Let’s go to the mall,’ someone said recently. And for some reason, I felt shivers down my spine. Malls were once the fountainhead of all things fun, but have turned into haunted houses of nightmares.
I remember when the first mall appeared in Bhubaneswar in 2004. It was a new world I’d only glimpsed in movies, and MTV videos. A Hogwarts of Capitalism, a Disneyland of Development. Like the Music World store, where you could listen to the latest CD without needing to purchase it. Rows and floors of shops of different kinds. Bhubaneswar being a small town, the mall was akin to a mela for most families. The latest Himesh-Hashmi hit playing in the background, children sliding down the rails, running through the escalators, and touching everything they could lay their hands on. For a city that had majorly lived in sepia, the mall was a Technicolour playground for the senses. And the malls knew this too!
You’d find a tiny Spiderman with a gun crawling on the floor. Or disco lights that made us follow them like catnip-fed large cats.
For those like me who were in the throes of teenage, malls became important parts of dating life. My first few relationships were all nurtured on mall-sold coffee (₹50) and sandwiches (₹30). One no longer needed to go to a park and hide behind bushes like heathens. You could use the free AC provided by capitalism, and promise to be with each other for the rest of your lives. Malls were spaces without paan stains on the walls, or people hooting just because they saw someone with XX chromosomes. When you bought popcorn and Coke and passed it on to friends in the row, you felt strangely cosmopolitan. All arguments were settled under the jurisdiction of the ‘food court’. Where all the members in a ‘friends group’ could eat different foods and everyone went home happily after the eventual missed call from home.
Today, going to a mall is a painful visit to Hotel California. You wade through traffic for 40 minutes, circle around parking for 30 minutes, and finally pay 50 rupees to leave the place. Then there’s the security check at the gates. It must be that Suriya movie that I watched, but for some reason every time I get frisked, I imagine getting caught with seven bags of contraband, an Indonesian wife, and a family staying illegally with forged documents! Malls today are epicentres of anxiety, with lights, sounds, and people everywhere you turn your head. With so many people shooting videos and reels, I feel like a junior artist without a union card, constantly avoiding cameras from every angle.
I wonder if malls will survive in the coming decades. With people shopping online, they’ll probably serve as warehouses for Amazon. It’s a cruel closing arc – malls killed Kirana stores and e-commerce killed malls. Or perhaps they’ll survive as free AC centres in India summers. Maybe they’ll turn into ‘experience zones’ – places where you can actually touch things, and look at real people walking about. Or maybe they’ll become places where the old people hang out. As my generation reaches their final decade, they’ll probably waddle about reminiscing about the time when they hid from their parents in these structures, and promised to love and live together for the rest of their lives.
Malls will probably remain as relics of the past. Clunky structures causing traffic in a modern megapolis – the last thing you curse as your ambulance rushes towards the hospital.
(The writer’s views are personal)