Same old junk everywhere you go.

But what did I expect? I went to the Mumbai suburbs tonight and went to the biggest mall in Mumbai and a “hypermarket.” I went with my new Singapore friends. Alvin from work, his girlfriend Jingyi, and other people from their school – which is, I think, the Singapore School of Management, but they’re all undergrads. Christine was MIA. Tomorrow one of these Singapore guys is making dinner, and I’m invited. We’re having spaghetti, and no one told me to do this, but I’m going to have to figure out where to buy wine, which I’m sure will be warm. I almost figure that even if the wine isn’t warm when I buy it, it’s probably been warm at some point. It’s not easy to keep anything constantly cool here. Plus there are power outages that’ll shut fridges down.

Singapore friends

So these malls are a new phenomenon in India, and I saw Ruby Tuesday, Pizza Hut, Citibank, and who knows how many other American brands I didn’t see. I didn’t care to look too hard. I had a veggie pizza slice (called Jain pizza here) and green salad for dinner. Skipping Indian food for one meal seemed like a good idea. If I had been at my apartment, I probably would’ve skipped dinner.

Shortly before my pizza, I had some “chicken floss.” These Singaporeans wanted to come to this mall partly because there is a bakery there called “Bread Talk.” It’s a staple in Singapore, so they say. One of the signatures is a roll covered thinly with some mayonnaise sauce and some finely shredded and dried chicken that has the texture of carpet. This dish is called chicken floss. It tasted like a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich. It wasn’t bad, but next time I’ll take a fruit tart.



chicken floss

So a shopping mall in India is pretty much like a shopping mall in the U.S. The Hypermarket is like Super Wal-Mart except there is at least one worker in each aisle asking, “Can I help you sir?” There are almost too many – let me just shop, man – but this is India. Labor is cheap. Once you go through the checkout, there are kiosks hawking crafts and sweets. It’s like being on a Mumbai street, only everything is clean and the temperature is cool. Cheddar cheese was really freaking expensive. It’s imported.

Before going into most bigger, chain-type stores (and movie theaters) you have to go through a metal detector. I set off a metal detector on Saturday while I was shopping, and I kept walking, and no one stopped me. Mritunjay called these metal detectors a “farce,” and I guess they’re terrorist deterrents.

It’s almost guaranteed that any woman over 45 in a sari will be walking slow with a limp. Watch out whenever walking behind one.

The food aisles at the Hypermarket were of course stocked with packaged U.S. food brands. Almost all of these American brands are manufactured in India by an Indian partner because India’s protectionist laws won’t let the foreign brands flood the Indian market. I bought Renu contact solution that was manufactured in Delhi. The loosening of such restrictions is one of the main causes of India’s constantly-talked about economic growth rate. Wal-Mart can’t just open up shop here in India. It needs an Indian retail partner.

What I’ve noticed at bookstores is that business books are very, very popular. I saw all kinds of books that I thought were obscure titles. Here they are displayed on prime shelf space and make up a large percentage of the inventory. The top 10 nonfiction books are almost completely filled with these books. Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat still among the top 10. I’m going to go ahead and theorize this love of business books is because Indians hear about and see all these other Indians getting rich in this heating economy, and other Indians want to get into business and get rich too. So they can drive their new cars to their shopping malls and buy a whole bunch of crap they probably don’t need.

Uncle Skeeter told me one time that corporations are evil because they manufacture so much crap for us to buy that we don’t need. This doesn’t necessarily make them evil, but they do manufacture a whole lotta crap we don’t need. I saw aisles of it tonight. Indians didn’t have these options 5 years ago. But corporations giving us choices doesn’t make them evil. People can buy want they want to buy, or not buy what they don’t want. It’s just unfortunate for people’s health that there are aisles and aisles of Frito-Lay chips here now, when not long ago there wouldn’t have been.

I see so many fatsos in saris, and the sari leaves part of the stomach and back exposed. This means I’ve seen a lot of exposed fat rolls. What I forgot to mention is that there is an Indian edition of the reality show “Biggest Loser.” And there are some seriously fat Indians on that show. There is also an Indian Idol, complete with neon blue “Indian Idol” logo. (Watching Indian Idol with Babu two weeks ago, a girl contestant fainted when she got booted off. Babu laughed and said, “No prize.”)