premshree

After living practically out of the office for over a year, I finally have my own place. Pankaj was looking for a place for himself some months back, and he asked me if I’d like to move in with him. I reluctantly said yes—I wasn’t too keen on renting a place then.

The broker guy showed us several blue-pink houses with their USPs being “you can see diamond district from here, saar” and such. We were pissed.

We chanced upon our penthouse—yes, it’s a penthouse, not by Bombay standards, but yeah, a four-floor building is what you get in Bangalore—when the broker was showing us another flat in the same building. We had to rent the place. And we did.

It wasn’t very easy getting the house ready, though. I don’t know why, but there seems to be something terribly wrong with the way folks here conduct business: “yes saar, ready saar, today evening, done”. But of course, it never gets done for a month. Anyway, after giving up on them later (agreeing to bright yellow and ivory white being the same color, etc.), we moved in.

Pankaj and I have been shopping for curtains, cushions and things like that. I’m quite happy about how the place is turning out.

Here are some pictures. Pankaj’s pictures.

In Bombay, the higher up your house the more you pay. For example, in one of the places we’ve looked at, there’s a floor rise cost of INR 20 per sq. ft. So, basically, a 1000 sq. ft. flat in the 17^th floor would cost around INR 300,000 more than the flat in the lowest floor (2^nd).

When I was in Chennai, my friend who was taking me around, pointed me to a bunch of buildings where, apparently, a lot of Tamil movie songs are shot (Chennai’s Hiranandani, I guess). Out of curiosity I asked him how much a flat there’d cost. He said something, and added that the higher up you go the cost decreases. If that’s true, well, Chennai is probably new to the living-in-a-flat thing.

That’ll change.

Oh yeah, in Bombay now.