Filter Coffee #035

On Lease & Licence, and Punctuation

Dear Friends,

Last week's edition on the landline evoked many interesting comments. My dear friend Lynn Weiss from Washington D.C. narrated how fond her mother-in-law was of the phone on the table. Speaking for herself, Lynn says she has moved on with technology. She is very comfortable with the mobile phone and makes the best of its features. Another reader, Manivannan, lamented that he had to give up his landline as it was just sitting in a corner and unused by the household or outside callers. He also mentioned that his friend who gave up his OYT connection is still waiting for a refund of the deposit! 

One of my avid readers, Shahji Jacob, commented that instead of being tied down to the landline, we are now tied to our cell phones. He recounts the launch of the satellite phone Iridium with the tagline “Geography is History” implying that wherever you are, you can be reached.

Interestingly, the vanishing landline has had collateral damage. Handheld cameras also seemed to have vanished. There was a time when photo-film was considered expensive and when digital cameras made the splash there was considerable interest in acquiring one. That interest has also waned significantly with the invasion of mobile phone cameras. In fact, one is left wondering if mobiles are used more to call people or to take still and video shots.

I thank you all for posting your comments and continuing to patronise FC.

🏘 Lease & Licence

Many people give and take premises on rent. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on residential premises since non-residential premises have their own inherent challenges.

I am not going to bore you to death with a whole lot of legalese and legal discourse. But, please don’t switch off as I intend to provide practical insights into certain aspects of the Leases and Leave & Licence (L&L) which will be helpful to both owners and tenants.

Firstly, lease is governed by The Transfer of Property Act, and licence is governed by The Indian Easements Act.

The single most feature that differentiates a lease from a licence is that in the case of a lease there is an exclusive transfer of rights over the property for the duration of the lease whereas in the case of a licence the owner grants the tenant a mere use of the property for a specified period without transferring any other right over the property.

In short, a lease has an element of exclusivity whereas a licence is non-exclusive.

Secondly, it is a common misconception that if a house is given out for 11 months, it is considered as L&L. Let me first tell you why people enter into an 11-month lease. 

Any lease for 12 months or more must be compulsorily registered under the Indian Registration Act. To avoid registration, which many consider cumbersome, a lease is granted for 11 months.

However, as a matter of convenience and practice, 11-month leases are structured as Leave & Licence.

In Maharashtra, registration of Leave & Licence agreements is compulsory. I recommend you click on 🔗 this link to see for yourself the facility provided for registration. 

What then is the meaning of the word ‘Leave’ when associated with Licence? Leave means permission. An owner of a property permits a person to use the property for a limited period, giving them a licence to occupy the property, while retaining full control over the property.

There are a number of instances when courts have interpreted a leave and licence agreement to be a lease and vice versa. Merely calling a document a leave and license agreement does not make it a licence unless it passes the test of licence.

A lease and an L&L are both contracts and will require to be stamped as per the Stamp Act prevalent in a given state.

Two issues crop up. One relating to deposit and the other relating to the lock-in period. These two must be properly addressed and worded to avoid problems later on.

If you wish to know more about Lease or L&L, please feel free to write to me. As promised, I am keeping this simple though there are many aspects that would require careful drafting. 

⁉️ Punctuation

Speaking of careful drafting, punctuation is something that people are not particular about.

There are 14 punctuation marks that are commonly used in English grammar. These are the period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets, braces, apostrophe, quotation marks, and ellipsis.

Some of the familiar ones are full stop or period, question mark, exclamation mark, apostrophe and quotation marks. The other punctuation marks, though appear familiar, either confound you about their proper use, or you are unfamiliar with them.

Take the comma, it can alter the meaning of a sentence if not placed properly. For example in the classroom, when the teacher gave a sentence and asked the students to use the comma. The sentence was “Woman without her man is nothing.”. The boys wrote “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” The girls wrote “Woman: without her, man is nothing”.

Dash and hyphen, in their usage, can be confusing. 

The dash is used to indicate a connection or differentiation. For example, “2020-2021 has been quite harrowing due to Covid-19.” A dash is also used in writing to end a sentence emphatically: “When the son asked the father if he could take his car the father said - No!” The dash and the exclamation mark capture a tone of finality to the word ‘no’.

Hyphen is typically seen in a sentence where two or more words are joined together into a compound term but not separated by space. For example, head-to-head, one-on-one, back-to-back etc. It can also be used to describe a feeling or emotion. A personal example: I have this habit of not asking people for directions and ending up at the wrong place, and the look I get from my wife is either an ‘I-told-you-so’ look or a ‘men-will-never-learn’ look.

Quotation marks are the most confusing. 

A double quotation is used to cite a sentence or paragraph attributable to another person or source. You must have seen some quotable quotes. One attributed to Winston Churchill is about a woman who told him “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee”. To which he is reported to have said, “If you were my wife, I’d drink it.” 

A single quote is used within a double quote. Try this: “I went and asked him how his dieting is coming along and he said ‘my heart says have cakes & ice cream but my pants say eat a salad’ and I found it really funny.”

Parenthesis and brackets are often used interchangeably. Parenthesis is used by Americans and brackets are used by the British. Even in India, brackets are preferred to parenthesis. Both parentheses and brackets are used to clarify a matter in a sentence. For example: “I went to the pub with my friends (my wife thinks I worked late).”

The use of square brackets while writing is rather unclear. I have seen it being used in legal documents as a matter which is yet to be resolved. For example, the draft of a lease says “ The tenant shall pay [thrice] the amount is he overstays.” The words within square brackets is something that is not yet agreed upon.

There are some sentences where both are used. For example: “Late APJ Abdul Kalam [a well-known scientist (he worked at ISRO) who later became the President of India] died in Shillong in the year 2015.”

Brace is what we call flower brackets or curly brackets { }. It is used more in equations and musical notes but seldom in English.

I will sign off with two punctuation jokes from yellowjokes.com:

• Which is a prisoner’s favourite punctuation mark?
  The period: it marks the end of his sentence.

• What has 4 letters, sometimes 9 letters, but never has 5 letters.
  (pay close attention to punctuation)

Dear Readers, I do hope you liked this edition of FC. Please share your comments and your views, I’m always delighted to read them. Until next week — stay safe, stay healthy.