En Vogue

Yes, finally we have a shopping mall in the city. A place you can shop till you drop 8212; just perfect for all those shopaholics out there. Crossroads the brainchild of Urvi and Ajay Piramal has its own department store Piramyds where you can pick pret lines from established designers like Rohit Bal, Ashish Soni, J J Vallaya, Rina Dhaka and other non-Mumbai designers who were not earlier easily available in the city. Apart from designer clothes you can also find here many other tempting goodies. From luxury branded goods like Swarovski, Daum and Shyam Ahuja to the more reasonably-priced house of Zeba as well as the younger more affordable designers. After shopping, there is a food court where one can relax and munch on Lebanese delicacies. Sounds like shopper8217;s paradise?

Well it8217;s not! Crossroads is overcrowded what with visitors treating the mall like some kind of tourist attraction. A shopping mall is not meant to be a place to hang in just to enjoy the air-conditioning. It is meant to facilitate shoppingunder one roof, where at the end of the day, people can head to the bar for a drink or a meal. It8217;s meant to take the drudgery out of shopping. But in Mumbai, Crossroads is being treated as the latest in8217; place to be seen at 8212; which, for actual customers, can be very annoying. The other day, there were just two families sitting and eating in the food court. With 50 other people just watching them chew!

The department store Pyramids is also so crowded that it is impossible to look at the merchandise properly and there is never an attendant around to help. I wonder how many people in the mall are actual paying customers. Not many, judging by the very few walking out with shopping bags. As for parking, forget it. Crossroads may boast of an over 100 car parking space, but during peak hours it is always full. And even when it is less empty it takes at least 15 minutes to get your car out.

In other cities it is quite normal to spend an entire Saturday at the local mall getting a haircut, picking up yourdry-cleaning, stocking the fridge up with fresh vegetables and fruit and even buying something special to wear that Saturday. The idea is that shopping even for something as mundane as groceries should be a pleasurable experience. Here, the mall is so crowded that you just want to leave 8212; as soon as you get it in. And as far as I can tell even me, a self-confessed shopaholic lacked the stamina to check out the whole place there is no supermarket or dry cleaners at Crossroads. Which is probably just as well 8212; knowing the crowd out here, they would probably turn watching clothes getting washed into a TV serial!