Harsh Talreja

I am Harsh Talreja, editor of Gaming Nation. I live and work out of Mumbai, and I spend most of my week writing, editing and fact checking the coverage you see on this site. Outside Gaming Nation I also work as an SEO partner for Indian startups, which is how I ended up paying very close attention to how badly served Indian gamers are by the content already on the internet. Gaming Nation is my attempt to fix that, one honest review at a time.

I publish here daily. Some days that is a fresh cafe visit writeup, some days it is a peripheral roundup, some days it is a boring but useful question like which games actually fit on a 512GB SSD after Windows and Valorant have taken their cut. If you have read anything on this site that felt like it was written by someone who has actually used the product or been inside the cafe, that was the goal.

What I cover

My beat is Indian gaming, defined narrowly and honestly. That means four buckets:

How I work

A few principles I try to hold myself to on every piece:

  • On ground visits for cafes where possible. I have personally visited cafes in 18 plus Indian cities. Where I have not visited, I say so openly inside the article rather than pretending I have.
  • Amazon.in availability checks. Every product I recommend gets a fresh price and stock check on Amazon.in, Flipkart or the brand India store before the piece goes live. If a product is only sold grey market, I flag it.
  • Cafe owner outreach. For cafe pieces I try to reach the owner or manager directly, get pricing, hours and rig specs from the source, and correct anything they flag after publish.
  • Honest uncertainty. If I have not tested something firsthand, I do not pretend otherwise. I would rather say “I have not played this on a 1650 personally, reports from the r/IndianGaming thread suggest” than invent a benchmark.
  • No paid placements. Nothing on this site is a paid review or a sponsored insertion dressed up as editorial. Affiliate links where present are disclosed, and they never change the ranking.

Why this site exists

I started Gaming Nation because I kept running into the same problem as a reader. Most gaming content ranking for Indian queries was lifted from US or UK sites, with the rupee symbol slapped onto a dollar price and the affiliate links swapped. The writers had never been inside an Indian gaming cafe. They did not know that most of us are not running 1TB NVMe drives by default, that we are not all living in Bangalore tech park flats with 1Gbps symmetric fibre, and that a 25,000 rupee budget is a real constraint not a rounding error.

None of the practical Indian realities were showing up in that content. Mumbai monsoon humidity eats cheap metal desks and un-anodised keyboard plates. Jio Fiber often needs bridge mode into your own router if you want decent ping to Singapore servers. Half the peripherals that rank on global lists are not even sold on Amazon.in, and the ones that are carry a 40 percent import markup. Cafe culture in Hyderabad looks nothing like cafe culture in Kolkata. I built Gaming Nation to cover this honestly, in the voice of someone who actually games in India, rather than someone translating a Tom’s Hardware article.

Recent work

Connect

The best place to reach me professionally is LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/harsh-talreja. For editorial matters, tip offs, cafe coverage requests or corrections, email [email protected]. I read everything, even if I cannot always reply the same day.

Editorial corrections

If you are a cafe owner, a reader, or a brand and you spot something wrong on any piece I have written, please tell me. Wrong pricing, an outdated rig spec, a cafe that has shut down or moved, a product that is no longer available in India, or a benchmark claim that does not match your own experience. Email [email protected] with the URL and what needs fixing. Corrections get made publicly on the article itself, not quietly in the background.