Renting a flat is a fairly new phenomenon in India. Till a few decades ago, kids or well you also say adults, would mostly stay with their parents only.
Maybe some might move out after marriage or if they get a job in another city, but otherwise the norm was that kids don’t have any compulsion to move out of their parent’s house, unlike the Western countries.
Where children usually move out as soon as 18 opting to stay in dorms for college or at least when they start to earn.
But this thinking has appealed to many of us and slowly more and more of the current generation are wanting to move out and live independently.
However, though the young generation might be all for living on their own, but the society at large is definitely not there and well the unfortunate part is that they are the ones that determine whether you get a flat or not.
For some time now, I have been seeing this ad on my Newsfeed about homes that don’t discriminate.
And it got me thinking of a scene from Pink, where the neighbours were always suspicious or wary of the 3 young girls living on their own away from parents.
The Prejudice Is Cemented Deep In Us
The truth is that the prejudice and preconditioned thinking is cemented so deep within the older generation that the minute they hear bachelor renters, immediately their hackles raise up and most of the time, they reject the candidate without hearing much else.
To be honest, this wariness is not without cause as many bachelor renters have proven to be uncouth and irresponsible and have brought about trouble with them.
That does not mean that all bachelor renters will be like that, or just because someone is a bachelor it will automatically mean that are trouble makers.
This prejudice does not stop at just bachelors, it also extends to women, people from minority groups, differing religious backgrounds and ethnicity.
Various housing societies or landlords have different rules of who can live there and who cannot.
This according to me is not only unfair but downright illogical.
Isn’t It Time We Have, Homes That Don’t Discriminate?
I believe it is high time that we have flats or homes that don’t discriminate someone based on their relationship status, religion or gender.
To me, it almost feels like we are making progress in practically only technology and science and the rest is still stagnant, still steady at that very place it was a few decades ago.
Shouldn’t we as a society be past all this and the first being to stop discriminating or preventing someone a home based on such superficial details.
If don’t want to keep someone as a renter, then look at their police or criminal records, their background, get references from the renters about family, friends and employers.
Contact these people and find out what kind of a person they are.
Keep them on a trial basis and monitor their activities and such in order to make sure that they don’t bring any unnecessary or even harmful trouble over to your house.
Signing off I would like to say that, maybe homes that don’t discriminate might be a long way off, however landlords and housing society associations should in the meantime, go over their current rules and try to adapt them to this generations.
Image Credits: Google Images
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http://edtimes.in/2016/07/indian-millennials-how-these-things-are-normal-for-us-not-for-our-parents/
