There was light disbelief on the face of my friend when I said I would go to South City Mall on Republic Day, to be done in one go with the diverse shopping list that had piled up for want of a suitable one-stop shop nearby. You are obviously new to the city, he said, adding that, on a holiday, that place has more crowds than the zoo.
The shopping mall is obviously still arriving in Kolkata. These make a good place to go out to on a holiday in a city where there are few public spaces like amusement parks or movie halls that are both pleasantly clean and affordable. I myself quite liked going round them, with their smart shops, when I first discovered them in Bangalore a decade ago.
Rather quickly I realised they were quite lethal. “Impulse shopping” is not an esoteric term of little relevance to lay people. I am not to be let loose near any counter that stocks a range of kitchen knives of fascinating shapes and for diverse uses, or cheese from different parts of the world, the wife will affirm.
When malls first came to Kolkata, they aroused contrary sentiments. Ordinary people liked to simply go around then, particularly when the air-conditioning made a big difference from the temperature outside, and maybe even buy a thing or two. Others – the Left was still entrenched then – saw it as the long arm of globalisation carrying consumerism to its extreme. An unavoidable evil, if you like, but an evil nevertheless.
What is fascinating is how malls have fallen on hard times in the Holy Grail of capitalism, the United States. They have been declining for a time, but two developments in recent years have dealt them lethal blows that look like being terminal. One is the Great Recession that struck when housing prices crashed in 2007, and the other is the inexorable advance of online shopping.
It seems that now some malls are being shut for the weekend because there are simply too few footfalls. On the other hand, in Kolkata and most of India, both the rich and the poor love going to malls. Those too poor to buy anything meaningful treat a mall as a window to the life they would like to have but cannot, innocent voyeurs peeking into the lives of those they think have it all.
Things are about the same in China, where a once-poor people are now a bit ahead of Indians on the road to better incomes. Material things that they have long wanted give them pleasure. There are also those who have earned too much too soon and don’t have the sense to hide it. A friend came back from Shanghai some time ago and related with disgust how at a posh restaurant he saw a celebratory party at which people were downing one of the best champagnes mixed with – I am not fibbing, he said – Coke.
Over time I have loved to patronise individual shops which seem to have a unique communication channel to their customers, knowing precisely what they will be looking for and stocking it up front. The little bookshop in the Fort area of Mumbai; Premier bookshop in Bangalore while it was still there; Hema department store in the same city before it changed hands; the shop in Kolkata’s Jadavpur which stocks an incredible range of buttons so that if a cardigan or a blazer is in danger of being disabled for loss of a button of a particular shape, size and colour, you know where hope still lingers – these will live on, in the mind at least, for ever.
But I still like to occasionally go to a large outlet of a chain store in a shopping mall (in India one often comes with the other) — unless it is a public holiday and Kolkata. The functionality is unbeatable. You get everything on your list in one go, and for the commonest items of daily consumption there is a range of brands on display which the all-purpose corner store cannot match. And like it or not, customer service in modern retail chains in India is better than you will get in most traditional outlets. I have, on a number of occasions, returned things that were bought in error and been easily obliged. There are also well-trained floor managers who will carefully listen to your complaint and sometimes completely turn you mood around by their sympathetic handling.
However, it will not be long before the onslaught of online shopping hits Indian retailing too. At the Kolkata book fair, I spotted an out-of-the-ordinary book which I decided to possess. So I came home and ordered it on Flipkart. That must make me one of the most ungrateful people (vis-à-vis the bookshop at the fair) ever.
