Goodbye Akme Harmony

As we moved to KB, we also bade farewell to Akme Harmony, our residence for last 17 months.

Akme Harmony was a good place to stay in March 2006. The complex was well kept, resident were few and overall facilities worked well.

Over a period of time things started deteriorating. First Akme cut down the maintenance staff. There was hardly anyone taking care of landscaping. Then the plumbing and electrical maintenance staff started taking days to respond to calls.

As the next step down, some residents from Akme formed a committee to take over the working of the complex (perhaps the committee was already there and they started taking more active interest). Things worsened after that.

Broken park swings were not repaired. Water bodies were hardly filled/cleaned. Haphazard rules and regulations started being imposed (no pets in lifts even for 8th floor residents). Water shortage became rampant, in spite of digging 4 bore wells within a span of 4 months (yeah there is talk of financial irregularity in some quarters).

Even worse was the attitude of committee members when questions on these rules or dysfunctional system were raised.

Communication as quoted below has started to happen often on the mailing list.

This one to a tenant who raised the issue of misbehavior by a maintenance staff:

You don’t realize that you are given a privilege to to be part of the email access [member of society mailing list] to be in the loop…

Most importantly, you are renting here because it’s suits you – you are not doing charity or social service here.….
All in all, you have abused the access [member of society mailing list] given to you and continue to do so – it’s ought to be stopped.

and this one to someone who objected to sudden (and without discussion) imposition of move in/out charge

This email is notify few AKME Harmony Tenants who shows undue interest in the Association and other matters – be it Move in-out charges or how to conduct Association activities etc – they are given privileged access to yahoo groups…

Generally a society is expected to improve once the residents association takes over. Akme Harmony seems to be going the other way.

For now, it is a place to be avoided.

Personally we stayed there and movied out without issues. We did have some issues around holding our daughter’s birthday party at the party hall, but nothing major which I could not overcome by shouting at a few people.

We made some good friends there. And our house owner was such a nice gentleman, that he returned the entire deposit to us which is something very few tenants generally get when vacating a premises in Bangalore.