Nishi Agarwal
A mall is nothing but ‘Maya’ in its most potent avatar. The glitzy attraction of a mallis no less irresistible than the pull of gravitation.Take an individual harried by a host of pestilent factors in the marketplace: infernal traffic, mounds of decaying garbage, and brain-numbing heat. For him to step into the refreshingly cool interiors and gleaming ambiance of a mallis as alluring a prospect as arriving at an oasis in the midst of sweltering deserts. Yet, once he steps into one, he is as surely trapped in its silken web as the hapless fly, whom the spider had once whispered seductively ‘Come into my parlour!’
Try to recollect the first time you ventured into a mall. You had only just begun to unwind and savour the magic of this wonderland. You had barely filled your lungs with gulps of its fragrant air when the real business of the mall got underway. All at once you were confronted by an array of products winking at you with coquettish come-hither looks. It didn’t matter that you had taken vows of asceticism. The displays were so aesthetically appealing, so dazzling to the senses that they made mincemeat of all your resolutions. You found yourself reaching out for things that were never on your shopping list, or, for that matter, not even on your wish list!
The funniest part is that like an addict hankering for a forbidden pleasure, most of us, against our better sense, return to the mall, time and again. With familiarity comes knowledge, and soon you realize that a mall thrives on exclusivity. Exclusivity justifies high prices; therefore a mall welcomes with open arms those with deep, cavernous pockets overflowing with moolah. A little statutory warning would be in place here: just in case you are a first-timer at a mall and you are weak-hearted, please peruse the prices under the doctor’s supervision. A skimpy little piece of clothing may command a price that would clothe an entire slum basti. A small frivolous item of cosmetic could make a dent in the monthly budget of an entire household. The establishment looks respectable enough.Yet this whole business does smack of daylight robbery!
It is an open secret to all and sundry who visit malls that to catch the fish, both big and small, the mall has in its can a whole variety of juicy worms. These are the much-touted schemes floated out by the masters of the mall:buy one get one free, combo packs, discounts on rates that have been cunningly inflated beforehand etc. etc– The list of enticements is a pretty long one. These schemes are definitely the products of scheming minds, which plot means and ways to offload the contents of bulging purses into the coffers of the malls. You have to hand it to them – they are master psychologists who have mapped out the human psyche in the greatest detail and devised brilliant methodologies to manipulate it to their gleeful advantage.The end result is that we, with our eyes wide open, bite the bait, and come home loaded with the most non-essential of items, topped with pangs of guilt about our stupid folly.
Once the mall has well and truly swallowed you into its innards, several realizations begin to dawn on you. Anyone with a semblance of patriotism and a love for things Indian is bound to observe that every mall worth its name is a slice of the Western way of life, with only a handful of Indigenous exceptions thrown in order to allay local sentiments. It is perfectly normal to desire to feel completely at home in these hallowed environs. But though you may be a proud Indian, you will have to be clad in figure-hugging jeans, an expensive, preferably branded tee-shirt, and sport the latest hairstyle to meld into the mall’s culture. Unless you have the ability to hold your own, you in your traditional Indian garb may well cut a dowdy figure among the stylishly hep apparitions dotting the ‘mallscape’ -an army of clones emanating from the same petri-dish of creation!
There is one other baffling and contradictory reality connected to malls. On the one hand, it is true that the more malls you visit, the more it hits you: a mall is a mall is a mall. If you have seen one in any corner of the country or even the world, you’ve seen them all, with minor variations. Any kind of regional flavor is quite non-existent in a mall.On the other hand, it is definitely ironic that every city is inordinately proud of its malls. Historical monuments, architectural wonders, places of religious significance, or natural beauty have all taken a back seat in the minds of a lot of glamour-struck mall-lovers. To cite an example, in the beautiful city of Indore, when asked for directions to the worthwhile places to visit, every finger surprisingly pointed towards their mall. Bah!
And finally, you also realize that a mall may be different things for different people. To old fuddy-duddies who hold trusty notions of searching for value for hard-earned money, a mall can be an absolutely inhospitable place. Moreover, it does not bother with niceties such as providing sitting spaces for arthritis-ridden doddering folk, because the mall likes to wear an uncluttered, minimalist look. However, for the young and sprightly, it is both an interesting hunting ground and an advantageous watering hole. You do need a bounce in your step to eat up those miles of space. You also need stars in your eyes and a blithe unconcern for the future to blow up money the way it inevitably gets blown up within the sanctified interiors of a mall.
A mall, in fact, stands for the diametric opposite of all the values taught to a generation brought up on a staple diet of Gandhian philosophy. Ever tried to visualize the reaction of Gandhiji’s ghost entering a mall on a whim, in one of its wanderings? I can vouch that it would do a double-take and fly out post-haste the same window out of which have flown out all his teachings!