The Quest for a Home !!

As I am writing this post, I am not sure what exactly I am going to write or how would the post turn out, but it should be something related to my experience with finding my house at Bangalore. I should refrain myself from calling it “my house” since I do not own the house, “rental apartment” is a more apt term. More than just sharing my experience, in this post I have tried to apprehend the experience of a “fresh-college graduate” in finding a rental apartment after moving to a new city. Those who have invested enough time in finding a house and faced the hardships, could relate with my experience in this post. However, for those lucky bastards who were able to bag a job offer in their local cities or those who believe in eating from other’s plate (those who move in with their friends, while these friends had made all the efforts in finding the home), my post should sound as a “ridiculous arrangement of random words”.

If you are a software engineer, or if you have joined a software related MNC, then I guess you must have stayed in the company’s accommodation for the first 15-20 days after you moved in the new city. There is an ubiquitous aspect about these “company-provided accommodations”, they are “fucking awesome”. They are way better than what a fresher could even think of affording right after college. Each time I firstly saw these accommodations (during the internship at Hyderabad and during my joining here in Bangalore), I was awe-struck. I would just stand for the first few minutes, looking at the awesome ambience of these rooms, for they were the most beautiful rooms I had ever seen in reality. Anyways, no matter how astonishing these “company-provided accommodations” are I have never been able to properly understand the company’s intention behind providing us with them. These companies spend a splendid sum of money for these accommodations (50k was my bill at hotel for 15 days. 50k = monthly rent of a person for atleast 7 months), only to make us realize, “Hey lad! this is what luxurious life looks like, and mind you pseudo-engineer, your life after these 15 days won’t be any close to this. Now, go enjoy in these 15 days whatever you can”. The situation is analogous to stuffing a goat with food before killing it for meat. A better approach could be to provide us with some mediocre stay for the first few days and helping us with the brokerage and finding a home with the remaining saved money. Anyways, I am no company-policy maker, so my suggestions don’t count.

So, after spending the first 2-3 days in the heaven-like place, I started to get the nightmares about where to move from here? What if I can’t find a place in these allotted 15 days, I would be on road. The foremost task before you start looking for a rental apartment is to find flat-mates. Generally, you end up with one person less or one person more than what you are looking for. For me,  I know one person (Puneet Kumar, the AI champ), and finalizing the third person was NO cake-walk. To some extent  I still don’t know who finally would be our final flat-mate. It’s a twisted story, I won’t get into that. The next task is to finalize your requirements. These requiremnts are generally hypothetical in nature, because finding a rental apartment satisfying all these needs and fitting in the budget is like finding “a needle in a haystick”. A senior of mine, Mr. Taneja (MT as he is well known as) is an exception to this rule, for he found a 2 BHK in the best locality in Banglore (Indranagar) at the cheapest prices I have heard of (12k).

Anyways, once you have finalized your requirements, the real game starts. The rules for the game are simple, (1) Find a reliable broker. (2) explain him the requirements. (3) go searching for houses from place-to-place. (4) get disappointed to find out there are no apartments matching your requirements. (5) lower your requirements or higher your budget. (6) meet with the owner. (6) apply your best tactics to negotiate with the owner. (7) pay the rent and absurdly huge security money to the owner. (8) pay the broker, more negotiations. (9) look for beddings at the cheapest rates. (10) find a cook, a maid, arrangements for cooking, ah! and it’s a never ending game.

There are two important aspects of this game, especially if Bangalore is your play-ground. First, you are already half-lost, if you are bachelor. Bangalore apartment owners (like Pakistani umpires~try figuring out the analogy on your own), seem to be highly biased against bachelors. If you are a bachelor and you are looking for a home in Bangalore, then you are committing the highest possible crime. The look they give you when you tell them you are a bachelor makes you feel as if you have molested their kids. I wonder if they are promoting “live-in relationships”, but whatever, I had to forfeit some of the best rental apartments found, as a consequence of being unmarried. The Second unique aspect about this game is the continuous “peer-pressure”. Unlike in other areas of life, where people envy you for “how much you can spend”, in the game of “Who finds the cheapest house”, people envy you “for how less you are spending on an apartment”. You become a matter of social disgrace and mockery if you have rented a home at a higher price than what your peers or friends have rented in a nearby locality. So, you would reject an otherwise perfect apartment, which was well affordable and suited your requirements, just for the sake of renting a cheaper house than your peers. The problem is similar to a travelling-salesman problem only that here, there are many salesmen who are looking for the optimized routes, and you certainly do not end up being the longest-route-finder.

I must admit that the last 2 weeks had been really strange for me. I have lived the life of an estate agent (sometimes I believed if I had come here for working as an engineer or for a training as an estate agent), a lawyer (I rewrote on my own large sections of my legal lease agreement), a deal-maker ( you need to negotiate and bargain with every damn person, be it the owner, the broker or any damn shopkeeper). And as I am sitting here in my newly-rented apartment, may be it’s time to finally play a Software Engineer (after all that is my bread-and-butter-and-jam).

PS - I know there are grammatical errors in this post, kindly ignore them. After hopping from shops-to-shops to buy beddings, I have no more energy left to re-read the post. This reminds me I still need to buy bed-sheets, huh!!!