6 Skills you must master when you’re starting a new-life independently

Let us interrupt your daydream about living life like the characters in the TV series F.R.I.E.N.D.S – moving out of home and into a cool apartment in an unknown city far away. You see, the episodes don’t just begin and end happily ever after. There is an eerily accurate theme song to dispel any romantic versions you are brewing of this ride through this ‘hurricane’, if you are unprepared. “So no one told you life was gonna be this way. Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A. It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear.” When it’s time to call the packers and movers and start a new life solo, perfect these six essential life-skills.

1. Get hammered, or get nailed

Women have curiously been discounted from learning these basic life-skills, even as befriending hammers and nails is the only way you can make your castle go from looking like The Eyrie to looking like The Red Keep–which is what everyone wants to do when they are far away from everything familiar. You suddenly want every flat and barren surface to bear reminders of the fact that you are not a loner, by providing photographic evidence of that people don’t mind being seen in public with you. But you know what else is barren? Either the drawer where the tools should be kept, or the section of your brain wouldn’t know how to make sense of all the paraphernalia even if the drawer were fully loaded. Buy a DIY toolkit containing a screwdriver set, electric flashlight or torch, electroprobe, hand shank, jacket, band tape, screwdriver, and get your hands dirty. Find a wooden surface that you can nail for practice, and then nail the task at hand – making your house look like someone built a museum on your insignificant little life. 

1. Let there be light

Either you think the woman’s body is an exceptionally good conductor of electricity, or you are just not big on the freedom to read and write and move around after the sun goes down. When my best friend got her own place, I made her a personalised lampshade with coloured tints and photos that dangles and swirls like a diva mid air. I couriered my warrior to her all excitedly, only to find, when I went to visit her six month later, that it had been given a transfer to the flower pot department, as she hadn’t a bloomin’ clue how to put a lamp together. Since she was barely managing to fund her tomato requirements, calling an electrician would have taken months of budgeting. All we had to do that weekend was look up some easy tutorials on YouTube or WikiHow, and my gift met its fruition. Last I heard, she’s developed a fetish for anything that blinks or glows, and has turned her place into the set for Dum Maaro Dum. Learning to change the tube, installing a WiFi router, replacing play dough skills with M-seal and are also vital components of waking up from a third world nightmare.

1. “Unagi”

While you don’t need to be told what the need for self-defense is in these dark times, I’d recommend Krav Maga, specifically, as your best bet in the worst case scenario. Here’s a bunch of super interesting facts on it from Wikipedia: it was developed for the Israel Defense Forces, and has the best techniques sourced from aikido, judo, boxing and wrestling – but, it was adapted to be useful in a real-life Street Fighter 3D kind of situation. Based on sharpening your instincts and hence, your counter attacks, if you master it, you may even be able to defend yourselves against attackers with weapons and firearms. And Wise Confucius say, it will also come in handy when you get on to a Virar fast and have to get off at Andheri.

1. Financial planning

Sometimes you’re the Master of Coin sitting daintily on a chest full of riches, sometimes you’re the chest itself that is cowering under the pressure of a fat spendthrift brat. The former is you living with your parents when you didn’t have to defend your attachment to 24-hour air conditioning even to Al Gore, whereas the latter is you living by yourself, where your mind is at constant loggerheads on whether you really even need the fan at all now, in your Chennai apartment. There is a series of things you didn’t even realise cost fat wads of Benjamins – any kind of furniture, maintenance, cultural donations, the final installment of the fog machine you purchased 10 months ago. Download a good budgeting app to keep a hawk’s eye on your incomings and outgoings. Divide your salary into a ratio between investing, spending and putting in a fixed deposit, and activate systems that pull money out of your accounts accordingly. Switch to ECS for your essential bills, like mobile, electricity and any important instalments you have to pay off. And most importantly, it’s time you make your existence subject to market risks, and start reading some offer documents carefully. Find someone you trust, or simply hire a cheap personal financial expert who can make some smart investments on your behalf to ensure that your account doubles before your expenses do.

1. Changing a tyre

That fifth tyre in the trunk of your car wasn’t contraband being smuggled using you as a mule; the car company put it in there as a spare intended for you, not a mechanic, to use in an emergency. It is anyways proven that the likelihood of flat tyres is directly proportional to how lonely and far away from civilisation the road you are driving on is and how swiftly your phone’s battery flat lines on you. According to an article on thisismoney.co.uk, their AA, RAC and Green Flag attend 8, 50, 000 wheel-change call-outs a year; more than one in three drivers can’t change the oil or coolant in their car; their mechanics spend six hours a day fixing simple maintenance tasks and botched DIY vehicle repairs.Some strategic hours spent on YouTube for tutorials – and you’re good to go on your next all-girls trip to the Himalayas to handle blown minds as well as tyres.

1. Networking even without your net working

Notice how I left the word ‘social’ out? I often side with the old-timers who are always looking at technology and digitisation with a magnifying glass in one hand and a pepper-spray in the other. My main contention with social media is that it was to be a means to an end, but now, it has become the end in itself. It was a means of communication to maintain real relationships with friends offline, but it is now replacing the need for human contact. But, the glare of your screen cannot replace the twinkle in the eye of a complete stranger when you discover you two have something in common. Certain apps, like Moodoo, let you get online so you can get offline. Moodoo tells you about the various meet ups happening around you and lets you know which of your friend are free and available to catch up. When you are in a completely new place, getting out there to attend local community events will not only help make friends and pick up the pieces of the social life you left behind in your hometown to rebuild another, but also forge a support system for you. But apps on food-crawls will not secure your night-crawls. The day you move, walk (so you remember better) to explore the area in a two kilometre radius around your house and map all the police stations, fire stations and government offices, and make a list of emergency contacts on your phone and on the refrigerator as well.

Sure, your mother warned you there’d be days like these, but getting these things in order will surely rev your second gear to full power, so that the world may never bring you down to your knees.