An expensive trash called home!

We recently moved (10th time in 5 years?) to a gated community. And how?

We renovated the house completely, ripping off all but the walls and doing it up pretty nicely. So, like any proud house owner, I am very interested in comparing notes, walls, door handles and knobs with the neighbors.

First stop is our next door neighbor which is a family of 4. A bald man whom I cant guess the age of. He could be 35 to 45. His wife who is certainly older than me. Two kids one of which is adorable and the other is perhaps a serial serial-watching overgrown kid that could have been adorable.

The sampling of an open shelf outside the door that keeps tasteless chappals tells me that they couldnt be our competitor for tasteful interiors. Perhaps I shouldnt call them tasteless chappals. May be they are. But the chappals themselves have to have tasted a concoction of paan spit, worker saliva and all urban waste that did not find a dustbin. Ah! Tasteless chappals that have their own taste!

Next stop is a muslim house that smells mutton, ather and dampness depending on the day of the time. They re-use pepsi pet bottles for water and dry clothes on cane chairs. Nah! Not competitors by a long mile.

There are 8 houses in each of those 8 floors totalling to 64 and I've haven't done them all yet. But, the house of ***** (or as we fondly call as Saettu veedu) was much cause of concern. The beautiful climbers and herb garden outside the house was threatening to puncture my pride and I had to sneak a peek. The Rajasthani glasswork style exteriors for the windows should have been a warning. I ventured to test further and with some help from the wind, I caught a glimpse of what was inside.  OMG! A crimson red monstrous couch that could blind the eyes, had it not been for the flooring which would already render the guest blind before they could look up. A mosaic of all variants of rad and beige on the flooring, only resembling paan again! No wonder their kid is so tired. Its just the exasperation of having to take in those colors every living minute, inside that house! Thank god my obsession with red stops only with dresses!

Failed attempts at potted plants, old furniture that are not old enough to leave once and for all, strewn chappals, misguided color sense that equates florescent to aesthetics, wall testimonials of soiled hands of workers and other people with running noses that also had an addiction for snuff are all I see when I go around looking for a house that would give us a healthy fight to the throne of tasteful decor.

A side note: Men in our apartment society have an average of 36 waist size and dont replenish their undies all that often! I have no access to their wardrobe and dint find the need either. The nylon cloth liners are apparently a standard part of exterior props for most houses!

Cute Baby!

I'm in that phase of my life that my friends, peers, cousins and colleagues have started investing on insurance of biological kind - babies. Even I did that, a couple of years back.

But to think of it over a cup of (unmade and unserved, by wife) lassi, the engaging(!) process and 10 months of earnest effort later, what we have on hands is, yes definitely, a bundle of joy. But then, that bundle is also quite not the beautiful type, with all birth wrinkles and stains.

My kid, your kid and all our kids are born closely resembling our ecological ancestors of arboreal kind! (For the wooden heads: Monkeys, I meant!)

So there is no fascination for viewing, liking and commenting "Oh chweet kid" on Facebook or email. I cannot bring myself to say such things, when we indeed know it takes a few months before a kid gets out of the orangutan mode! Till then its a bundle of joy (just for the parents and grandparents). So i restrain myself with just a "Monkey maari iruku" comment to my spouse (which I did when my kid was born too! No bias here!)

So the next time you send me a pic of a new born and I dont says "So cute", dont think I dont care. In fact, I care. And so I dont say a thing!