“Softwayerrrr.
Softwarayyyeerrrrrr. Games. CDs. Softwayerrrr. Softwayerrr. Windows. Games.
CDs. Softweayarrrr.”
It is as if hawkers from your local Monday Market have
landed at Nehru Place, the IT Hub, to sell software and games worth lakhs as if
it were fruits and vegetables. This is not an exaggeration, but the truth. What
was a funny conversation with a friend back in 2001 about Nehru Place selling
laptops and computers on the footpath, it is now a reality and it’s much worse
than what we’d thought.
I first visited the ‘IT Hub’ of India way back in ’99 when I’d
bought my first computer. It was a swanky Pentium II with 350 MHz of processing
power, 32 MB RAM, 4.3 GB HDD and a 40X CD-ROM. It was a branded system but made
by Vintron, a lesser known brand at the time, which doesn’t even exist any
longer. It was truly a mean machine back in the day and it used to run NFS II
SE, which is still my all time favourite car game, like the wind. So I’d gone to Nehru Place to buy my first ‘Game CD’ with my parents. It was a nice outing
and our first time there. After scouring through some random shops on the
ground floor of the main plaza, we went searching for some better, cheaper
options for ‘pirated’ games on the first floor. Walking through a dingy
staircase we landed up at this tiny shop where a fat uncle sat selling CDs of
all kinds. I bought Total Annihilation and Starcraft and my mother bought her
astrology software and we all returned home content. The games cost us about
350 bucks a CD and thus began my love for strategy games. It was a bargain.
Visits to Nehru Place increased as I started fiddling around
with my computer, trying to open it and playing around with the strange wires
and gadgets inside the ‘CPU’. Oftentimes we’d buy a game one day and would
return the next day to get it exchanged because they never worked the first
time ‘round. My parents had given up and I’d found some like minded friends who
didn’t mind travelling on a hot summer afternoon in a bus (Route No. 492, Noida to Nahru Palace Terminal) and have some Rajma Chawal or Chhole
Bhature followed by the epic Mango Shake. Of course, roaming around the
shops, window shopping, we aspired to one day build a mean machine with the
best parts possible. Although, when the time came, when we grew up, we were over
our obsession to assemble a system with the best configuration possible.
Going to Nehru Place still never stopped as there was always
a need for a minor upgrade or repair for the computer. Since we were a little
more aware of how computers are built, we never really bothered to call any ‘computer
engineers’. We were our engineers and we’d know when it was time to upgrade the
RAM or which HDD to buy which would be compatible with the previous one or how
to get the data recovered from a corrupt HDD. And neither did we stop eating Rajma Chawal, Chhole Bhature and the
epic mango shake.
Today when I ride to Nehru Place every day for work, I
still, at times, feel a little nostalgic about the days spent here as a kid. It
feels odd for I didn’t know that there was anything other than computer shops
in Nehru Place for the longest time. But today I am a part of a social media
agency operating out of Nehru Place which coexists with hardware vendors,
street vendors, malls, cinemas, an insane amount of food, and what not; with
harmony. The essence of the place still remains the same but the scale of the
operations (be it whatever, computers, piracy or food) has increased ten folds.
The dingy hallways still exist, the shady staircases are still functional (with
any repairs whatsoever), the taste of the food is still the same (bliss), and
it is still dirty (maybe dirtier) as always.
Even our worries about how this place functions came true when
in the last 6 months I experienced 3 fires in Nehru Place. One was a car that
lit up in the lane (next to my office building) opposite Park Hotel, the other
was inside a building opposite ours and one was on the 2nd floor of
the building where my office is located. People moved on as if these incidents
didn’t even happen. It shows great spirit of how we manage to continue living
and striving to make something of our lives but it also, quite disgustingly,
showcase our attitude of ‘Sab Chalta Hai’.
Nehru Place is a pinnacle of this callous attitude that we carry about our own
life. There is still no learning, there is still no improvement, there is still
no worry that an accident might happen again and it just might be worse.
Businesses continue to thrive, computers are being built day
in day out, more and more games and software are being sold on the streets with
every passing day. It is truly a concrete jungle waiting for that little kick
before it all crumbles. It’s a jungle full of cars, bikes, people, shops,
electronics, food, and it just keeps on getting worse. I wonder what will it take
to break the spirit of this ever thriving Mecca of quality products and
services sold like trash. Will there ever be an end to this madness? Only time
shall tell.
In the meanwhile, ensure it never happens, and go buy your
next laptop or computer at the cheapest price in India, in Nehru Place.
PS – Do not forget to eat the Rajma Chawal at the Sardar, Chhole
Bhature from Sona and Mango Shake from practically anywhere.
