PROPERTY DISPUTES

One property dispute that seems to have evinced the interest of the business community in particular and the public in general is the SHROFF vs SHROFF battle – Shardul Shroff vs Cyril Shroff, brothers and partners of the biggest law firm in India Amarchand Mangaldas. They are disputing their mother’s will where she bequeaths her entire 20% plus share to elder son Shardul Shroff, thus creating inequity in firm ownership between the two brothers. It took years for both of them to painstakingly build a clean reputation that saw their business flourishing and today this reputation is at stake.

This case seems to evoke a deeper human angle. Property disputes are not only amongst the rich today. This disease has become an epidemic and has spread across all classes and has hit the middle class in a big way. Why not, a home that was worth a few lakh of rupees 15 years back is worth crores of rupees today. The rise is phenomenal… on one hand making another home unaffordable for the family and on the other everyone clinging on to the one that has been passed on for generations.

It has become a social malice resulting from high property prices. In my own area where I live I see the fights happening between brothers and sisters over one single flat. In my hometown Kerala I was told by a journalist that joint families are breaking down due to property disputes. The Dubai returned keralities had invested in huge homes and land and now children fight over this ancestral property that they have made no contribution whatsoever financially or maybe even otherwise. Yes that is the key – No one has really earned it but wants as much a big pie that they can get. Maybe it is far-fetched to link this data; Kerala is the suicide capital of India.

I know a lady in Mumbai who was happy and cheerful. Just a year back her father passed away and the big ancestral property in her hometown is now the root of all her problems. The brothers don’t want to give her any share as they think that since she has been living far off from them and parents for many years now and is married and of another family, she does not need or earn a share. She thinks otherwise. She believes she must have a share as she wants it for her children. The fight is on and her life has now more tensions …. The irony of this malice is that the mathematics of life goes all wrong. We want to be more happier by adding that piece of property or money equivalent to the property which never existed in our lives before. But in the process we are deleting many, many good things from our life which existed before. So the maths works negative, does it not? For one, her smile nowadays is smeared with worries. Yes it sounds very philosophical but definitely not practical to the people concerned for whom it is also about fairness and equality, apart from the money.

But what all this surely does is kill the crux of human life - family. Family is everything. More then ever it is important for children to grow up in big large family of uncles and aunties.

Rising Property prices - It has started making all of us more inhuman than ever before.