Bengaluru has many ‘firsts’ to its credit. It is the first city to be known by that name, for example. And the first city to ask prospective tenants for their high school marks before being allowed to rent an apartment. You might need to read that again to make sure you got it right.
The paperwork involved in getting things done in many parts of the world, including ours, is immense. You want a passport? Get the police to sign your certificate of good behaviour. A visa? Let us see your bank accounts and try to convince us in 200 words why you don’t need a visa (presumably because anyone who needs a visa can’t be trusted with it).
Admission into kindergarten? Bring along certificates of the child’s previous work experience. A marriage certificate? Send us pictures of all previous girlfriends and boyfriends. No, I made up the last two, but the point is no one would be surprised if such were indeed the case. The crazier it is, the truer it sounds, the argument being, surely no one would make that up?
And so to our landlord. His requirements were laid out unambiguously. It began with a LinkedIn or Twitter profile. Then a certified copy duly signed of the date he joined his company. And finally, the marks sheets of his tenth and twelfth standard exams. Sundry other documents like the Permanent Account Number (PAN) were ‘welcome’. What was missing (maybe some other landlord is already working on it) was shoe size, number of blue shirts, daily teeth-brushing record and ticket stubs from the first bus ride or movie show.
A potential tenant was rejected because his 12th-grade marks weren’t as high as required. The landlord wanted a round ninety per cent overall. The nearly-tenant had an edgy 78 per cent. Parents giving their children reasons for getting good marks in school now have another one to add to the list besides seats in engineering or medical colleges: “Do you want to rent a house when you grow up?”
Fewer than half a dozen people I know would qualify to rent an apartment in Bengaluru if that marks card rule became law. I suspect they would then have to amend it slightly so the ninety percenters got the top floor, the eighty percenters got the one below, and so on till the ground floor where a large number would reside. They might have to build the basement in many floors too.
The strange thing is, no one I know who got ninety per cent in school is doing well enough in life to afford an apartment or even rent one. It is the forty percenters and seventy percenters who have turned out to be famous doctors, IT stars and businessmen. Some of them don’t need to rent an apartment, they can buy the whole damn building.
The moral is: do well, but not too well. And have two marks cards – the real one and another to show ninety percent of the prospective landlords.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
