I have become real

I'm not sure how it started, but I was thinking about it for quite sometime then. Maybe, I was nettled by the first rented house that I took in Bangalore - almost a dungeon with only one window for the entire house, it had four portions, rented out to four families - space problem, water problem - comfort had been clearly outstripped from that house. I could never understand why I should pay five thousand Indian Rupees for that clunky place, I very well realize that the Rupee value had been dispirited over the last few decades, but didn't know to this magnitude.

Then we wanted to shift, at a stage when we felt we no longer could be inhabitants of that domicile, we wanted to kibosh the practices of almost falling at the knees of the house owner to switch the overhead-tank-motor on, of looking at his over-adiposed face and hand him over the rent - I'm not too sure what his background was, but I bet he wouldn't have passed his high school. I just felt he doesn't enjoy any quality that I want a person to possess when he thinks I owe him five thousand Indian Rupees every month.

I just casually looked at some advertisements about apartments and sites in one of the newspapers - cogitating over it again, I agnized the benevolence it would bestow upon me - no rent-paying business, tax exemption, own-house-pride and you can then become a rent-collecting house owner, at least with the satisfaction of making someone else stay in a comfortable house. It then started, first as a knowledge-hunt, then as a passion-hunt and then the fervour got into me so powerfully that I wanted not to stop till I own a property in Bangalore.

Apartments or an individual house? The decision took around two months of the hunt. Built house or a plot, another three months - in these five months, I would have visited at least twenty apartments, a dozen of built houses and at least four dozen plots - plots almost spanning the entire East Bangalore. Then I began to realize the stretch this process has brought in me, almost every weekend I would be with some real estate broker or would be hashing out with some property owner. Weekend hunts became daily hunts, and my bike reached the 10000-km mark, I am sure half of it would have been spent in the roads (or the no roads) of East Bangalore.

The wheedling of the brokers - this site will triple in the next one year, water in the next two months, roads in the next six months - come on, the Airport Road flyover is lying unattended to for the last one year, thanks to all the hardwork (or the no hardwork) by all people involved, it was opened up for public recently. It was a hard time believing all those palavers, at least, I had, in the journey developed the maturity to identify which ones to trust.

HSR layout - Airport road - VivekNagar - Koramangala - CV RamanNagar - BTM layout - Outer Ring Road - Sarjapur Road - Ramamurthy Nagar - K R Puram - Whitefield - Hosur Road, that's lot of places to explore. Environment - Budget - Future - Proximity - Location, that's lot of qualities to analyze. How many phone numbers I had to store on my cell phone, how many people I had to speak with, how much I had to understand about the real estate business in Bangalore - how much encrytion, how much decryption - it was actually a good period of ten months in my life. Newspapers, magazines, web sites - I left almost no stone unturned. But the one thing I liked about me - every time I turned on the keys in my bike, I would believe this one I would finalize, till the last plot that I saw, the one near Marathahalli, the place is called Doddanekkundhi - five hundred metres from the outer ring road, five kilometres from where my office's new premises would be.

Well, I have now become real, from this day, the twenty first of July, 2006, all that piece and parcel of residentially converted land bearing Site numbers 7 and 8 in Gururaj Layout of Mahadevapura City Municipal Council belongs to me!