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REAL ESTATE Why The Inner City Is Dying Space, indeed, is the final frontier for the hordes of big corporates moving out of the city centre to the greenery and economy of suburbia.
In February this year, Arthur Andersen relocated from the 17th floor of the swanky State Trading Corporation (STC) building in the heart of Delhi's Central Business District (CBD) Connaught Place (CP) to one of South Delhi's many peripheral enclaves, Munirka. International consultancy firm Andersen had little choice in a situation where a host of its clients had already shifted out from Delhi's stuffy CBD to the fresher environs of Gurgaon. And Munirka is closer to Haryana's industrial entrepot Gurgaon than CP. In the last five years, a slew of MNCs has switched off its operations in the inner cities and plugged in to more eco-friendly and rent-happy locales countrywide. Take GlaxoSmithKline, for instance. Partho Mukherjee, Director (Legal & Corporate Affairs), GSK, argues that relocation was necessary. ''Our offices were scattered all over Delhi. So we wanted to centralise and consolidate our business under one roof,'' says Mukherjee. Sources say GSK was on the prowl for 55,000 sq ft of area, unthinkable in a place like Connaught Place. Top-of-the-line clients prefer more room, ample power back-up, uninterrupted water supply, lower rents, total computerisation and, increasingly, better bandwidth. More importantly, the rates in suburbia are far more economical. For instance, a 10,000 sq ft office in Gurgaon costs only Rs 40,000 a month to rent compared to the Rs 1 crore it would cost in cp, excluding maintenance, say analysts at international property consultants, Cushman & Wakefield. Now if CBDs are given a free reign, they could possibly live up catering to the 'high-end' status, but a saturation point seems to have set in. In Delhi's cp, for example, a building has multiple owners. According to Anshuman Magazine, Managing Director, South Asia, of property consultants CB Richard Ellis, each building in CBDs on an average comprises 100-200 owners. So collecting maintenance money from such a size becomes unfeasible. ''These small landlords, in turn, sub-let their pigeon-holes to more profitable land-use, and collections become further hazardous,'' points out Magazine. Space, indeed, is the final frontier for the hordes of big players moving out of the CBDs. For Pepsi, which moved out of CP's Mohan Dev building in 1997, ''an area of 13,000 sq ft was becoming rather stuffy. Now, at Gurgaon, we have 35,000 sq ft, boosting the employee per area ratio phenomenally,'' says a Pepsi spokesman. Adds Tanaji Chakravorty, Head of property consultants, Chesterton Meghraj: ''MNCs typically look out for contiguous, pillarless floor space with four attributes-light, height, location, and parking-none of which is available in the CBDs anymore." But are the CBDs-be it in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, or Bangalore-really dying? ''City centres never die,'' declares Chakravorty. ''For example, a one-square-mile area in the heart of London is the city's USP, not its suburbs,'' he notes. Productive use of prime land in the CBDs may just be the only bait to stem the exodus now and re-incentivise investments in the heart of the city. Till then, the Buddha (read: enlightenment) lies in suburbia. -Moinak Mitra The
History Of PC 1971: Even before the birth of the CPU, small computers were built with ICS and transistors; much like the video games, which did not use a CPU. John Blakenbaker produces one such pre-CPU called KenBak-1. Price: $750 1973: A French inventor, Truong Trong Thi begins marketing his Micral micro computer. It was the first commercially available system that could be called the complete personal computer. It was based on the new Intel 8008 chip, and an 8 bit CPU running at the then-astonishing speed of 200kHz (roughly 1/5,000 th the speed of a 1gHz Pentium III). Price: $1,750 1974: Bill Gates and Paul Allen start Microsoft. 1976: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
build their own single-board kit computer-the Apple I. After both Atari
and H-P refuse to buy it, the duo start Apple Computing to sell their new
machine. 1977: The people's computer Apple II, faces stiff competition from several other computers like the Ohio Scientific Challenger, Process Technology Sol, and Exidy Sorcerer. All these computers are aimed at the new home and small business markets. The Ohio Scientific Challenger was built by Homebrew Computer Club founder Lee Felsenstein. 1978: The PC marketplace is more competitive than ever. Home computers cost between $100 and $1500 and boast of new graphical capabilities. 1981: The Commodore vic-20 makes history when it becomes the first computer model to sell one million units. At $299 it was the most inexpensive computer in the market and could be hooked on to a television, negating the need of an expensive monitor. After virtually, ignoring the micro-computer market for more than a decade, IBM, the largest and the most influential computer company at that time, decided to create its own personal computer. In 1980, it despatched its 12 top engineers, later dubbed "the dirty dozen" to Boca Raton. The top-secret project was known as Project Chess. The ''Acorn'' is packaged with Microsoft's MS-DOS. Its success makes pc synonymous with IBM. Soon Compaq, H-P, and others were selling PC "clones". 1983: The first "modern" PC
to be sold is the Apple Lisa. Modelled after high-end work stations at
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the Lisa has a graphic user interface
(GUI) which includes a mouse to activate commands. It set a standard for
PCs that still stands today. 1984: The advent of Apple Macintosh changes personal computing forever. One could open files, copy them, launch programs-in short enter all the basic instructions to the computer by using the mouse to click on visual icons. The computer screen is now called a desktop. IBM adds networking capability to its PCs with PC Network, which makes it possible for up to 1,000 computers to be linked in a professionally designed and installed broadband network, with dos 3.1 to support. 1986: IBM introduces its first lap-top computer-PC Convertible. 1990: Microsoft's third incarnation Windows 3.0 allows users to run almost any task from within the Windows desktop. 1995: Microsoft launches Windows 95 that sells a million copies within four days. 2000: AMD beats Intel in the launch of the 1 GHz processor. ADVERTISING Just like the fizz in their bottles, there's one thing that cola companies never seem to lack: controversies. This time round, it is Pepsi that is caught in one. Its ''Eve's Temptation'' ad, showing a woman dressed like Eve drinking a Mirinda Apple in a garden evocative of the Biblical one, has been dragged to the Magistrate's Court by a Chennai-based man called J. Mushtaq Ahmed. His point: the ad is offensive to Christians and Muslims, who regard Adam and Eve as their ancestors. After being thrown out of the Supreme Court, the case has been dismissed by the Magistrate's Court. At present, it is back to being a complaint in the police station. In the past, Ahmed has also filed cases against painter M.F. Hussain, filmmaker Deepa Mehta, and cricketer Mohammed Azharrudin, with little success. Pepsi, on its part, is used to such complaints (it gets some 30 of them every week). And most of them make a very quick journey from the mail box to the trash can. -Seema Shukla RETAIL
Anuj bahri, proprietor of bahri Sons, one of Delhi's many volume-driven bookshops, waxes his extended and curled moustache and admonishes large, designer bookstores cropping up countrywide. ''They may have the space, but they'll never get our kind of expertise, nor the experience,'' he claims. That reminds one of Kathleen Kelly from the movie You've Got Mail. But, then, there is a new breed of Joe Foxes waiting to muscle out mom-n-pop bookstores from the Rs 25,000 crore-a-year market (Penguin India's estimate). The Chennai-based Landmark was a pioneer of sorts and flagged off in December 1987, as a family leisure store, merchandising books, music, toys, stationery, gifts, cards, and CD-ROMs. Today, the Hemu Subramaniam-owned Landmark has bases in Coimbatore and Kolkata, and contemplating a foray into lifestyle. Consider the Fountainhead chain, an endeavour of the largest book importers in the country, India Book Distributors (IBD). Says H.D. Chatlani, Chairman, IBD: ''We were keen on retailing and no bookshop in India had enough space on offer. So we chose to open our own shops.'' Fountainhead is now a major brand in Bangalore (6,000 sq ft), Chennai (7,500 sq ft) and has a tie-up with music chain, Groove, in Mumbai. Chatlani adds that Fountainhead's success hinges on expansion and creating brand loyalty, and the chain is slowly snaking in to western and northern India. Raring to go, Wordsworth-the $350 million DS group outfit-is, unlike other designer bookstores, on an expansion spree from north to south. It is already up and running in Ludhiana and have two stores lined up for launch-in Delhi and Noida-by month-end. What's more, Wordsworth has signed up with top-notch coffee shop, Barista, international toy-makers, Mattel, and RPG-promoted Music World, to embark on their 'space' ship. Also, for their 2,500 sq ft Janak Puri outlet in Delhi, they've roped in the Shashi Chimala-owned Qwiky's coffee-cum-grub pub. In Kolkata's downtown upmarket Park Street, the Apeejay Surendra group-owned Oxford Book & Stationery Co. (no relation to the Oxford University Press), sprawls over a mammoth 15,000 sq ft and boasts of a coffee shop, cybercafe, and exhibition space for book launches. As the charge of the designer bookstore brigade continues unabated, counter-charges from small bookshop owners are galore. K.B. Singh, owner of the Delhi-based The Book Shop, takes a dig: ''Designer bookshops sell less books and more coffee.'' As malice in Bookville intensifies, speculations about the big fish swallowing the minnows are rife and the diminutive, eager-beaver, over-the-counter figure at the 'the shop around the corner' fades a shade faster into oblivion. -Moinak Mitra
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