Last month – I became the Treasurer of our apartment association. There was no election. No one wanted to take up these positions. For long, the same set of individuals were running the apartment work. I felt obliged to pitch in.
Running apartments with 650 houses is an emotional ride. You always end up in a situation of ‘Damn if you do, damn if you dont’. Every matter has conflicting opinions. People do not think twice before posting castigating comments. Often folks forget that the one running the association are doing it on a voluntary basis. I am spending at least one day every week sitting at the association office poring over accounts, transactions and in general trying to stay on top of things. There are at least 25 different vendors or suppliers. There are bank accounts, auditing, collection of maintenance fees and a slew of other activities that will keep you busy. On top of that you get into sundry issues like TDS (Tax Deduction at Source). Some vendors do not want you to collect the same. And since you are part of an association, one of the other association official would have identified a supplier for an event or a function. Now, how many IT folks know about TDS? This is news to almost everyone running the association. So, when it comes to deduction of TDS – every one gets squemish. The vendor asks for more money if you are deducting TDS. This becomes a rather awkward conversation.
Despite all of this, our association is reasonably well run. We need to conduct monthly residents meetings. This is part of our association’s Deed of Declaration (DoD). Any expenditure over Rs. 50,000 needs the resident’s approval. In essence, any reasonable modification/beautification work, needs residents approvals. Its not such a bad thing as we have meetings every month.
Now, the last residents meeting (the first one – that we conducted after we took over the association) reached its nadir – with just one resident showing up. These meetings occur on the last Sunday of every month. Typically it happens at 10:00 AM. Would it be such a tough thing for residents to show up for one hour in a month – to discuss what is happening in their community? Most of our friends are in the same complex. When we have an emergency (starting from borrowing a bowl of sugar, to a trip to the hospital emergeny) these same people help each other out. And yet no one can sacrifice an early rise on a Sunday to walk across tot he Club House. So many people though have the time to comment on topics trhough emails. That medium is fairly asyncrhonous you see. You dont have to face someone in the eye, when making your comments.
I wrote an email in the pretext of minuting the meeting notes. I will share that meeting notes a few weeks later, when the currency of the matter has subsided. But, the good thing that happened with this was; we used the opportunity to pull in some kids who were playing and started the Kids Association. We are planning to entrust them with identifying vehicles without association stickers, people who are driving in the wrong direction and in general enforce community rules. We believe, adults will find it difficult to talk back to confident and cocky kids. Today most adults fire back when security members ask them to not flout rules.
And besides, if you do talk back to some children, imagine what those kids will tell their friends, who may just happen to be your child. That child may come and ask you on why you are breaking rules! I hope a lot of such emabrassing situations occur in our homes. In all of India. We teach our children what is right and what is not. But when it comes to practising, we choose the convenient.
nice one..I liked the kids being the rule keepers.
Thanks Dinesh!
Great idea to teach adults thru kids. I always felt that traffic rules and civic sense should be mandatory subjects in schools.
thanks Partha!
Wield your power in a responsible way 🙂 Kids learn quickly! How many traffic violation tickets has Dhruv handed out?
he is too young to join the gang at the moment. We have some older kids in the group. Currently they are all busy with their exams and stuff. So not much going on.
Hi Vinod, that's a great idea! Do let us know about your experience with this experiment, we would love to showcase the same in the ApartmentADDA Champions blog. http://apartmentadda.com/blog/champions/
This could also inspire other Associations to try it out!