Mall culture kills the neighborhood shops. Old kirana
dookans lose out to the varieties of goods offered by the shopping malls.
Period. Social scientists and planners have discussed the cultural and economic
implications of this transition in taste and consumer behaviors in several
volumes. I cherish local stores as well as malls. Today one cannot be a
fundamentalist taste; one cannot impose personal agendas to others. If people
are comfortable in shopping in malls, let them do so. Perhaps, malls are the
new age interactive spaces, where hygiene and impersonal contacts rule. Malls
are the preferred hang outs of families and young people. However, you cannot
expect the same people hanging out at the same time in the same mall as it used
to be the case with the local shops, village squares, tailoring shops and
saloons. Even if you see some of them quite regularly as you are a regular there,
as impersonal contact is the norm none cares to connect through exchanging of
smiles, niceties or the general display of familiarity. In the temperature
conditions interiors of mall foyers, multiplex theatres, restaurants and shop
interiors, you are a planet of your own that moves in the cosmos of
strangeness. In this new environment, strangeness is a sort of insularity; a
safe recluse.
Though this is the situation today, one cannot say that the
old world charm has died out completely. There are some places or shops where
you still feel a sense of familiarity without the usual threats on your
privacy. These are the shops from where you get anything and everything under
the sun. They are not necessarily the shops in malls, regimented and sanitized
with exclusivity as their guiding principles. They could be located in an
upmarket area, or even they could be some non-descript shop in a crowded
street, but you could get anything that you want from there. Such shops are
still in the neighborhood, if you have an eye to see them and a purpose to
experience them. If your kids are still in the school, I am sure the local
stationary shop in your neighborhood is a place of all wonders. School teachers
send notes in your kids’ diaries asking for things that you do not regularly
use at home. ‘Three plastic spoons, one prism, a bundle of jute threads and a
packet of sequins’ to be sent tomorrow itself’. But you need not worry, these
things are available under one roof; your local stationary shop. The person who
runs the shop disappears into the innards of the small shop and comes up with
all what you have asked for, as if he were a genie. Yes, he is a genie. Forget
the market forces and demands that control the demand and supply chain. You may
wonder at the ability of this man to stock all kinds of weird demands made by
the school teachers on your kids.
Nobel laureate Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, in his novel, ‘The
Black Book’ writes about a shop at the Nisantasi Square, a neighborhood where
he lives. Pamuk calls it Alladin’s shop. The person who runs the shop is
Alladin. His name could be something else. But he is like Alladin in the
Arabian Nights who could perform wonders with the help of a genie and wonder
carpet. You get anything and everything from Alladin’s shop. You ask for a
particular issue of a superman comic that you had read in your childhood. He
will disappear into the darkness of the shop and come out with the number. He
knows your demands; but the interesting thing is that he even knows the demands
of the future. He intuits that a child would cry for a particular kind of candy
one day. And he stocks it for that one child. He remembers people, their
demands, needs, desires, their vagaries, their eccentricities and their
aspirations. Alladin is a man who is made of dreams. There is an Alladin shop
in everywhere, whether you wish it away or not, it remains there, for you
always. You may have stopped going there ages before. But one day you would go
back to that shop for a packet of naphtha balls, a needle, a particular kind of
button and what not. My friend and ace photography artist, Deepak John Mathew
takes me to a small shop one day in Ahmedabad and he asks for something very
peculiar and the shop owner gets it for him, again from the darkness of that
shop. Deepak, without knowing my familiarity with Alladin’s shops tells me that
this is an Alladin’s shop.
I have a reason to write about Alladin’s shop. In Delhi
there is a book store, Midlands, at the Aurobindo Market. I am a regular
visitor there. Three generations of people run there, a father, son and
grandson. The shop displays the pictures of famous writers who have visited or
visit there with the owner. Newspapers have written about this book shop and
the people run it. It is not a huge book stall like Landmark or Crosswords. It
has a reception area which is less than ten feet long and eight feet wide and
at the billing counter one person could hardly stand. Crossing this area there
is a bigger room stacked with books and there is an attic space where also book
are displayed. That makes the Midland book store. I am told that it has another
branch in Delhi but I have never visited this. I have visited most of the book
stores in Delhi but this one became a regular haunt for me because if I ask for
any book, without consulting the computer or anything they tell me whether it
is available or not. If it is available, out of the thousands of books stacked
up there (mostly without much of labeling like history, biography, new
arrivals, sports, self help etc etc) they pick it up and hand over it to me. It
is really magical. It is not just about the titles and authors that they know
by heart, as seasoned book sellers, they know even the contents of the books. I
have seen so many scholars from reputed universities and journalists thronging
there and asking for advice about certain new arrivals. It is not coming out of
practice or real home work; it comes from the passion with which they handle
their profession. They love it and they feel it.
A sense of nostalgia and longing became so intense for this
book stall when I recently visited one of the famous book store chains in a
mall in Mumbai. I was looking for a particular book. As I could not see it in
its designated section I went to the counter and asked for it. There were at
least ten uniformed boys and girls to help the book lovers to select and find
their books. As the corporate norms tell them, they went to check the name of the
book in the computer and found that there were two copies available in the stock.
Then they came out with me to check it in the shelves. Almost for one hour they
checked the whole book stall to find out the book. But unfortunately they could
not locate one. They did not have even any clue about the author or the book. Then
I asked for another book and a girl in charge told me that it should be in one particular
section. I told her that I had already checked there and could not find, she
came with me to only to offer me another book written by another author, almost
sounding like the one that I demanded. ‘Will it do?’ she asked me. I gave her a very good smile and walked out of
the book stall. While walking out, I was
just remembering the Alladins in Delhi and their art of selling books.
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