Strolling in a market place with or without the intention to shop is an enriching experience. With the arrival of mall culture, the neighbourhood markets and shops are becoming a thing of past. Markets are memory zones, observers Sushma Sabnis taking her experience of visiting markets in India and abroad as a point of departure.
There is the damp sweet smell of a flower market that hits you as soon as you get into the overcrowded, jam packed bustling marketplace in Borivili West, Mumbai. This place probably has been here since eons, as far as public knowledge goes. When one has walked into these complex network of fruits vegetables flowers and all kinds of ware sellers, interspersed with the odd Mangalore store run by a man from Hyderabad who sells, sambar shallots, Kerala acchapam and Tamilian Karuvepalli thokku, along with any and every type of ghatia, sev , bhakarwadi and muruku. This market place resides as much in one’s being as it does in reality.
A smell or an odour brings to mind a plethora of memories which never leave even when the mind is stressed about the work to be done for tomorrow and day after, somehow suddenly the mind wanders into an old pooja samaan gully, where the heady perfumes, incense sticks, smell of kumkum, haldi and camphor intermingle and all things auspicious including little black stuffed dolls, look at you with some kind of plea, ‘please buy us, we are tired of hanging on this string, we’d rather burn and colour a human forehead or hang off the main door of a hut than sit here and take in any more smells of rotting fruits and flowers.’ A peculiar cry reminds me of the tender coconut vendors who sit in the hot sun with skin glistening with sweat beads like diamonds on Hirst’s skull. They defy the sun by reflecting their attitude of industriousness. There is the exquisitely wrinkled, nine yards clad woman from Vasai who sells pockets of ginger, chillies and garlic, her wrinkles are the advertising industry’s best kept secret, because everyone runs to help the poor old woman with wrinkles who sells the same products a bit higher priced than the wholesale market two feet away. But she in her ‘sales get-up’ emerges a winner every day.
A market place is in a child’s imagination a beautiful possibility to possess things. One would remember going to the market with their parents and then alone or with friends as a teenagers. One would want everything on display. The colours, the smells, the tastes, the cute shopkeeper who stares, last time even with a smile, was he just being coquettish or is that his way of getting customers to buy something from the shop? Earrings trinkets and bangles, were the hottest selling commodity in those days. Then during the working- earning days, it was cosmetics and trinkets, earrings, clothes and bangles.
For today’s generation, it is mostly mobile phone recharges, blasphemous apparels (one cannot qualify them as clothes) and friendship bands. One could see a market place as a place to covet things. If one approached malls with the same kind of perspective, one can get saturated up to one’s twelfth auric layer with the maul-ness of malls! Fake, mostly momentary pleasures can be very misguiding.
If one has had the opportunity to go through many market places in the world, one would notice that a country’s truth surfaces in a market place.
The noises, the voices, the buying culture, the produce of the land, the openness of the country / people to accept trade, hence accepting other non-indigenous products, the selling culture, the way people make a sale, the way they speak to the customer even if they are merely selling 10 peanuts, all this contributes to culture. Then sometimes the quality of a product has no bearing when the sale is being made.
Coming back to market places that flourish, in Thailand, the markets are one of the places one looks forward to visiting. From fruits, to vegetables to fish, meats to sweetmeats, from clothes to lingerie, from ornaments to traditional Thai clothes, to fake Prada (Prado) purses, to rambutan and durians sold by the kilo. The beauty of the market place in a country where one doesn’t know the local language, the point of engagement with the seller is highly interesting. In China and in Hong Kong communication between locals and tourists happens with the use of a calculator. Numbers are apparently an ice breaker of language and words and also precise and to the point. In Hong Kong the local markets have people who speak broken English and one could accosted by the incessant ,‘You, you liiikkee?’ question. Sometimes however, signs and hand gestures can be very misleading.
In a village market on a 10 deg C Friday afternoon, in Nairobi, the Swahili speaking masai -mara folks wearing Nike shoes often come across as intimidating, they have disarming smiles and the red of their robes is enough warning of their hunter instincts. But they sell beautiful beaded
ornaments, wooden sculptures and figurines of animals and birds, true to the natural surroundings they come from. But they are very difficult business people. Nature has taught them never to bargain.
The evolution of today’s human kind can be seen in the way the market place has gone from a physical entity of a shop with wares which all the five senses can interact and experience, to a screen presence on a laptop with a shopping cart and a favourites’ list. Online shopping / marketing has revolutionized the whole concept of buying itself. When it did start, it faced a few glitches, but later security of websites, etc have made online shopping an experience far too simple and less time consuming.
But with the advent of online markets, does the traditional market die out slowly like everything else? There is a purpose of a traditional brick and mortar, odour ridden, colourful market place, the purpose of such a place is to bring humanity together. A market place is the only place where a vegetarian and a non vegetarian can shop side by side without offending each other’s principles, urging human interactions of all strata and status levels at a simple transactional platform..
The online market place is an isolated experience. One sees a product and buys it at discounted prices but what actually gets discounted is human interaction. This in the long run may harm the society as a whole. If people do not interact with each other, the building block of communities will vanish. People may get more depressed with this kind of self imposed isolation. A healthy balance may be able to keep the whole system form toppling over.
Sushma Sabnis
