Statutory warning: The title and the following post can remind you of the plots of many Bollywood movies, but I can assure you that it is purely non-fictional and un-inspired from reel life.
It's been a long four years of having the most coveted milestone of "owning a house" under our belts. Now, if you belong to the salaried class who is constantly trying to climb up the slippery wall of affluence, only to see the wall dismally getting higher and more slippery and your legs and hands weary of climbing, not because you cannot but because you're worn down with the weight of EMIs, loans and soaring expenses, you'll understand what a big deal this is. If you do not belong to this category, I suggest you move on because what's coming next might make you laugh or cry, depending upon how you view this class:-p
The first year of the arduous house hunt involved turning down projects because they were either so ridiculously priced that you wanted to laugh hysterically at the marketing sales guy who sold a mere 1000 sqft flat for "just" 1 crore (not all inclusive), or they were located in the farthest most crevices of the city and just the mere thought of crawling out of the hole and getting to the nearest school, mall or office in the (in)famous Bangalore traffic could make you tired and hungry! So, when at the end of it, when we found a property that didn't burn down our pockets and was relatively in a good location, we carried smug looks around and pitied people who missed the (our) bus.
The second year flew by fast and we didn't realize until much later that our beloved little home hadn't really metamorphosed into that beautiful haven we had been promised over pre-launch talks and welcome drinks. It was just struggling to gain some shape after the cocoon of fraudulent marketing broke. Now, of course, I can choose to think of it as a blessing in disguise because in the process of extracting work from the workers who had brick walls in place of brains, I soon learned the ropes of plumbing, masonry and other sundry construction work. Anybody looking to build their house can please contact me.
Finally, we decided, like many of our neighbours, that we move lock, stock and barrel to our abode which was, albeit a little under-finished, quite literally an effort of our sweat and blood. We began to settle in as a community bonding over the common misery of being cheated. Oh, the human mind! There's so much solace in knowing that you are not the only fool and you have company in suffering.
We prided us on our multi-tasking skills by getting on with our normal life ( as normal as life could get with leaking pipes, broken tiles and ignorant handymen) and taking the builder to task to finish the pending work using the Chanakya neeti of saam daam danda bhed. If only, Chanakya would've been alive today, he could've seen how even his neeti proved ineffective on unscrupulous goons of today who made the Aam junta get entangled in the maze of timelines. Many a times, I did feel like rolling my eyes and bellowing at the goons like our Sunny paji, "how dare you keep giving us tareekh pe tareekh?!" But, I refrained because, sadly, I lacked a dhai kilo ka haath.
Even this was becoming a new normal way of living and it seemed even adventurous to many. I swear none of us said, "yeh dil maange more" but the universe misheard us and gave us more strife. This time with additional villains in the guise of neighbouring landowners. They seem to be influenced by our country's notorious neighbour and claimed a share in our property. We might soon take training in guerrilla warfare. Life is certainly happening here and as things stand we might soon go down in the annals of history for fighting at our LOC a la mini India-Pak border war.
"Har Ghar kuch kehta hai" goes the Asian Paints Ad. In this case, I'd like to add "har ghar khareedne wala bahut kuch kehta hai". If any of you is planning on taking a movie but is at a loss for ideas, please feel free to get "inspired". You could even feature hapless residents like us during the credit rolls singing, "oh paape, ghar khareedke pachtaya."
