Pursuit of Happyness

It was April, 2016 when we finally took the plunge. Everyone was excited, yet a little scared. It was big leap and we were signing up for several years of EMIs. To be honest, we were booking a house slightly beyond my reach. Based on some overly simplistic calculations in my excel sheet, I was confident I could achieve the goal. All it needed was some good planning, that could go hand in hand with the calculations. I only missed one little detail - all the planning (with buffers) goes for a toss when you get hit with uncontrollable variables. In your face.

After ages and ages of waiting for our building to completed, we tried to sneak into our still under construction flat. Nirzari was all excited and even did the 'Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi' sequence once we entered the half complete flat. I too was very excited as this was going to be our future home, after all. Unfortunately, our happiness was short lived. As soon as I entered the kitchen, my heart broke. It was complete darkness. Even after spending hours to choose the ideal unit, we had chosen the worst possible flat on the brochure. There is little you can do in an under construction property and to some extent its pure luck on how your flat would turn out to be. And boy, were we unlucky?! Just when we thought our ideal home was about to be completed, we were given this shock.

I was in no mood to accept this flat. After all, that brilliant sales man had managed to sell us the worst unit after all promises of "plenty of light and ventilation'. He had very smartly diverted us from the best unit (in terms of light, ventilation, view etc) and restricted our options on the bad ones. We fell for it. Anyway, the damage was done. After this started my long battle to change my unit. The sales team knew that selling this unit again would be very hard. And hence started the excuses like 'we don't change our unit, its not our policy'. After months long of escalation and what not, I finally got approval to change my unit as "an exception". This time magically, we only had option on higher floors in the direction that we wanted (no surprises, another tactic from sales). However, this time I was actually ok with it due to the brilliant view it may provide. But I didn't want to take any chances this time. So, we climbed the staircases. One by one, all the way to 28th floor. By the time we reached, both me and Nirzari were completely exhausted. And was it worth it?

There are some things that just click. We follow this simple rule while buying. If something instantly clicks for both of us, we dont think further. Else, we dont buy. And this was one such case. The moment we entered the flat, I just knew this was mine. The view, the light, the breeze - everything was just perfect and how I wanted my dream house to be. We went back to the office and told that this was the unit of our choice - 13281. The guy promised the change and that price would be only on floor rise. Naive mistake number two from me. I believed him.

For several more months, the process to change the flat happened. Meanwhile, we had started working on our interiors way back - right on the earlier unit. The interior designer was patient enough to wait for all this mess to go and was waiting for the key to our house. It was clear that it's going to be another few months before we can get the flat. Finally, after several more follow ups and escalation, the flat change was done. And then, I got the horror when I was sent the revised agreement copy. They had added HUGE amount in the difference of price of flat. When I contested, they asked for proof of promised difference of amount to be just on floor rise and nothing more. Gotcha! I didn't have any written proof as the sales guy mentioned to me it was a standard process! Well, here began my one more long journey of getting this amount reduced. After a LOT of emails, calls (and call recordings), I proved to them (will skip the details) that the promised price of flat was much lower. And then we finally settled on an amount to close it.

I knew buying a house is painful. However, to actually experience the pain is something else. Not everyone perhaps would go through all the troubles that we went through, but I'm sure everyone has their share. We atleast got a beautiful house of our dreams at the end. Luckily, the interior process was very smooth for us ... till Corona struck!

Only 10 days of work was pending and the apartment decided to disallow all interior works. It's like seeing the finish line from a feet away and stopping there. Now started yet another battle of resuming the interior works. I made a group of owners stuck in similar situation and we fought this battle together. After couple of weeks, the apartment finally gave in and allowed us the works (again will skip details).

Well, just a tiny flash back. Just before the interiors were stopped - finally the day of registration of flat arrived. Everything was smooth, except the next day I was gifted Conjunctivitis. Though I recovered from Conjunctivitis soon, I suffered from dry eyes for quite some time. Till today, I'm not sure if it was normal infection or... you guessed right.

At the end, after all the struggle and financial planning for every stage, I feel not accepting the earlier flat was the best decision ever. Hard earned peace is extremely satisfying after four years of booking the flat :P

Except for one tiny detail. Nirzari and Anika (our 6 month baby) are still stuck in Maharashtra due to COVID. Now the last leg of battle remains - to bring them back safely :-)

Flashes of Life

Rarely do times like these dawn upon the world. And though one might think we will have stories to tell once the dust settles, the truth is rather bitter. The best story tellers in the world are at risk. If the virus was an intelligent being, one would think the strategy to be to eliminate all the wisdom from the world by attacking the elderly. As of today, nearly 6.5 lac cases have been reported worldwide and over 30,000 are dead because of COVID-19 virus. 

Yet, there is hope. History tells us that during the worst times for the world is when the best inventions were made, including penicillin. And we are already starting to witness breakthroughs from the top brains in the medical world. However, we know there is still uncertainty around when a cure will be established scientifically. It may be long before a vaccine is available to public. Meanwhile, we know thousands more will die. It is inevitable. 

In such gloomy times, even the most optimistic folks are hard hit mentally. It is hard to not think about life in such times. Ponder about the things you have accomplished and those that you couldn't. All the happy (or sad) times you had with family. Old memories come to life and one gets lost in the merry times to get some respite from the reality. 

It is funny that I can't really tell what my oldest memory is. Can you? I have vague memories of early childhood - mostly beating the hell out of a soft toy and launching it over our gate outside. Of course, there are other memories captured in pictures - but I can't really remember any of those. As I grew older, me and my brother Abhijeet had some weird tactics to keep ourselves busy. Of course, this is when he wasn't troubling me. Mostly it was playing cricket inside our house compound. But I clearly remember one of our devilish "ideas" was to come up with a chemical formula to kill red ants - because those are bad ants! And our genius invention was to mix whatever chemicals were available at home - and mix them up and test it on the poor ants. Mostly the poor creatures died from drowning in water than from our genius solutions. In an another unrelated incident, I had killed a black ant. And my brother convinced me that the ant's ghost will haunt me tonight. 

But I also liked to play alone. I remember I had a yellow plastic box (some discarded box from my dad's automobile shop) where I kept all my toys. Cars and action figures! And like any other kid, I used to cook up stories and play with the toys. Until one day, when my brother hid one of my cars. Hell ensued. I had a Yankee Doodle sticker on my small wardrobe. And my brother said he hid the car BEHIND the sticker. I can't believe how stupid I was. I actually TORE the sticker to find the car while in parallel crying the hell out. My brother on the other hand was laughing his ass out on his idiot sibling. Post that it was WAR. I took one of his car, went to the terrace and threw it over from there. After that it was parental intervention that caused the ceasefire. But there were peaceful times as well. We did not stop from playing cricket inside the house. There was one small room which was never used by anyone - and was typically our playing area. I clearly remember playing with a steel rod and plastic ball. We used to 'swing' the plastic ball and hit with the rod so hard that at times we could see sparks flying from the tiles. I remember both of us looking at each other stunned when we saw the sparks. 

Summer holidays were obviously the best. We usually went to our uncle's place in Mumbai. Of course I was always given some maniac holiday homework. I distinctly remember writing tables from 1 to 20 some 20 times! I can't believe I actually completed that work. Cruel. However, I did get time to play cricket with the kids in the apartment. We did break a few windows and ran away frequently. When not in Mumbai, we used to play some stupid games like creating a garage from old school book cardboards. Or creating some 'homes' in the terrace under the coconut tree leaves. It's hard to believe that we were once so dumb and innocent at the same time. 

As we got little older, we graduated to colony level cricket AND video game! I remember shopping for 64 bit cassette games in Manish Market in Mumbai. Those typical 999 games in 1, out of which we played 9. Duck hunt, Mario, Contra, Circus and so many more. I was amazed (and still am) that I could shoot down a duck with a gun pointed at TV screen. Well, we also graduated from running around everywhere to getting cycles. That led us to go to cycling on most evenings. And I clearly recall once we went into an adventure to go cycling into some weird farm with a really old structure. We were clearly lost and it was getting dark. To top that, we saw bats in the structure. Hell. We just cycled like crazy from that farm till we finally reached the road. What a nightmare. Of course, when we got home we got some nice shouting from mom.

Life was good till this point. Then came the serious phase of 7/8th standard when I somehow got hooked on to studies. I used to consistently rank beyond 13th in my class before this. Somehow, the graph went up after that and I fell under the trap of "high scoring" and tuitions and what not. Basically the rat race. A group of us even went to Kota post 10th for ambitious IIT coaching. This HAS to be the worst phase of my life. I hated that place to the core. I struggled with the way things were taught and executed there. Plus we were staying away from family for the very first time. I didn't have time to cope up with the immense pressure. I was just lost in another rat race, and I wasn't winning this one - I wasn't even close. I was never the one with immense self belief - inspite of doing well in schools I always doubted my ability. Before every exam in school, my typical note to mom was 'Im going to fail tomorrow'. When I came back from Kota, all I had was a huge relief. It was not a place meant for me and I was happy to be out of there. Yet, it did give me a life time of lessons.

Life at the moment is pretty much like Kota (ok way better than it, but you get the point). We are all stuck in this situation that no one wants to be part of. Its not a place meant for us - yet it will give the entire world lessons that we will never forget. And we will survive this - just need to keep looking back on the good times for relief and humour!