A few people have asked me about Nehru Place, which always features
prominently in my adventures with hardware. There's a
Wikipedia entry,
but—although it makes a feeble effort—it's much too dry to communicate
the flavour of a place where you can find, next to an "authorised HP
distributor", a chap with syringes full of coloured ink who will refill
your printer cartridges for a small fee.
Nehru Place is a large commercial area in South Delhi. The core of the
marketplace is spread across a number of four-storeyed buildings about
thirty years old, but businesses have expanded outwards into newer and
taller buildings. A number of companies have offices here, but the area
is best known for being India's largest (or so I hear) marketplace for
computer hardware.
There is a tremendous variety of shops. Swanky laptop showrooms with
mood lighting rub shoulders with stores selling second-hand hardware,
stationery shops, food stalls, people selling cheap T-shirts off the
pavement, high-quality printing shops, and shops of varying size that
sell all kinds of components, optionally assembling them into computers
on the spot. Space is at a premium, so hardware is stacked ceiling-high
everywhere. The larger stores usually keep the bulk of their inventory
in some basement or somewhere on the seventh floor of a building you
didn't know existed, and will order it for you on demand.
If they don't have something you want, they'll find someone who does,
because everyone is connected through an internal telephone network, and
shops have gophers who are regularly dispatched to pick up or deliver
some item to each other. Everyone has a pocket calculator to quickly add
their cut to the price they get on the phone without your seeing the
numbers… and the prices for a component can vary widely, depending on
where you ask, and how much effort you're willing to put into surveying
the options. Visiting the market without a clear idea of what you want
(and a checklist to keep track of all the prices) is just asking for
trouble.
Nehru Place has also changed a lot in the past ten years. I remember a
time when there was someone offering to sell me porn at every corner,
but these days it's only pirated CDs ("software! games! movies!"). There
are many more women buying hardware than there used to be even a few
years ago, and more foreign tourists looking for cheap hardware. The
older buildings are still fire-safety nightmares with exposed cabling
and dilapidated elevators, but the newer ones are all shiny glass and
steel with central airconditioning and CCTV surveillance.
There was once even a token effort towards access for disabled people,
but it was restricted to building ramps beside the stairs in the central
courtyard. (While this was happening, Rai and I almost stumbled into the
first attempt: a sixty-degree slope with a deep open pit at its foot; we
can't find the photographs we took, but that pit just about sums up the
whole effort.)
Nehru Place also features an Udipi restaurant (among many other shops
that sell a variety of fast foods) that serves the most excellent
kachoris I have ever eaten.
(Here's another story about
getting a motherboard repaired at Nehru Place.)