The excited real estate multi-bagger story exchange in the investing classes heard over the past few years in Delhi and Mumbai has given way to a grimace and a despondent shrug. I know from anecdotal evidence that people are down as much as 50% on their properties in select locations in Gurgaon and Noida. The volume of conversation is only growing—I’m increasingly accosted in public places to give my views on the future of real estate. Kuchh hoga kya? I’ll come to that in a minute (and will try very hard to take the I-told-you-so tone out of the column, but…) but first, a look at how deep the bleed has been. I looked at the Residex, a real estate price index across 23 Indian cities constructed by the Reserve Bank of India-owned National Housing Bank (www.nhb.org.in/Residex/Data&Graphs.php ).