and then get dropped off for ten to twelve hours of chaos.

Doesn’t look quite finished, does it? It’s like the second Death Star: structurally incomplete, but fully operational. Well, nominally operational, anyway. We were one of the first tenants when we moved in back in October, but it wasn’t until about two weeks ago when they had enough elevators running to make it more likely to take an elevator up the five flights than to walk up the stairs. Things were so bad that most people would pack into the elevator as it hit the ground floor on the way to sub-basement three and then ride it back up. You never had a chance of getting into an elevator that was actually going up.

Today, nine of the twelve elevators work. Our hallway no longer reeks of sawdust and varnish. And the cosmetic touches, like that giant decorative whatsit reaching skywards past the sixteenth floor, are almost done. Just in time for my company to pick up and move to a new office another kilometer down the road.Which is what we’re doing in April.

UPDATE: Here’s a picture of my office building from the front page of the March 2 New York Times!

Here’s my clients’ building. Here’s another view of my building. Here’s the bane of my existence: traffic. And here is where I actually sit and stare forlornly at the traffic:

Here is the road I have to take home: