Nehru Place Geek

What would you say about a 40 something alpha male who spends his Saturdays in the dirty bylanes of Nehru Place? Unromantic? Sleazy? Voyeuristic? Perverse? In one word Nehru Place can be described as unimaginative. Box like multi storied structures with rows and rows of shops selling Hard drives, printers, ipods, mobile accessories etc which beckon you with cut price offers. Beneath the dirty veneer, it hides the ultimate paradise for the digital shopper. In hot Delhi summers the place looks even worse.
Nehru Place is certainly not the kind of place to ogle at lissome lasses or to laze around on holidays window-shopping. The sheer joy of bargaining Rs 25 off a webcam priced at Rs 750 or buying a blue tooth headset at a rate cheaper than the Electronics Complex in Pantip Plaza, Bangkok is indescribable. The wife is reconciled to these occasional journeys into the unknown where she is uninvited. In early days she was often suspicious of these occasional trips, which lasts more than 3 hours. She is relieved that at an age when men are turning on to paramours, gambling and assorted other vices, here is the Nehru Place geek whose idea of having fun is spending hours in the most unimaginatively constructed market place hunting for basement rate bargains on things digital.
The passion started in the early nineties with an intro to storyboard, the original presentation package and the sheer innovativeness of solutions offered by MSDOS PCs with word processing and data base operations. But those were the days when graphic user interface was in the distant horizon and the trend was to remember complicated commands to weave magic on the monochrome screen. The male instincts were tenderly awoken by the initial advent of Internet. In the latter nineties, VSNL was the only service provider offering a prohibitively expensive Internet service at about Rs 3000 per annum. Spending such money on a facility, which gave no tangible benefit, made no sense. The wife was shocked at the idea of spending that kind of money, which incidentally was a substantial portion of the salary in those days. Early morning hours were spent browsing technology sites, Rediff.com, Pakistani Newspapers (which offered a contrarian view point on Kashmir, Taliban and assorted subjects) and redneckporn.com that offered quality porn on the net, free to boot. In those early days configuring the modem and the PC with the telephone line at crawling speeds itself was considered some kind of expertise. Even the professionals in the field who advertise in the classified columns of newspapers couldn’t do anything better at configuring the modem. Invitations were received from the neighbors for this expertise in return for eternal gratitude and an orange juice.
Then there was email. The world shrank and messages would zip halfway across the globe with replies in cryptic and often unintelligible sentences. And there was spam. Someone out there in cyber space seriously believed that every male’s dream is to increase the size of his private parts or to artificially boost his sexual vigour with capsules and herbs. The average Indian Male’s sexual drive requires no external intervention and the size of their private parts by and large require no further elongation. Even a reply with the choicest of abuses could not restrain the enthusiasm of these cyber entrepreneurs. Then there are these irresistible offers of a million dollars of unclaimed wealth of a dead tycoon, which can be possessed by small handling fees of a thousand US dollars.
As one crosses into forties there is the sinking feeling that your child is too grown up and cease looking up to you as a role model. The wife is too busy juggling with the humdrum of daily life. The balding middle-aged male has to turn to something to keep his passion for life alive. Hours and hours are spent browsing, configuring the mobile phone and ipod with the laptop and doing everything wirelessly. One has become too old for visits to the pub, too weary to get excited at Rahul Dravid’s latest stylish hundred and too young to die. So Nehru place it is - the ultimate Mecca of the digitally awakened Indian Male out for his nirvana in gadgets and digital shopping.

Published in Man's World Dec 2006