Sri Balaji Steel Centre

You can find Sri Balaji Steel Centre at 125 Basavanagudi. We’ve been sitting on this street for quite some time now. It’s a shop filled with all kinds of steel items, from small parts to bigger pieces that take two people to lift. The place isn't very big, so things tend to get stacked up high against the walls. It smells like metal and old grease in here, which I guess is what you’d expect from a steel shop. We don’t have a website or anything like that. People mostly just walk in because they saw the sign or someone told them we had what they needed. Basavanagudi is an old part of town, and we like the vibe here. It’s steady. We spend our days measuring things, cutting pieces to size, and loading them into trucks or onto the back of scooters. My hands are usually stained with a bit of dirt or rust by the time I go home. We don't wear uniforms, just old clothes that we don't mind getting ruined. Sometimes customers come in with a specific idea and we have to dig through the back to see if we have the right gauge of steel. It’s a lot of physical work and it can get hot in the afternoons when the sun hits the front of the shop. We just keep at it, one order at a time. It’s a honest living and it keeps us busy.