Reclaiming our Entertainment and our Marriage! Phew….12 months in….

We moved into our rented apartment in Khar last year. I know its been exactly one year now since we just re-signed a lease for another year’s extension.

When we moved in, we had a lot of things already set up by the landlords – phone, internet, cable etc. By the time we had moved in all our furniture and settled in, we turned our attention to Hari’s favourite object in the house – the TV! After furious flipping through the channels, we discovered we had no Travel and Living Channel. OMG, it felt like our entertainment lifeblood was snatched away from us. We called the cable guy and used all tactics possible – Requesting in a sweet voice, feigning ignorance and saying “ Ummmm…there is something wrong with the cable….the Travel channel isn’t working …blink blink….!”, yelling like a Behenji, and even threatening legal action by taking the matter up with the consumer bureau. But of course nothing worked. Apparently, the cablewallas had the right to choose what channels you got to watch and what you didn’t.

So we disgruntledly trotted on with no t&L. We did have the option of installing satellite TV or a set top box to get it but we weren’t sure if it was worth the hassle since we were renting.

One year later, Hari and I realized that our marriage was not the same anymore. We hardly spent any time together on weekday evenings. Of-course having a toddler around and a fledgling business to take care of didn’t help matters.
One day, we hit upon the realization that the ONE and ONLY channel that we both loved watching together was Travel and Living. Also given the amount of Wanderlust that is festering inside us at any given time meant that without T&L, we were seriously starved of entertainment.


So after one year of being deprived, we decided to get a set top box to get T&L. The story doesn't end there….the installation happened and we got access to 200odd channels. Bad signal quality seemed to be affecting just a handful but hey, we didn’t care about that if we had T&L right? Oh No! If only life were that easy! T&L was in the handful of channels missing…along with some other Bhojpuri and Telegu channels which we would have never missed one bit.

So another 2 days of installation and 6 meters of additional cable later, we finally had T&L – Hooooooooray! And life has never been nicer. So much more time is made in the day to lounge and watch – Amazing vacation homes and drool over Antony Bourdain(‘s cooking of course ☺) that our marriage has got the uplift it needed. One bloody TV channel is what it takes….hmmm!