The story of a recorder that we “fixed” when The Ritchie Street had given up on it

Garima Sane, Naincy Sachan

Following our earlier visits to Ritchie Street for repairing a laptop, buying a charger, interviewing bigger shop owners, this time we were in the street for what it was originally known for – radio and audio equipment. We had Solly’s 2012 Olympus recorder with us. The recorder seemed fine but we had difficulty operating it. We went to some shops which had audio equipment outside, but they said that it couldn’t be repaired. One of the shopkeepers told us to go to Raheja Complex. So off we went to the shop in Raheja Complex, like people running from one government office to another to yet another to get their paperwork sorted.

The shop in Raheja Complex turned out to be a fancier shop. We were very, very tentatively hopeful – bigger shops (which one shop owner described as the “Big Fishes” in the market) rarely fiddle with repairs or dip their toes in the waters of refurbishment. At this shop we were told that the model could not be repaired and that we should buy a newer model – a Sony model. A little bit disheartened, we stepped out of the shop to realise that we were at the edge of Ritchie Street, and right next to a sweet shop. We decided to indulge in the gastric pleasure of eating some hot jalebi with cool lassi. After that we headed once more into the deeper underbellies of Ritchie Street, like one goes back to an otherwise exciting lecture except for it being held at crack of dawn (8 AM) on a Monday morning. We headed into another complex which turned out to house inventories of bigger shops. Upon inquiring on a few counters, finally one person told us to go to the complex right next to the one we were in – that’s where all the audio-visual equipment shops were.

We were almost hopeless at this point, but decided to venture to one last shop, reflexively looking at it as a ‘field’ but also because we had tried so many shops and faced so many disappointments, what was one more! (Sunk cost and all that.) The shop was full of audio equipment – speakers, sound systems, everything. On the front rack, in one small compartment, there were some phone cases. A man was sitting at the counter, working away on his laptop – we weren’t sure if he was the shop owner or not. We explained our problem to him, expecting to be turned away after a perfunctory hearing, as we had been so far. To our surprise, he was actually willing to entertain our request for repair. He explained to us that his shop was a “professional” one, working on bigger projects like installing the sound systems in auditoriums and so on. He then called someone on his phone, who we first thought was his boss. It turned out, as he (and Appu) explained, that he had called his “technical guy” – someone based in T Nagar. A “specialist”, if you will. 

He told us that he would check with some other technical people he was connected to and would let us know. He gave us his number and recommended that we go to T Nagar and check with the shops there. Much like a doctor, he also operated on a notion of “trustworthy doctors” and “quacks”. I say this, because when asked about technicians in Ritchie Street, he said dismissively that they would just “open it up and tear everything down”. The technical experts outside Ritchie Street were clearly the people he trusted with this delicate “body” of an older recorder. In addition to being a doctor, he had an almost artistic sensibility while looking at the tape-recorder – it was a piece of craft which could not be handed to just anybody. 

Further, one of us was in an attire (a nice-ish saree, featured image notwithstanding) that might have been perceived by the shop owners as ‘being out of place’ with Ritchie street – and that, along with our language (we were speaking in English), did seem to inspire more the idea of ‘service’ rather than ‘repair’. The Olympus recorder that we were seeking to repair was definitely a ‘difficult item’ to repair due to it having limited customer base and hence a limited service base, and the shop owner told us the same, warning us that it would be difficult to refurbish or repair the recorder. Upon being asked for alternatives, he recommended the Zoom H1N Handy Recorder to us and cautioned us that while it could be repaired or serviced for next three-four years, it would be very difficult to service it after that as it gets very difficult to find spare parts because companies cease to produce them as they come up with upgraded models. 

We obviously could not figure out the recorder malfunction that day at Ritchie Street but later that day, we got an archive of YouTube videos (- a gift that keeps giving, indeed!) sent to us by a dear friend and we eventually figured it out ourselves. It was surprising how easy it was! We fixed in our shitty hostel rooms something that was declared as ‘unrepairable’ at the temple of refurbishing/repair industry in South India. Later, thinking about specialisation at Ritchie, we thought about every device in our purview that is generally dismissed as ‘unrepairable’. There always seems to be a place where a device’s life can be extended and that’s a thought we work with, as laypeople to the repair landscape. This incident directly led us to questions of understanding the age of devices and the ‘repair knowledge’ associated with them. How do we understand a device and its ‘outdatedness’? Can we try to comprehend a ‘lifespace’ for electronic devices that informs and is also informed by a discourse of repair, and more importantly, does this offer us a critique of straightforward concept of ‘technoscapes’ of globalisation?