Yes, you can congratulate me now. I have bought a house, and man was it a herculean task! So as a veteran in searching a house, going for a housing loan and getting everything mostly right, I’m going to write about what can (and most definitely does) go wrong, and how to beat it.

1) Start with finances. If you don’t have the money to make the down payment, delay it for as long as possible. Don’t think that you’ll arrange it someday. Arrange the money now. Earn, borrow, steal or rob, but have it right now. If the house you’re eyeing is unfurnished, account for shiploads of money (usually >10% of the house price itself) or plan to go for another house furnishing loan.

2) Beware of banks. They say that they will give you 85% (or even 90%) of the sale value of the price, what they mean is that they will give you 80% of the market value (which the banks calculate themselves, and is quite lesser than the sale price). Finalize which bank are you going to go forward with, and start the procedure ASAP. It easily takes 3-4 weeks for any sane bank to actually give you the cheque of the remaining amount from the time you approach them for a housing loan.

3) Actually this should have been point # 1, but here it goes: Maintain a good CIBIL score. Remember the credit card you once defaulted? Or the one you thought was extorting money by asking a lot of stupid ‘finance charges’ and decided to shout at the call centre girl to get it settled for half? My friend, you’ve destroyed half your chances to get a housing (or any other) loan. If affects your eligibility more than anything else. Stay clean, pay your credit card bills, don’t have bounced cheques, don’t make settlements with a bank EVER, pay the full amount.

4) Get married. No seriously, being married gives you a host of advantages. Your credibility in the eyes of bank increases. Your loan eligibility increases if your spouse is working. Your CIBIL score is offset by that of your wife, who has religiously paid all her CC bills always, and never let her bank balance drop to zero. Also, she has most probably spent more time in her present company than you have in your present organization

5) Before paying any amount to the seller, figure out whether you are eligible for the loan that you are looking out for. This is the step when you finalize your bank, submit documents for loan application, and manipulate the seller in delaying the token amount payment. The most amount of hurdles occur at this step. Have you been in your present company for less than a year? Problem! Are you asking for a loan whose EMI exceeds half your monthly salary? More problem.
Make sure you have your identity proof, address proof. PAN card, salary slips, bank statements (for all accounts you hold) for a year. Working in a startup doesn’t exactly help your cause.

6) Assuming that you’ve signed the sale agreement (different from a sale deed), and made the down payment of 15% (or whatever percentage) of your house price, now is the time to get everything fixed in your new house. The seller has smelled blood with the few lacs you’ve paid him, and will be willing to fix anything for the remaining. Check all the switches in the house, any trace of seepage, broken tiles, drainage system, your parking lot, any remaining dues. Lots of stuff to check, really. But its important that you do it now, because once you’ve paid the entire amount… most probably the seller will forget that you or the house exist.

7) Go sign the sale deed. Reach your registration office on time, and keep every document ready. Don’t act over smart and just comply. Do whatever you’re told, pay any overheads (yes, another term for bribe) and you’ll be done in a couple of hours. Your banker will keep the original registration documents and give you a photostat. Make sure you don’t give any more docs to the banker than required. Do not, for example hand over your maintenance agreement or your clubhouse membership to him. You’ll need it.

8 ) If you get a vanilla house, with no wood work whatsoever, you need to also get a house improvement loan. Well that’s for some other day, but the only thing I’d suggest is: Plan the amount you’ll need for getting the furniture done, multiply by 1.5. These things are never cheap, and they aren’t only as expensive as you had planned initially.

I don’t usually write blogs.
I certainly don’t crib or make fun of fellow human beings, publicly.
So what really grinds my gears here?

Nothing really My bored self couldn’t say ‘no’ to Anuj’s “Dude! You gotta write about this one on my blog“.

So, the motif of this post is an accidental discovery made by me sitting in the confinements of a cybercafé in downtown Kolhapur. Yeah, the birthplace of those famous-but-i-have-no-frikkin-idea-how footwear. So tacky and uncomfortable that I could never get my feet to wear a pair for one hour straight.

Anyway, let’s come back to the cybercafé where I was going to search something in Google. I clicked in the search box to start typing and popped open the dropdown menu with past searches stored in the browser cache.

My eyes and smile grew wider as I moved down the list, till I reached this absolutely breathtaking set of queries. I have seen a lot of bizarre stuff; I have seen a lot of crazy stuff; Heck, I’ve even seen MBAs actually doing some meaningful work. But I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I had never ever seen anything as phenomenal as this:

Yes! I had to pick my jaws up from the floor too!

Mosquito Net! Really???

Our hero was probably looking for fishnet clad females.
He must have seen the photographs or videos somewhere, and must be enamored by it. No surprises there. When I saw something similar in my childhood days, I liked it too! I can distinctly remember spotting those pages, presumably torn from a magazine, thrown on that deserted road over a which my 13 odd yrs old past self was biking nonchalantly. That  sudden visual stimulus prodded my brains hard enough to make my bicycle do a  5-0 in 0 seconds. “Holy cow!”; “What is it that she’s wearing?”;  “This thing is so cool!”; “Is it really what I think it is?”; “Oh my!”; “Why oh why would anyone throw these gems on the road like this?”, were few of the many thoughts that flashed across my titillated mind.
No, I didn’t pick up and stash those pictures. That happened later. and it was a completely different set of pictures, outside the scope of this article.

Now I wonder if I would have done something similar back then if I had the luxury of having Google at my command. The imagery was fascinating, I must admit. But I’m not sure if I was driven enough.

So there are many things that go to this dude’s credit. You just have to give it to him!
A – He’s got taste. An evolved one at that!
B – He’s a fighter. A go-getter! He seeks, fails, and tries again.
C – He’s creative! I couldn’t have come up with something like this. Could you?

It was Google’s job to better its algorithms to understand the need of this youth. Our man did his best. Not his fault.

I’m not taking any credit away from Google though. It’s awesome! But like all the know-it-all smarty-pants it does have fun with you once in a while. Which brings us to my other discoveries that fateful evening. A lot of queries followed this pattern:

Aishwarya hot and necked
Rakhi Sawant hot and necked
Mallika hot and necked

This is huge! Did he really wanna see these women necking?
Why would he need to go to a cybercafé to see necking when they show it on TV all the time. This age old technique has been depicting both love and rape on Indian silverscreen forever.
Not too difficult to guess what would have happened. This one probably wanted to see Rakhi au natural or, probably in his words, ‘neced’ or ‘neked’. And Google threw a googlie: “Did you mean necked?”
In a blink this dude must have gone, “Oh! Yes, exactly… yes yes. That’s what I meant.“  Google must have sniggered while this gullible juvenile browsed through the almost similar results thrown at him anyway.

You too have done this to the naive kids, haven’t you? You insensitive scumbag.

Before I conclude this post, I can’t help but wonder how my english literature professor would have interpreted the mosquito-net phenomenon.I can almost hear his words: “The author is a clever satirist. At display is his snide acerbic wit with carnal overtones. He brings the reader’s attention to the fact that most models these days have assets which qualify as ‘mosquito bites’. Therefore he cleverly weaves his metaphorical mosquito net and tells Google exactly what he does not want to see. Hence he craftily coveys his fancy of the ample curves of the feminine form.”

Hail mosquito-nets!

- Anupam

What does this domain makes you think?

1)A confession?

2)A bad name for a porn site?

3)An ice cream which refuses to melt?

4)A lame cocktail?