Column

This year is already two weeks’ old and it already feels old, like same old, same old. The city feels even older.

Last year at least winter stayed and overstayed its welcome, giving us something new to crib about. This time it’s playing with us, coming, going, showing a glimpse of what it could be before retiring like some stupidly shy girl. So we’re already at summer if this is what global warming means (okay, I know what it means all right, please don’t try to tell me). Of course, it may all change tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we’ve lived through a financial scandal - which Mumbai was not the centre of, yay yay yay - and two strikes. See, same old same old? But at the heart of the Satyam trick lay the chimera of land and that we in Mumbai know all too well. So lakhs of people queued up to pick up forms to apply to a Mhada’s housing scheme while across the city, distant suburbs and satellite towns, hundreds of flats lie unoccupied since they are priced in some builder-inhabited fantasyland, which no one else has thekey to enter.

There are three new buildings coming up around where I live. But there are three “new” buildings around me too, which have been up for two years and are largely unoccupied. One builder won’t even talk to you (“we are not interested in selling at the moment”: ya sure, you built this for your own viewing pleasure) and the others charge such astronomical rates that no one’s buying.

Talk to any builder and he blames the media (of course) and the potential buyer (unrealistic expectations, go figure). The brokers say that everything’s stagnant. The builders suggest that you buy for a fairly reasonable budget, a flat in Karjat which seems grossly unfair.

Okay, shoot me for saying this, but Karjat is NOT Mumbai. I mean 20 years ago Karjat is where you went for picnics. There’s a wondrous Builder-Made Fairy Land around us. Even Ramalinga Raju thought that.

Pick of the week:
TV news channels remain a mystery to me, although I did conscientiously watch whatever I could on the unravelling of the Satyam scam. Through this I learnt that business TV news anchors have even stranger accents than regular TV news anchors.

And that businessmen/corporatewallahs/industrialists speak a language that is completely foreign to me, which makes their accents immaterial.