By Imlisanen Jamir
There is something faintly comic about a young man deciding to build a personal computer in the very year when silicon has remembered its own importance. My friend has just secured employment.
The salary is honest but modest, the sort that arrives with dignity and leaves without ceremony. And with the optimism peculiar to the newly salaried, he has chosen this moment to enter the republic of PC builders.
To build a PC in 2026 is not merely to assemble parts. It is to study markets, currencies, shipping corridors, and rumours from Taiwan. RAM, that unassuming strip of circuitry, has become a barometer of global anxiety. The talk everywhere is of artificial intelligence. Data centres swallow memory modules by the container. Investors speak of “AI demand” in the same tone farmers once reserved for monsoon forecasts. Somewhere far away, a procurement officer signs an order for server-grade memory, and a few weeks later a young man pays more for 16 gigabytes than he did a year ago.
In smaller markets, the distance from manufacturing centres has a practical meaning. Freight adds a quiet tax. Stock arrives later than the headlines. Choice narrows. A graphics card praised in metropolitan showrooms appears here after its moment of glamour has passed, and often at a price that suggests the journey itself required tribute. The fluctuation of numbers on a website feels less abstract when there are fewer alternatives to soften the blow.
So the hunt begins. Smaller Indian e-commerce sites. Regional sellers. Telegram groups where hardware enthusiasts whisper about flash sales. Old-fashioned phone calls to dealers who promise to “check stock.” The process feels less like shopping and more like negotiation. Each tab open in the browser carries a different figure. Each figure carries doubt. Is it genuine stock. Is it grey market. Will the warranty be honoured if the card fails during a humid monsoon night.
Then there is the taxonomy of parts. DDR4 or DDR5. 3060 or 4060. Ti or non-Ti. Eight gigabytes of VRAM or twelve. Benchmarks are consulted with the seriousness of scripture. A ten-frame-per-second difference is debated as though it were a constitutional amendment. Yet beneath all this calculation lies a simpler question. Can he afford it without forfeiting peace of mind.
The irony is plain. Artificial intelligence promises efficiency, automation, and the reduction of human drudgery. At the same time it has made ordinary memory modules dearer for ordinary people. The global appetite for computation has grown enormous. The small builder feels it in his wallet.
And still he persists. Because there is something quietly defiant about assembling one’s own machine. In a world of sealed devices and subscription services, the custom PC remains an act of self-determination. You choose the processor. You seat the RAM yourself. You hear the first boot and know that it answers to you.
Perhaps this is why, despite the prices and the freight and the uncertainty, he will go ahead. Not because it is the most economical year, but because it is his year. And in places far from the centres of manufacture and finance, the desire to build something with one’s own hands has a logic that markets do not fully understand.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
