Ek Akela Is Shahar Mein

July 20th, 2008
Before I start, I am going to be very optimistic and assume that this blog will be read in the non-Hindi speaking part of the world as well and I will therefore translate the title into English as well. It reads,"A lone guy in this city", this city being Mumbai and the lone guy as one could easily guess is yours truly. It's been 3 weeks since I moved to Mumbai and I haven't been able to find my groove yet. Not to say that I don't like the city, I think I do, it's just that the time it takes to get used to the ways of this city is perhaps much more than any other. But then, no other city is quite like Mumbai either.

I took a train from Kanpur to Mumbai and was met at the Dadar station by a driver sent by my company to pick me up. I was also met at the station by Vishnu, my roommate from business school who now lives in Mumbai. The hotel was about 10 kms from the station and it took us about 2 hours to traverse the distance - fairly common going North from Dadar in the evenings. I won't say I was surprised but it did serve as a crude reminder of how much 'fun' traveling was going to be in Mumbai.

The next few days were great- meeting friends, family and co-workers and enjoying the change of environment after a long break since B-school got over. But soon I had to take the plunge into one of my most grueling experiences in recent times - APARTMENT HUNTING! The last time I looked for an apartment was in Washington DC and I spent a good two months doing so, but that was for other reasons (I was traveling to Cincinnati every week and only had weekends to look for a place). I had about 2 weeks in Mumbai to find a place else my company would kick me out of my hotel room... well, that's an exaggeration I would admit, they would have asked me very politely to bear my own expenses.

So, I started looking for a suitable apartment online on a number of websites and I was delighted to find hundreds of postings for 'my ideal place' to live. I noted down the details of many and called up the agent and booked an appointment to see the few places I really liked. I show up for the apartment viewing at the scheduled time and realize how much of a novice I was to think that those were my ideal places to live! Almost nothing was as advertised - as long as the place has enough space for 3 people to stand it counts as capacious, if you are seeing anything but your neighbour's window from your balcony then it's a great view, as long as you can reach the airport or train station within 1 hour from there it's called right next to it, anything less than 10 years old is new, put together a dining table, a bed and a refrigerator and you have got yourself a fully furnished apartment, not to forget if you can reach your house without falling into a man hole or being robbed on the way - even if you get drenched by rain water logging on the street till your knees and you are surrounded by slums on three sides of the complex - you are in a very posh location! And of course since you are getting such a wonderful place, you will have to pay a handsome amount for it - it's only fair and I am sure you would agree.

So I got the idea of an ideal place out of my system fairly quickly and started looking for the least compromised option. After seeing about 30 places over a period of two weeks (did I say that I just had two weeks to find a place?) I finally settled for a nice 1BHK in Powai that didn't cost me a leg and an arm and the owners seemed like reasonable people. It was a new apartment (new in the same meaning that I was aware of till now) and close to my office with the kind of amenities that I would like to have. It was categorized under "semi-furnished" which typically means you get furniture but not electronic items, which seemed to be the case here as well. Turns out that this place was literally semi-furnished. It had a dining table but no chairs, it had a sofa set with the rocking chair missing (I found it later on at the owner's residence when I went to sign the contract), there was a stove without the burners and there was a bed without a mattress. I am not even going to talk about no lights, no curtains and... you still reading?

August 18th, 2008
Oh well, all that's a matter of past now and I am almost settled in my place. I am still waiting to get a burner and a gas cylinder so that I can deliver on my promise to prepare a Thai meal for my bhaiya-bhabhi. I got a fancy microwave/grill/convection combo this morning only too realize that its plug is so huge that it doesn't fit into any of the sockets in the apartment. I am not even going to talk about what I had to go through to get my cable connection and internet (I even had to call TRAI at some point of time - but that's another blog altogether). I think I can safely say that in the last 6 weeks or so I have talked to more people (and machines) than I have done in my entire life. My Sony Ericsson phone has refused to store any more numbers and any time I make a new contact I have to find someone from my past life whom I don't need anymore and delete him (or her) from my life (I mean phonebook) and then add the new person in... has improved my prioritization skills tremendously.

If only I could tell you how much I love this city...