The Mall Culture...

I visited the so very affluent Dubai Mall today for some unusual purpose (don’t ask what) and was I taken aback to see how mammoth and so vacant it was. The shopping precinct was spread over some huge 3 levels of pure retail therapy and that too, for the well heeled class, which also houses an Olympic sized ice rink! That’s when something just dawned on me, the reality that unlike what people say, the city that was once called the “City of Dreams,” is now segregated. Divided.

On one hand of this Dubai, you have the rolling middle class that gleefully drives a Toyota or a Honda and chomps on the Indian and Lebanese street cafes and restaurants, on the other hand, you have the ones who lazily stroll in the so called imitations of French cafes, spend their evenings in the arms of Chanel bags, Jimmy Choo shoes or Cavalli gowns (sarcastic).The loaded class I call them!!

I often muse at the times spent at the very famous and old, Deira City Center or DCC as we call it now. The unbearable shrill of claustrophobic people walking all over ,the shops abuzz with activity and the variedness of men and women in the food courts & now, the only thing I sense or come across are cafes or lounges with names never heard before, weird seating arrangements and even more weirder dish names, stores boasting of humongous bill boards but zilch crowd and most importantly, the gigantic ,but empty parking lots which make you realize you’ve entered some eerie old building rather than a shopping mall!!

Simpler and easier were those times, when shopping just meant a trip to the local mall with family or close friends and hanging around at the food courts within one’s reach. The sudden paradoxical shift of this word’s meaning has put me in a dilemma. I often think twice now, before going to a shopping mall, not for the fear that I might not get what I want but for the thought that I would bring back home a body full of tired and aching legs ,which I absolutely don’t want…