If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

All advertising is, by its nature, a misleadingly scrubbed version of reality. Adobe Photoshop, in particular, allows you to get away with a lot, most especially when it comes to architectural renderings and real estate ads. Look carefully at each one and you'll notice that a building's surroundings are always much greener, more pleasant and more exciting than they are in real life. I don't think I've ever seen so many egregious examples until traveling to Delhi.

Billboards for new apartment buildings are everywhere in Delhi, as are new buildings, which isn't much of a surprise considering how fast the city's population and built environment are growing. The most fascinating detail of the construction is the juxtaposition between the modern elegance of the buildings -- balconies, gated entrances, nice construction materials -- and the piles of bricks, sand, bits of trash, dilapidated buildings, roadside vendors, and generally chaotic streets that surround them. The construction process is also intriguing: The friend who hosted me said construction workers live in the buildings as they're built, which must be punishingly cold in Delhi's winter, and overall, the buildings look like they're in an unfinished state right until the moment they're not.

In short, there are no green lawns or palm trees around any new buildings, as the above photo, taken in one of Delhi's nicer residential neighborhoods, would suggest. In fact, there are very few lawns or open spaces in general in the city, though maybe I simply missed those parts of town. This ad -- and many of the others I saw -- suggest Delhi is in love with Corbusian, modernist towers in the park, though I found everything there to be too much of a jumble to be described by one aesthetic. As for those lawns, everyone can dream, though Delhi would sure be much less distinct and appealing if they came.

Thanks to whoever invented the most overused slogan in real estate advertising for this post's title. I wonder if he or she was able to trademark it.