Unlocking the door is the first pillar of wisdom

Experience has taught me that the only thing worse than being home alone is to be locked out of a lonely home because one has forgotten to carry the front-door key. A house is not a home if the key to the front door is missing. Standing in front of a locked door which just cannot be opened makes one realise that the immediate priority is to enter the apartment.Everything else, like the plight of the Indian rupee in free fall or the constantly burgeoning oil-pool deficit, is of secondary importance and something which can be tackled by the FM or the OM (oil minister) who have been elected to do the job.
There was a time when, like all good managers, i used to delegate domestic responsibilities like the carrying of keys to others at home. However, managing alone is quite something else. One is a lonely number, especially when there is a multitude of keys to deal with. There is not just the key to the apartment door. There is the car key. There is the key to the bureau in which i store my valuables. There are the keys to the bedroom almirahs. And then there are the anonymous, laawaris keys which cannot be identified.
My late father, who was trained in the army before he joined the railways, used to tag each and every key in the house. There was even a key which was tagged 'God' because it opened the almirah in which the ornamental lamps for puja were kept. Over a period of time, the tags fell off and each key hung on a chain from a common board which i nailed on the wall near the front door so that i could pick up the one i wanted while leaving the house.
On days when i left home in a tearing hurry, i would return, telling myself that i could finally relax. And then i would find that the key in my pocket was not the one which would open the automatically-locking front door. Fortunately, each apartment in the block i lived in had a balcony. The security supervisor would prop up a ladder so that one of his boys could climb up to my first floor balcony, open the sliding window, put his hand in, unbolt the rear door, enter the apartment and open the front door. It was a time-consuming process, especially if the ladder was not in its usual place.
On one occasion, when i rushed to the airport to pick up an American cousin and returned home to find that i had taken the wrong key, it took 30 minutes to locate the ladder and open the front door. "In this age of technology, it is criminal to waste so much time on opening an apartment door," the cousin said, sounding like a TV commercial. "All you need is a voice-activated system where the locking mechanism will instantly unlock in response to the owner`s command. A journalist like you should be aware of all this," the cousin added.
It did not take me too long to figure out that such a hi-tech solution would be quite expensive. There was also the risk that a traditional Indian door might not take too kindly to state-of-the-art imported technology. In which case, i could end up losing my cool and shouting 'Open, damn you' while kicking the temperamental door which refused to budge.
And so i opted instead for what the legendary economist E F Schumacher conceptualised as appropriate technology of the energy-efficient, environment-friendly and locally centred kind. I decided to leave duplicate keys for my apartment door with not one but three neighbours. The late Schumacher, who was also a statistician of repute, would have concurred with my premise that the probability of all three neighbours not being around the next time i forgot to carry my apartment door key was highly unlikely.