Living in Mallville

A couple of months ago, The Economist wrote an obituary to indoor malls in the US, the land where the phenomenon began, as people moved to open-air lifestyle centres and retail spaces. But in Gurgaon and Bangalore, Guwahati and Vadodara, Chennai and Pune, they are alive and have become more than shopping arcades; they are the new town squares. As Mitali Choudhury Deka, a 40-something civil engineer in Guwahati, says, “Malls have taught us to have fun.” Evenings in the Assam capital don’t end with a quick grocery shopping at the nearby bazaar; the nights don’t die early at 8 or 9. Bornali Saikia, a 36-year-old banker, who takes her five-year-old son to the year-old Pizza Hut, at Donna Planet, says, “Earlier there was no concept of hanging out. That phrase was strange. Now the malls have brought that in.” Lifestyle has changed; new games are in; and even the language has mutated a little.

Conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah reasons, “In the past 50 years, the government hasn’t provided any open public spaces. So malls have become an outlet for recreation.” Ashis Nandy, sociologist, agrees that the changes are happening.
“Malls have become substitutes for meeting places. The youth would spend time in the malls rather than shiver or sweat in a street corner. Like in most of the US, we don’t have a street life. It is mall life,”says Nandy but he refuses to invest too much significance in the alterations malls are causing in the physical and social landscape.

Malls were always meant to be more than a cluster of shops and a car park, even when Victor Gruen, a Viennese immigrant, first constructed them across American suburbs in the 1950s, keeping the indoor temperature constant at 24oC. The temperature is the same at the newly opened Select Citywalk at Saket, Delhi, but it does not belong to Gruen’s “rat traps”. The landscaping is meant to evoke a mini park, with cobbled lanes and fountains. “We want the mall to be a laidback town square,” agrees Pranay Sinha, CEO of Select Citywalk, who was associated with the building of malls in Bangalore, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

Not that there aren’t shoppers. From the Mango-loving Saba Khan, who breezes in with the smell of Chanel No. 5, and breezes out with Rs 30,000 worth of labels in paper bags, to Dipanjana Gupta, who settles for Rs 3,000-a-weekend shopping, they are there. But they are just a fraction. Malls in India, an exhaustive book on the new retail landscape, talks about a research conducted in Bangalore, which showed that the average expenditure at a premium mall was only Rs 200. They are the middle India. Past the security checks and beyond the sliding doors, they are greeted with a language of hyperbole—of Planet Sports and Music World and Global Jewels. Beyond the glass walls is Neverland for most—perhaps Tomorrowland for some —but they are not here to spend their money on a pair of silver stilettos or that beguiling shade of mauve blush from Mac, or the slinky lingerie in Marks and Spencer. They don’t disdain them either. They take in these gleaming objects and pass them by, trundling the kids into escalators to reach the food court where globalisation comes in plastic trays—pizzas, palak paneer and pan-fried noodles—and, yes, a lot cheaper. They may not be shopaholics but they are mostly hope-aholics. It’s just that they care more about the budget than the body shop. They will relax it a little bit in multiplexes.

It can be argued that malls are not exactly town squares, public places that evoke heritage and history; that these are retail megaliths whose ultimate purpose is to convert the lounging masses into the shopping classes; that these glass palaces would not come up in trouble-torn Srinagar or Kohima; that they haven’t entered the cultural discourse of the nation yet—we haven’t had movies like Dawn of the Dead or Mallrats; or a book called Mall: the Novel. But their evolution into parks, amusement fairs, fake piazzas and new tourist spots in less than 20 years has been dramatic.

In Bangalore, a mall is the real-estate version of Facebook for techies. Yadu Krishnan, a 20-something who spends his after-hours and weekends at the Forum Mall, says, “If you are a software engineer, you are sure to bump into a school buddy or a college friend here.” In Ahmedabad, Sudha Anil, 27, travels to ISCON Mega Mall on Sundays to be part of the 90,000 footfalls on weekends. “We don’t have many relatives or friends, so we go to malls,” says the schoolteacher. For those like Anil and Krishnan, immigrants from Kerala, malls are places where they can safely hang around people, and feel part of a weird social circuit of strangers. If for Mumbaikars, malls mean dinner and movie, without having to deal with monsoon or traffic or parking worries; in Chennai, they are among the few night zones available.
But will malls survive? According to Images F&R Research, the number of malls in the country is expected to rise to 600 by 2010-11, spread over more than 200 million sq ft. Even mall managers are aware that mall gazing can get boring. For, malls are mostly a homogenised landscape; the only difference being the restaurants or the presence of particular labels. They don’t have the “aap kaise hain” kind of easy familiarity of the neighbourhood shop owner or the high energy of a street market where you haggle and harrumph over a good deal. Nandy says this is a passing fancy. Lambah agrees, “It is the novelty which attracts people. You clean up the Mahim Fort and people would also want to go there.”

For now, Jasbeer Anand, 63, who has flown from New York to New Delhi, is lounging with her husband at a mall in the Capital and is pleased that it almost looks like the sprawling Roosevelt Field Mall in Big Apple. She is not one for the candyfloss evening at India Gate. “What is there to see in India Gate? Here, there are so many shops and such wonderful things,” she sits back with a smile.
With inputs from Priyanka Pereira in Mumbai, Jaya Menon in Chennai, Sushmita Das in Ahmedabad, Samudra Gupta Kashyap in Guwahati, Amrita Chaudhry from Ludhiana and Rutuja Wakankar from Pune