In June, I received an e-mail from one of my schoolmates who has bought a large 4000-sq-ft flat in an upscale NRI housing complex near Bangalore.

He was always a brilliant student in school and had gone abroad to do his master’s after completing his graduation from IIT Delhi. I met him only once in the last 20 years when he returned to Calcutta to get married. After that, we kept in touch initially through letters, then through e-mails and occasional phone calls.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I received his last mail in which he invited me to go to Bangalore to help him decide on the interiors of his new apartment. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go and he ended up spending a fortune in doing up the interiors.

This was not just an investment ? he had said ? he planned to take premature retirement from his job in the US and settle down in Bangalore for good. After all, the NRI complex was going to take care of all his needs and make him feel as if he was still in Houston.

My friend moved into his flat in October 2005 and wrote another mail explaining how wonderful it was to be in India and yet feel like living in the US. I felt happy for him.

“Why can’t we have more of these NRI complexes all over the country so that Indians from all over the world can gradually shift to these complexes,” I thought.

Then one day, these NRI complexes will grow and grow and eventually will touch one another and convert our country into a huge mass of replicas of the US, Canada, Europe or West Asia.

My friend’s next e-mail woke me up from my Utopian dream and put paid to my grand scheme of converting the whole of urban India into a clean and swanky environment like Melbourne or Sydney.

He wrote that his wife had started complaining about the “NRI environment” of the complex. She complained that she misses the “life” and character of an Indian city in the “manicured” landscape of the area.

She had apparently also insisted that people all around felt that the occupants of the complex were snobs from an alien land and had started calling the township “Snobville” behind their backs.

His wife pointed out that after all, NRIs were human beings first, Indians second and NRIs last. Therefore, they had to eat, drink, sleep and breathe like all other Indians and it felt strange that after making so much money abroad, they were not able to contribute meaningfully to Indian society.

Other problems included their son’s insistence on quality control. He insisted that the air was polluted and asked why the NRI complex cannot have “NRI-quality” air to breathe.

The problem didn’t stop there. Their daughter apparently wasn’t happy with the teachers at school. She said they spoke a different language and the school should have NRI-quality teachers and staff.

As a result, my friend’s wife is now running a school for Indianising non-resident Indians at her flat. His neighbour’s wife is running another school for Indian grandparents so that they can communicate with their grandchildren in an NRI-friendly language.

However, some of it has backfired as the grandparents could not differentiate between their grandchildren and other people in the township and it created a lot of confusion.

Two of them were recently thrown out of a bus (non-NRI) for being impertinent to the ticket collector.

Other than these minor problems, my friend is really happy as he has almost found what he wanted in order to live an NRI-friendly life in India.

I have warned him that his township will have to elect a local government since the population is going to be more than 2 lakh. He should start identifying NRI councillors and an NRI chairman for the elected committee.

In the meantime, his unhappy wife can try to adjust to the maids’ and servants’ non-NRI ways of working.

My friend’s last mail is full of optimism. He has written that his wife had asked him to read Taasher Desh by Rabindranath Tagore and that he has found many solutions in the dance drama, which he can implement in their township. I have requested him to rename his township Paasher Desh.

The author is an architect and urban designer