Indian dvd seller
Gurdeep, who passionately takes us on a guided tour of his shop, talks like a man trying to keep alive a noble but vanishing tradition. But I am not going to change my line of business,” says Gurdeep, sitting at his shop that has thousands of DVDs and music arranged alphabetically on dust-laden shelves. “My sales have come down from Rs 50,000 daily to Rs 2,000. Gurdeep Singh, a DVD shop owner poses for a picture at his shop in Tilak Nagar, New Delhi. Or Nirmaljeet Singh Duggal, who runs Avon Video Selection in south Delhi, which, by Duggal’s own admission, has become an oddity. Take, for example, Gurdeep Singh, 59, who runs Sethi Audio & Video, in west Delhi’s Tilak Nagar, which he refers to as ‘a pure music and DVD shop’. Seth is among the last CD and DVD sellers - most have been wiped out in the digital revolution - trying to stay afloat against all odds. I believe CDs and DVDs will return,” Seth says. “I have 50,000 DVDs, perhaps one of the country’s largest collections.
But there are hardly any takers for these.
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Then, there are a few customers in places such as Goa and Pune who want me to send them DVDs,” says Seth, sitting at his counter, surrounded by thousands of DVDs and Blu-ray discs – Bollywood, Hollywood and Punjabi movies, the popular TV serials Ramayana and Mahabharata of the 80s, live music concerts, among others. The few customers who visit are older people preferring to buy the physical product rather than having music in the digital form. “Today I am lucky if I sell 5 DVDs every day. I would sell and rent as many as 500 video CDs a day,” says Seth, his face beatific.īut his mood instantly changes, from joy to melancholy, when he returns to the present. By the mid-1990s, I probably had the largest collection of audio and video CDs in east Delhi. “Though everyone was getting into the audio cassette business those days, mine was a carefully curated collection.
The 77-year-old considers his music shop a ‘cultural institution’ that had once created a community of music and film lovers in the days when music was not about plugging in an earpiece connected to a smartphone. Vikas Music, as he named his shop, instantly struck a chord with the locals. Jagdish Seth’s eyes sparkle when he recalls how, in 1984, he had given up his fledging property business to start a music shop - a rage at that time - in a quiet east Delhi neighbourhood.