My best friend spent 45 years living in Delhi . His father was the Air Attache to the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi so he had a good first hand experience . I ' ll just narrate what he told me over the years . When he first moved there , it was difficult for them to find a house to rent out . They didn ' t like the house they first moved into in Anand Niketan so their father asked to have it changed . His superiors at the High Commission allowed him to , which meant that his father had to go around looking for a house like any other potential tenant . This process took them three months . He said that every time a homeowner would show them a house , they ' d take a day or so to think over it . Should they decide to accept , the homeowners would just change their minds and refuse to rent out to them . In the end , they made an abrupt decision to rent out a house as soon as they saw it and signed all the paperwork on the spot . He lived in Vasant Vihar for the remainder of his stay in Delhi for 34 years . He attended The British School in Delhi which was full of Indians and other foreigners . Most of the Indian students were upper or uppermiddle classed so he didn ' t face much discrimination and actually befriended quite a few Indians . He did tell me about a fight he had in school with some kid who would throw around discriminatory jibes at him but who hasn ' t fought in school because some kid was being an asshole ? He narrated one story where him and his mother went out shopping one day and his mother and the shopkeeper started conversing . The shopkeeper noticed her distinct vocabulary and accent and inquired whether she was native to Delhi . His mother told him that she was from Pakistan . Upon hearing this , another shopkeeper went to the backroom of the store , returned with a pistol , discreetly showed it to them and very politely said Behtar hoga ke aap yahaan se chalay jaayin . However , this is the only bad incident he ' s narrated from his long stay in the country . One day , a friend of his invited him over to his house in Gurgaon after school . Since he was living there on a diplomatic visa , he wasn ' t allowed to travel outside the legal confines of New Delhi without explicit permission . Gurgaon is in Haryana . He was oblivious to this and went to his friend ' s house with him . As soon as he had done so , he received a call from his father telling him to return to Delhi immediately as he ' d received a call from the Indian authorities to tell him that his son was outside of Delhi and would face deportation if he didn ' t go back immediately . During his stay in India , his family was allowed to travel to other parts of the country temporarily under surveillance . He went to Goa , Chennai or Kolkata I can never remember which of the two it was , and Shimla . There are quite a lot of other stories and incidents which he ' s told me over the years but that ' s all I can write down for now . He described his stay there as bittersweet . We ' ve even talked about visiting the country together as tourists since his dad just retired from the Air Force . We ' ll see if that plan substantiates in the near future . Most of our conversations on the subject end up with roasting a mutual who lived there during the same time as him as his father was the Naval Attache at the High Commission . I could ask him to do an AMA here sometime if people are interested .