I was in 9th grade, and I remember how much I had to plead with my father to make him agree to buy this for our home, a brand new Panasonic audio cassette player deck, one which has slots for two cassettes, one which you can use to copy an audio cassette to another. It did come with a AM/FM radio, an input from TV as well as AUX input. I was so impressed that, for a month or so I kept it next to my bed.
Not many years from that an Audio CD stormed the market, the idea of choosing the track you want to listen without having to fast forward/rewind the tape attracted me totally, now I wanted the audio CD player badly, all our relatives and friends had one, but since the tape player was working perfectly and was not so much old either, I had no courage to ask my dad to replace that, finally he himself wanted one, so in came an Audio CD player, and it was Panasonic again.
Video CD’s and home theater became the next in thing in the market. With Audio CD player, I was not the one who asked, so this time I had the right to say I want a VCD player, and so I did. My dad unable to say no, took me to the electronic shop, and this time I was smart, I took a local brand, a cheap one for just about 4000Rs, it came with 3.1 sound output too, I was so happy.
I was almost close to my first salary, when DVD’s became the next craze, I mean the digital output, and the crisp sound, and all that hype amongst friends made me want to buy one too, this time I knew about 5.1 output, so I wanted the one with that output, so Samsung it was gonna be, so went ahead and brought our home a Samsung DVD player
I landed in the US, I was totally drawn to the portable dvd/vcd player, wanted one badly for myself but somehow restrained myself from buying it, the other thing which attracted me was Tivo, as it does not work in India I did not think about it much, however the combo of VCR/DVD which higher list of features and coming as cheap as 60$ made me buy a combo player, and even though I haven’t played a single video tape in it so far it has found its way into the TV cabinet.
Now did you guys observe one thing?, all I was saying was things which came into my house, and none of them found its way out.
Now there are these DivX players, ones with the ability to play movies from the USB sticks, one which have 100gb hard disks to store movies, ones which are sleek. I want them for my house. What do I do with the old ones?, our cabinets are full and so are the attics with all the old, working but still useless stuff.
This is the problem I am facing, I guess its not just me and there are lots of us, and not just the music equipments. I have my old PC in my attic, old walkmans, old stoves a lot more of electronic gadgets not knowing what to do. Not all things comes with exchange offers, so you can hardly do anything to them. I wish there was some way to dispose these e-wastes
Suggestions any one?
prats said
hey…there are organisations like Sahas here in India that do collect e-wastes. Our complex, just went through the process of recycling and stuff….and now we’ve succcessfully become the first residential community to get composting from kitchen biodegradable wastes. As to e-wastes, we collect them periodically and the organisation sends someoen along to pick them up..
neilina said
This one is exactly like my father. He also loves to collect electronic gadgets and there are so many collected in my home also!
One thing, you can do, give all these gadgets to me, I will take care of them! hehehehe 
Rash said
Donate them. There are organisations (e.g. orphanages) or NGOs who need such stuff but are short of money. U can donate ur eWastes to them. At least they’ll be of some use to someone…
Aimee said
I keep my stuff until it breaks and then I toss it. However, if I have an MP3 player and a diskman, I’m tossing the diskman because they scratch my CD’s.
Sameera said
This reminded me of my trysts with my Dad to get me an audio player,then a walkman,then music system,then discman,and so on.Today finally my laptop has replaced all these.
I don’t care much for the old system,but I feel a lot for the 300 + audio cassettes I stacked up during my school days.They are all just rotting away now
DreamCatcher said
We had given our old but working electronic stuff to a blind school – a tape player, an old pentium III system, a bulky dictaphone so on and so forth. You can look at municipal schools who would love to use them, but I guess going through a NGO is better to ensure that the donated stuff us used in schools and not in the teacher’s house!
theshowstopper said
found my way here from another blog.
Why consider it as a problem ? Well I have my computer which is like really old (windows 3.1, can you beat that !!) which i still use. Well not regularly but still its part of my history.
I know space is a problem, but here is my question….Do you wanna give away something which grew with you ?
VC
http://theshowstopper.wordpress.com
preethi said
I have lofts full of things to be donated in my chennai home.. from cradles to cribs to clothes and shoes all in sparkling new condition! This time I managed to unclutter my dad’s house by giving away all the stuff to the iron wala, paper wala and maid.. you could do that… or wait for that day when you would finally donate everything to the orphanage. My uncle is pretty good at it though, he donates furniture to orphanages. They even pick it up if you have a lot of stuff, so usually I just dump my old stuff in his house
marja said
We just gave all that old stuff away to garage sales, sallies etcetera. You will never use them anyway anymore
ssnab said
my bro does autopsy on all the old n discarded stuff at home… n then throws em in d trash
BlueMist said
I have lots of old mobile handsets as well