A quikr relocation to Bangalore

‘You remember all the times we have relocated?’ I asked Specky. She looked at me, smiled and said, ‘But you always linked relocation with sparkling excitement.’ This was true. I have always believed that relocating rekindles our spirit to explore, to discover, to go out and transform all the passivity in life into action that is live and kicking.

The truth is that we have relocated a lot of times… even shifting home from one locality in Delhi to another because of one issue or the other can be as stressful as relocating from one city to another.

Stressful?

Yes, stressful is the right word. Imagine having to find another friendly grocery store who will take your monthly orders on the phone and send someone with the stuff. Or finding the most reliable mechanic or electrician or plumber or crèche or school or even a raddiwala! So whether we were relocating from North Delhi to Central Delhi or from Delhi to Bangalore, the issues would be almost similar. Let me admit here that we have been at the same location now for around ten years now and all our relocation experience is before a lot of online and offline solutions that we see and hear of now even existed. I knew that relocating would not be such a major hassle but decided to see how nervous Specky would be if I told her that we had to relocate to a different city. With a serious look on my face I then went to her said, ‘We will have to relocate to Bangalore. The newspaper is opening a branch there and they want me to head the editorial team there.’

As expected, Specky looked stunned… but quite unexpectedly, she seemed to recover fast because in less than three minutes she pounced on her laptop, made a few authoritative tapping noises and beckoned me. I went to her and there she was browsing the Bangalore section on Quikr.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Quikr,’ was her one-word answer.

‘I can see that you’re on Quikr,’ I insisted, ‘what has Quikr to do with our relocation?’

In the next few minutes she had converted the stress of my supposed relocation into a fully activated assignment. ‘We will not carry any of our heavier electronic gadgets or appliances,’ she said, ‘Quikr will help us find buyers in Delhi and in Bangalore we are going to be the buyer.’ She then told me that Quikr would not only help them buy and sell stuff but also had sections dealing with jobs, entertainment, and events. She said, ‘I’ve browsed them cursorily and I now know that these pages on Quikr will help me plan our weekend entertainment, get me a teaching assignment there, and will keep us abreast of all event grapevine.’ Before I could even appreciate her proactive awareness of how relocating seemed to have become easy, she went on, ‘I was rather surprised to find even matrimonial mentions on Quikr.’

I smiled and asked, ‘Come on, not at your age now.’

‘Not for me,’ she said, ‘and not for us. I’m just saying that this site is way beyond simple buying and selling of used and unused gadgets.’

I then told her that a friend of mine had told me that everyone seems to be only selling on Quikr. And I asked him, ‘Then who buys?’ I mean, if everyone is intent on just selling, the entire inventory there would be in a suspended state of waiting. This friend told me that he had placed a few ads to sell his old PC monitors, one smartphone, an old microwave, and even a Parker pen. This friend then said, ‘All that has happened so far in the past 30 days, is people calling me up, fixing up a meeting point and time, and then not turning up. Sometimes they do call to tell me, ‘Your product is too expensive. Please reduce the price.’ To find out the truth of these callers, I even reduced the price to the level that was suggested… and yet all those things that I planned to sell on Quikr are still with me.’ I told Specky that this friend is convinced that Quikr is a massive fraud, a concept that will die sooner than expected and told her that this friend was convinced that he had not noticed anyone buying on Quikr.

How do you think Specky responded?

She simply said, ‘Your friend may have had a bad experience. But the portal would not be in a position to have such a massive media budget if they did not have a large group of loyalists who were buying as well as selling. See, they survive on this interaction of buying and selling, right?’ I said nothing but she knew that I wasn’t convinced at all. She had even registered there and had begun the process of placing ads for finding the right packer and mover. This was the stage when I told her that the entire Bangalore relocating news was a drama to see how she would react.

She said, ‘Aha! So how do you think I reacted?’

‘As expected,’ I answered, ‘you know a lot.’

Though we were not relocating but we did decide to place a few ads to sell some of our stuff. So Quikr just might help us with gadget relocation!