Home physiotherapy in Navi Mumbai: a guide for the new societies of Vashi, Nerul, Belapur and Kharghar

People assume the pain problem is an old-building problem. Then I visit a four-year-old tower in Kharghar or a Seawoods society with a podium garden, a working lift, wide internal doors, and a living room you could actually exercise in — and the back pain is identical to the one I saw in a 1970s walk-up that morning. The building is not the variable. The day is.

What is genuinely different here is who is in the flat. The demographic in the newer Navi Mumbai societies skews young: couples in their late twenties and thirties, often with a child under three, frequently with both parents working and no grandparent living in. That combination produces a very specific load profile, and it is not the one the internet writes about when it writes about office posture.

It also changes what the flat is used for. There is space, but the space is occupied by a cot, a walker, a drying rack in monsoon, and a dining table that has become somebody's desk. When I plan exercises here, I am planning around a sleeping baby and a shared room, not around whether there is enough floor.