Deceptions at the 'Dollar Store': Life in the holodeck of a Bombay mall

By Leon D'Souza

September 6, 2005 | MUMBAI, India -- Walking into "Nirmal Lifestyles," a mall complex on the outskirts of a north Bombay suburb, can feel a bit like stepping into a holodeck deep in the Star Trek fictional universe.

Outside, the unrelenting madness of the street: taxis weaving in and out of lanes, horns blaring; frantic rickshaws dodging startled passers-by; bus drivers mocking traffic signals as if they were suggestions and not the law; mongrel dogs defecating on the sidewalk -- a world that appears as though it was something Jackson Pollock might have created on a bad day.

But wander past the Golden Arches, and into the embrace of a smiling Ronald McDonald, and you enter a world that seems oddly familiar.

Ahead, a mockup of the space shuttle poised for liftoff looms mightily against a backdrop of the cosmos. "We have a countdown on New Year's Eve," one of my cousins informs me. "That's when they launch the shuttle."

"Launch it?" I ask, confused.

"Oh, it just moves a bit and returns back to its resting position," he clarifies.

"I wonder if it's designed to snub the shuttle program," I joke.

My cousin shoots me a blank stare and then points to a replica of the International Space Station dangling from the dome-like ceiling that encloses the massive plaza. "See the Indian flag on the astronaut's backpack?" he asks.

It's quite impossible not to see the flag, a metaphor perhaps for urban India's soaring ambitions, and the breakneck effort afoot to transform Bombay and the other metropolitan hubs into cosmopolitan havens along the lines of Singapore or Shanghai.

"We get all foreign stuff here now," my uncle announces proudly. "It's just like in the States, and it's cheap too."

This isn't an exaggeration.

Everything -- even the dollar store -- has been appropriated by corporate India in this vast conspiracy to tempt an upwardly mobile middle class, pampered by high-salaried jobs in American call centers, to satisfy its cravings for all things Western.

What's unfortunate is that the innovation once characteristic of the Indian marketplace isn't visible in this rushed revolution. Soon after India threw off the British yoke in 1947, its leaders, inspired by Fabian socialism and its philosophy of gradualism, framed policies that kept the domestic market relatively isolated from the world.

High import tariffs prevented most foreign goods from being sold here, so by necessity, Indian entrepreneurs developed their own brands covering a fairly unique line of products. We ate vada pavs (lentil batter doughnuts stuffed in loaves of bread), not Big Macs.

Yet now, as India enters an era of market liberalization and economic reform, it seems to have traded its inventiveness for a business plan written years ago in the United States . And nowhere is this more evident than in the use of monikers like "The Dollar Store" in a country where transactions are carried out entirely in Indian rupees.

"Look, do you get this shampoo there in the States?" my father asks smugly.

He's holding a bottle of VO5 -- strawberries and cream; I flip it over and read the fine print out loud: "Intended for distribution only in the Americas."

Enough said.

Dad lets his question go unanswered, but we're soon on to other fragments of American retail, and more line-shooting about this and that. ("See the fresh produce aisle, with the sprinkler system?"; "Oh, now we also get these American magazines, Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan. See the racks?")

I'm not sure what drives the gasconade, but I suppose the rhetoric about an Indian Shanghai must have an almost aphrodisiacal lure in India, a country where more than 300 million people -- nearly the population of the United States -- still live on less than a dollar a day. The facade of modernity offers the masses a glimmer of hope, and they respond to it by holding fast to the dream, and even peppering it with their own escapist fantasies.

So, venture into the "Café Coffee Day," which promises that "a lot can happen over coffee," and sample a concoction of "Love in Colombia." Forget about the here and now, the dreamers seem to say.

But is it possible to forget?

Outside the holodeck, Bombay still houses the largest slum in Asia; its apathy is still legendary; its minorities are still threatened by communal hate; its AIDS infection rate is still staggering. And all in all, it remains a real cesspool of a place. As the Canadian magazine Ubuntu put it in a 2003 essay, "inside and around and through its heart, Bombay is dying."

I step into the street feeling a little wistful.

If only India could set aside the dream to confront the wretched reality. Perhaps then we might be able to achieve real stability and sustainable progress, one neighborhood at a time. In the words of Sir Winston Churchill, "To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years."

MS
MS