Aldrich India

We are over at Shop Number 42 in Srivastava Market. If you’ve been to Hauz Qazi, you know it’s a very old and very busy hardware market. It’s the kind of place where you have to watch your step because there’s always someone carrying a heavy load right behind you. Our shop is quite small, like most of the others in this market. We’ve been here for a long time, and the walls are stained from years of dust and work. We sell various industrial tools and parts. It’s a lot of manual work, moving crates and organizing small bins of screws and valves. The market gets incredibly crowded during the middle of the day, so we usually try to get our deliveries done early in the morning. We don’t have a website or any of that stuff. People just know our shop number or they recognize our faces. It’s a very traditional way of doing business. We have a small stool for customers to sit on while we look for what they need, though most people are in too much of a hurry to sit down. The air is always thick with the smell of metal and oil. It’s not a glamorous place, but it’s where the real work gets done. We’ve seen many shops come and go, but we just keep doing what we do every day. Sometimes it feels like the market hasn't changed in fifty years, and we are just a small part of that.