ExpertDabbler

Let me assume, that you, the blog reader is about 25-30 years old and have relatives from both of your parent’s side. Let me put this as PK’s principle #1 : The healthiness of the relationship your father or mother has with their siblings is in direct relation to the way the ancestral property was governed, administered and partitioned or would be partitioned.

To my mind, no other stuff comes as close to handling the partitioning stuff in a civil manner as a WILL. If your parents or grand parents were busy in their day to day mega serials, never ended up writing a WILL and passed away all of a sudden, fireworks are in store for you. If you are jobless right now, you are in for some exciting times. Better play some old, strategy video games and be prepared for the onslaught.

I am not sure if it’s a basic human instinct to postpone the important in favor of the urgent all the time. But I am sure its a perfect way to land one and their offspring in trouble. Some people are so confident on their immortality that they hardly ever fill out the nomination section in the bank account application forms! Their children might end up getting a crash course in Hindu Succession Act inter alia and end up cursing their parents all their lifetime.

Let’s face it, irrespective of what any astrologer tells about one’s ‘ayul’, anything can happen at anytime. Its even more pertinent if the person who is managing the stuff in the family is above forty. And just like the heights and depths of the Sensex, the levels at which blood relatives / family members would go fighting for money matters is to be seen to be believed. I have so many cases which would make all those scheming fat ladies in tamil mega serials look like saints.

So first things first, if we really love our loved ones without any streak of sadism,
then we should do the following

- make sure we have all the bank deposits filled with proper nominees first. Its okay even if any of my readers run for it without even reading the rest of this post. It’s THAT important.

- get a lawyer and affirm ourselves to write and register a WILL for the entire self acquired property. This is not a guarantee that all our children will stand united forever as they show in the closing shot of all Vikraman movies. But hey, at least we did our job and there’s only so much one can do.

We can relieve at least a good percentage of our civil courts’ case burden just by ensuring that we draft a WILL clearly about the property that we have acquired, and to whom it should pass on once we are past tense. Please note that failure to do so may even result in our annual ‘thidhi’ being cancelled in anger by our loved ones (Bharatha Kalachaaram you see!).

Afterword:
My good friend and blogger Prabhu (Adengappa) wanted me to write about the need for drafting a WILL sometime back. Being the slacker that I am, I managed to scribble some stuff only today. So this post is dedicated to Adengappa

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.