Little more than shopping malls

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!