The Monty Python film “The Life of Brian” is a culturally defining film for Britain the way that Gone With the Wind is for the US. This speaks volumes about exactly how different these two societies really are – but let’s save that for another time. In an hilarious scene from this film set in biblical times, a group of Jewish terrorists planning a kidnapping discuss the oppressive taxation under Roman rule then ask, “And what have they ever given us in return?” After a long and classically Python dialogue Reg sums up the discussion saying, “All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?” As I sat in the backseat of my car this morning surrounded by a fast moving stream of muddy water 2-3 feet deep, I thought about this scene wondering if the Romans might have built a drainage system had they come to Gurgaon.
This morning we got one of the summer’s few monsoon rains worthy of the name. My first impulse on looking outside was to sit and wait out the heavy showers before leaving for work. Remembering the drainage issues here I soon got hold of my senses, grabbed my brolly and headed downstairs to the car. We left the complex under a pouring rain onto roads that act as storm drainage channels.
Like a horse refusing a gate my driver Raj stopped short about a kilometer from the office when he saw the first of several rushing rivers we would need to ford in order to reach the office. With some encouragement from me and a few other cars going ahead, we took the plunge and passed this first test successfully. After being turned back a couple times by some pretty angry flood waters filling the streets, we finally turned onto the road where the office is. The water was so deep here that waves splashed over the front of the car as we pushed a wake in front of us. As the transmission began slipping from being submerged underwater, the wash from a car passing in the other direction 
pushed the water up to my window. I began to think, “Hmmm, I guess this is how people drown in their cars”.
Fortunately no such fate befell us and we made it to the office, guards scurrying to cover me with their waiting umbrellas. By afternoon the floodwaters had mostly receded and by evening the trip home was merely routinely death defying.
