Nehru Place – The IT Hub

“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 2^nd 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.