Five + Five Ants = Tenants

If you found American politics comical and entertaining, then clearly you are missing out on Apartment politics, which make Trump look like Amrish Puri decapitating seven sidekicks and American politics more boring than reading a bank locker rental agreement. 

So, it all begins when the owners of a new apartment complex come together to form a Whatsapp group. If the builder owns some apartments there and is part of this group, then the others create a second Whatsapp group which is generally named Residents-cum-Victims, with the image of a noose as the DP.

A retired Army officer is generally the most active member because he feels that civilians are so disorganised that they cannot manage anything. Civilians feel that he is so organised that he cannot manage anything.

There is always one financial planner in an apartment complex who comes up with the bright idea of investing the corpus of Rs.8.72 lakhs in an equity mutual fund that he normally would not touch himself with a spear-tied-to-a-barge-pole. Such adventurism is promptly castigated, of course, particularly by the above retired Army officer whose endearing approach to Life since 1971 has been to Shoot the Bloody Bugger.

Almost always he becomes the President of the Building Association, being completely unemployed except for his evening Patiala peg. As President, he tables the proposal to acquire CCTV and nuclear missiles because he feels that the apartment could be invaded anytime, particularly by spotted doves, which are drones sent by a neighbouring enemy country.

Generally, at least one apartment is let out to bachelors, resulting in the creation of another Whatsapp group to keep watch on the above and to debate if the smell emanating from that apartment was burnt rasam or weed. Since none in this group can identify the smell of weed and surfing the Net only tells you how horribly you can die from smoking up, everyone asks everyone for help, but no one wants to volunteer that his/her kids could expertly tell the difference.  

The Bachelors-at-Bay make matters most interesting by hosting a party in the middle of kids’ exams, which gets all the WhatsApp groups super-active, with everyone and their mothers-in-law voicing opinions, judgments, stern warnings and dire outcomes (‘They don’t CARE’ or ‘Mark my WORDS’, clearly indicating a need to conduct classes on When-to-use-CAPITALS ) and forwarding videos of Recovered Alcoholics because they could not find anything else to send.

This apartment owner lives in Minneapolis and therefore is one fricking, big help in this whole situation, but will nevertheless apply American Rules and suggest that an Officer of the Law be called, on which issue the Doves-Are-Drones Army man has strong views generally after his second peg. After the party, someone takes a video of the bottles outside the apartment and posts it everywhere and tags the PM on Twitter, thus achieving a Dutiful Citizen I-Love-My-India status with tiranga and bhel puri.

Owners also choose their apartments carefully as a result of which there is someone from Coorg who cooks panni curry on Sundays living next to a Mylapore maami who thinks garlic is Ravana Incarnate.  The resultant neighbourly affection, of course, results in the creation of two Whatsapp groups and vibrant lively conversations on manners, right- and left- wing, ancestry, calling-the-cops and fictional childhoods. 

Then, in one of these groups, someone will post a highly relevant message like ‘See What This Man From Venezuela DID To His Dog’, which, of course, makes the sender neither Left-Wing nor Right-Wing, but belonging to the North Wing of the apartment complex.

And the Armyman replies that We Must Shoot The Bugger.