Looking for a house, anyone?

Ok, so finding a house within a modest budget in Bangalore is impossible. Nope, not happening. Not in the area you want (which is old Bangalore, where you can still hear Kannada being spoken often and where your neighbous are not high-flyers). I don’t get this. Anyway the people with pots of money wouldn’t want to stay in such areas (these areas are not posh you see). We’ve been wanting to buy either a flat or an independent house for a while now. And where ever we go, we’re just baffled by how much Bangalore has grown and how expensive it has become. A lot of you would say, that’s to be expected, it’s a growing city. Well, grown to such an extent that there are apartments being constructed purely ‘By Invitation’, i.e. the builders invite only some of the affluent to buy the apartment(naturally for an unheard of price). See, all this might be common in Bombay or Delhi, but here??? Or maybe I’m just naive, maybe I haven’t grown with the city…well, maybe I don’t want to. In the midst of all this frantic searching for a house (‘coz our flat owner increased our rent suddenly by 30% owing to the fact that he was paying more income tax!), I had this conversation with hubby darling:

Me: So, what do you think of this flat, should we zero in on this?

H:  We can’t afford it. The EMI will eat into almost our entire salary, we will not be able to sustain our current lifestyle.

Me: What do you propose we should do? I’d really like to have our own place here.

H: I don’t understand what’s so wrong in staying in a rented place. It’s very convenient in every aspect.

Me: Well, that is true…but it’s not our own place

H: What is more important? Being happy or owning a place? We are happy here.

Me: It’s not that simple…

H: Why not? The whole point is about being together and being happy, isn’t it? Does anything else matter…err…expect for maybe a faster car?

Life is as simple as you make it, isn’t it?

p.s. We have stopped searching for the house!

p.p.s. No, I’m not saying ‘Bengaluru’, that’s what I say when I speak in Kannada, not in English. I don’t get the reason as to why the government thinks changing the name would give the city its real identity. Ridiculous.