I told him that I had completely forgotten about it and so had everyone else. I did not tell him that the video on YouTube had already crossed 300,000 views.

Once we sealed our contract of silence through smiles and a handshake, Abhijit asked me if I had settled down at Dufresne well enough. I told him that everything was fine except for the fact that I was still waiting for work and that I had to find a place to live in by the twenty-fifth of the month.

Abhijit told me that things were slow now but that the pipeline was robust and that they—the top management—were expecting a huge resource crunch in June and July. So he told me to enjoy my free time while I could.

And then just before leaving he asked me to take tomorrow off and go house hunting.

I was beginning to feel a little pensive about Dufresne, to be honest, but today was a totally awesome day.

I have an extremely busy day tomorrow. I am planning to scout Bandra East, Sion and Wadala for apartments. Jenson and Reema said that they were going to check out places with a broker. Losers. I can’t believe that they’re just going to get taken for a ride by a broker voluntarily …

I bought an Eicher city map from the hotel bookstore to help me in my quest. (Charged to the room, of course.)

Watch out landlords! Here comes Einstein!

21 May 2006

7 p.m.

I may have been a little too hasty in my criticism of real-estate brokers, Diary.

Earlier in the morning I arrived at Wadala station and decided to tackle the problem with the Dufresne approach.

So I first made a shortlist of all eligible buildings within a twenty-minute brisk walk radius of the station. There were six buildings. I then decided to rate each one on a scale of one (minimum) to five (maximum) on a number of important criteria: cleanliness, access, shopping facilities, age and upkeep, security, neighbourhood.

After I collected all my inputs and completed my ratings I decided to visit each building one by one and speak to the security guy or the society office.

Three did not let me in, one told me they did not give homes to bachelors, one told me that they were exclusively booked by an FMCG marketing company’s employees and the last one threatened to let loose their Dobermans on me.

This was most demoralizing as you might expect. So I decided, against all my instincts, to give Bansal a call. Shailesh had told me he was a very friendly and efficient broker.

Within fifteen minutes Bansal picked me up from outside Wadala station and showed me eleven apartments in half an hour. Including one in the building with the Dobermans. One of the dogs actually licked his feet.

To be honest I really liked three of the flats. But I successfully managed to cover up my interest in them by frowning considerably as I walked through them. One of the buildings even had a swimming pool.