Producer and director Nivedita Basu went through a difficult situation recently. A portion of the ceiling of her house in Mumbai fell down. She talks about the incident
“Staying at the top floor of any building is a disaster in Mumbai because of the monsoons and the wear and tear which the weather here does. Same thing happened in my building. The repair has been going on for the past 5 years. It fell at a place where my daughter and I were doing something just five minutes before this accident happened. We just went inside in the bedroom and the slabs fell down, one in the study room and another in the hall,” shares the Head of content, strategy and business alliance for new Hindi GEC channel Atrangii and Atrangii OTT
Monsoon is already on. Hence, getting repair work done at home is difficult. “The worst time to have your ceiling damaged is the monsoons. The walls of the rooms needed to be broken down, because there was moisture and dampness in them. All the bedroom walls have become weak and the side walls have developed cracks and started breaking as well. So when the labourers started breaking the parts that were broken, the other parts also started crumbling down. I literally had to call movers and packers and made the house empty so that the repair could be finished. Now for three and a half months my house is all packed up. Luckily we have another house in the same society so we shifted on the second floor of that, still it was inconvenient because of the monsoons, so I decided to drop my kids at my mother’s house in Delhi. It’s been a month now they are there while we are getting the work done,” she shares.
Nivedita’s advice to the people living in Mumbai is to never buy a flat on the top floor. “It’s nothing to do with the builder. It’s just the quality of sand which doesn’t hold the monsoons rain properly. Living on the top floor only looks good in pictures and magazine covers, but in reality it is the most inconvenient thing. So, if you notice any cracks anywhere just repair them immediately and don’t wait or else it would get worse,” she adds.
Having two kids at home during such a situation only adds to one’s worries. “I have a 4 year- old and a 6 month-old child. I am not going to take it lightly and will take strict actions because this has been happening for a while despite telling the society heads, but they were taking things lightly,” she signs out.
