15th November 2008 :: Yeh tera ghar, yeh mera ghar
I was not looking for a house when I should have been because I convinced myself that my stay in Bombay is not going to be a long one and I feel that was a state of absolute bliss. Now the property rates have shot through the roof, I am looking for a house. A house that I very well know will prove to be more of a liability than an asset and I am unable to find it. What I like, I can't afford and what I can afford, I don't like. What to do? I think to start with, I'll do the usual—blame the government. In a city where the population has been increasing consistently for as long as anyone can remember, very little has been done to solve the housing problem. The administration has not been proactive in doing anything except clearing more land for construction and legalizing the illegal structures. I am not a town planner so I won't know much but a fairly obvious solution would have been making more houses in the same place. I don't know why I don't see any 50 storied residential buildings around me and I wonder why 7 floor buildings are approved any more.
If there was an honest effort to solve this housing problem, we would have bigger and much cheaper houses in Bombay without eating into our green belts like Aarey or Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
On Mental Floss
Splitting the Indian atom
Any political leader with a microphone is trying to get his share of the division, whether it is Mayawati dividing the dalits from the rest of the nation or whether it is Raj Thackery who is dividing them as Marathis and non marathis...read more