There are differences, though: unlike Indian malls that brim with a broad swathe of the urban middle class, Westgate caters largely to a class of affluent Kenyans, many of Indian descent, or an international expat crowd - you'd be better off calculating your lunch in US dollars than Kenyan shillings. Kenya's professional class, like its manufacturing base, is small; disparities between the rich and the poor are huge. The country's social and political distortions are a magnification of India's. With rampant political corruption, tribal conflicts, a mountain of financial debt and ill-starred military intervention in a neighbouring country, its terrors come close to our nightmares.
Friends from Nairobi often visit India in search of specialised medicare - or of shopping that could include something as commonplace as decently priced cotton shirts. (In East Africa you buy either expensive foreign brands or low-grade export surplus from Asian sweatshops.) When Uhuru Kenyatta, the country's president who took office in April - and who lost a nephew in the Westgate attack - was finance minister some years ago, his way of cost cutting was to get ministers and senior officials to swap their Mercedes-Benz cars for Volkswagen Passats.
More From This Section
Uhuru means freedom in Swahili, a phrase akin to swaraj in Hindi. As the son of Kenya's founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, the 51-year-old leader also heads the majority Kikuyu tribe; he lives in a palatial farm house not far from Nairobi, its 31 acres a mere fraction of the thousands of acres the Kenyatta family owns. "He laughs, cracks jokes, drinks a lot. He is almost a hedonist," an old acquaintance of Uhuru Kenyatta's told the American journalist Joshua Hammer after he came to power. A criminal case against Mr Kenyatta for abetting murders, rapes and displacement of thousands in the violent election of 2007 drags on in the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Its temperate climate and serene setting apart, Nairobi is an unsafe capital; it is dangerous to wander around town after dark. Well-off residents are regularly targeted in muggings, highway hold-ups and murders; the Indian high commissioner and his family were attacked at night inside their walled residence near the colonial Muthaiga Club some years ago. Assailants often get away and convictions are rare. In a country where tribal rivalries are on the boil, it is never quite clear who they might be. (A hard-hitting account of Kenya's seething tribal tensions is given by the British journalist and Africa affairs specialist Michaela Wrong in her book It's Our Turn to Eat.)
Two years ago, Kenya unilaterally sent 4,000 soldiers into politically volatile Somalia across its eastern front to take on Al Shabab militants. The grievance against Kenya is visible in reactions by Somalians in the media analysis on the ferment in East Africa that the Westgate attack has generated. A sample post by Abdiwali Mohamed, a member of a Somali youth organisation, reads: "I have a great empathy with the innocent civilians who were trapped in between Al Shabab fighters and Kenyan forces at Westgate but if the attack would have struck at Kenyan government facilities, I would have become cheerful because Kenyans have invaded our country and maimed dozens of civilians in Kismayu. So, I think now it's payback time."
When the pieces are picked up after the Westgate attack, Kenyans might wonder at the root cause of the spread of terror.