Rent or buy a home? That is the question.
If Shakespeare lived in modern India, it’s a fair bet that he would make Hamlet’s soliloquy less about suffering the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune and more about the question that faces so many Indian youth today – whether ‘tis better to rent an apartment, or to buy a house. The dilemma is a relatively new one. Before liberalization created the white-collar IT industry and grew the financial sector exponentially, most of us grew and lived close to home, and even those who emigrated to the larger cities typically planned to return home sooner or later. Even if not, housing remained largely affordable for anyone with a decent job. Far away from home But legions of young Indians now work in one or the other of India’s mega-cities, and the freedom and opportunity they encounter there means that they have little incentive to return to the smaller towns they came from for the length of their career at least. Unfortunately, the real-estate market has skyrocketed as well, and