The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal has a front page on piece on three young men in India having a chance to escape out of Poverty by finding jobs in a mall in Mumbai. All three of them work in Pantaloons in Phoenix Mills - an old textile mill in central Mumbai redeveloped into a sprawling mall.
All three men are keen on being able to have enough money to be more like the 'middle-class' customers they serve in the store. There is a strong aspirational value here, which affects decisions made by the poor. For instance, one of the men in the story recently purchased a laptop! Imagine walking into a urban squatter in Mumbai - open drainages, unattended garbage, no water supply and even electricity - and you walk into one of the houses, and you find a guy sitting on his laptop. Am I the only one who thinks there is something not quite right about this picture.
I guess we need a little more than shopping malls to help us!
Monday, November 19, 2007
Little more than shopping malls
Posted by Santhosh at 1:05 AM
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5 comments:
Very true! exploitation @ its peak ..Nice post!
How r u? :)
I'm not sure I get who the exploiter is here?
How the hell does it matter? Iam sick of finding out how poor we are. Yes. We are poor. Yes development is one sided.... SO what???? Why Do I have to give a flyin' F***. Tell me Santhosh. Am I suposed to feel guilty because I can afford what these poor Basta**s can't? SO what if the whole bloody world goes to the Dogs? Why should I care? Don't gimme the whole 'compassion' rigmorale? Why doI even need to lift a fingerto help them.... Alll of us are miserable anyway..... Cleaning up the slums appeal to my sense of smell..... but nothing else....
On a totally unrelated subject Santosh, I saw one of deepak's comments on one of your old blogs where he was referring toyou as 'Tosh'. I knew I'd heard this word somewhere and well, I did some research. Guess what daddy found on wordnet?
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=tosh
For the impatient:
Noun
S: (n) baloney, boloney, bilgewater, bosh, drool, humbug, taradiddle, tarradiddle, tommyrot, tosh, twaddle (pretentious or silly talk or writing)
LOL
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