It was under the dimmed lights over the jeans section at Westside in Express Avenue, that I took a look at my watch. It was 7.30 and as my mind quickly processed the data, I realised that it was the longest one and a half hours of my life (including having to listen to Chemistry from 1 - 2.30 in the post lunch session). I mean I could have sworn that the minutes clock hadn't been moving for a long long time, but that was against the fundamental principles of watch-ticking - the minute hand and the second hands always stop at the same time - and so I didn't really have a go, but admit for all badness in the world, that I was a complete fail shopper.
I instantly felt depressed. I mean in this Era of hyperactive shopping and consumers rights and shopping malls, it is not bad to be a mass-murderer, but its criminal to be a complete fail in Shopping. The gravity of this crime is evident from the fact that Samuel Johnson deliberately avoided listing an antonym for the term 'Shopaholic' while compiling his first Dictionary of the English Language. I mean that's so mean. Screw that man!!
But trust me, since times immemorial, I have never really seen a point in walking around kilometers of aisles and stacks and stacks of neatly/unneatly, folded/unflolded/hung clothes to pick up that one piece of sewn fabric that you believe will make an average 20-year old look any less hideous than he/she actually is. I mean its ridiculous to even think that clothes have that ability. If anything, good clothes reflect a good girlfriend. And if that is a social prestige you intend to show off to the World, then shopping is for you. Not for me... no.. I still dont see the point.
I belong to the 'gang' which believes that shopping was awesome when you just had to sit at home and watch Tom and Jerry while your Mom and her sis and that neighbour aunty and their daughter akka all went out together and when they came back got back orange colour shorts and baniyan from a kids shop. Back then shopping was so entertaining!! I dont know when suddenly the transition happened from orange shorts from a hosiery to trousers at Lifestyle, from watching TV while waiting for waiting your mom to call you and put on the baniyan to going to the trial room and trying them out yourself.
I mean look at the average process chart for shopping and you ll know why I dont appreciate shopping much.
1. Find a shop
You can base your choice of shopping spot based on a variety of factors as listed below
a) How much scene you want to put (Over scene, go to Louis Phillippe and John Players. Less Scene, go to Peter England)
b) With whom are you shopping ( If girlfriend, go to mall. If mom, go to hosiery shop)
c) Who are you shopping for (If Girlfriend, make some excuse like fever, cough cold, etc. Going there will be dangerous for your monthly budget. And in the extreme case, if you take her to Express Avenue for shopping, you either love her too much, or you have suicidal tendencies (Visit a Psychiatrist) For others - non-gf's - it is flexible)
d) Who will be buying (If you are buying, go to Pondy Bazaar. If someone else is buying, go to Lifestyle)
2. Decide what you want to buy - This could range from jeans and corduroys to flat front to pleated to khaki to mukka pants - a product of the acceptable social convention. Like for instance, wearing a mukka pant to play football is a great idea, but then it kinda looks odd in an office when you are wearing formal shoes, full hand shirt with a tie and all... Ew.. Just imagining it looks bad enough. Dress Sense is important.
3. Decide what you want to buy in whatever you want to buy - The "java-coupled-with-nuclear-energy-for-the-evolution-of-mankind" equation means that when you decide to buy any garment - like say jeans - you are only one step into the entire clothes buying process and thats the relatively easier part. Fashion has reached a phase where you have millions of possibilities for every choice you make, and as we can see today, dedicated data mining applications are being developed just for fashion retailers. Gone are the days when you could just walk into any shop that sold fabric and say "show me jeans", cos then he will ask you "straight cut ah boot cut ah basic denim ah washed denim ah acid wash ah stone wash ah dirty wash ah slim fit ah tight fit ah low waist ah mid rise ah ??" Asking for "jeans" in a garment shop is like asking for "alchohol" in a bar. There are too many subtle differences between the choices we have.
4. Look for the price of what you want to buy- In 1905, after the partition of Bengal, when Bal Gangadhar Thilak walked into a Levi's showroom (or maybe Pepe Jeans or even Wrangler, I dont know) in Kolkata, he was so horrified by the prizes that they had listed, the moment he came out, he started the Swadeshi movement to burn down anything foreign. His point - If the cotton was from India, the cost of the garment he bought should be affordable to the normal Indian too!
If the pricing of jeans is any indication of the timing, then trust me friends, it is the best moment for the Swadeshi Movement v2.0. There is only so much that the cost of a Tiruppur manufactured fabric can multiply before it becomes the final tee-shirt displayed in the Shopping Malls. But that isn't how it turns out, and when we decide to get ourselves cheated by the hi-fi looks of that showroom and buy that one small piece of transparent "Baniyan" which someone gave a fancy name "Round Neck T-shirt", it burns the proverbial hole in our pocket ! Who said imperialism died ? Go check out the shopping malls. At the current rate, it wont be long before we all start buying our charkhas and weaving khadi - that symbol of Indian technology.
5. If you still want to buy whatever you wanted to buy, you are doomed to use the trial room to check the size cos they "dont exchange goods once purchased"
The only good thing about modern day trial rooms in shopping malls is that they are not toilets- at least not by name. Toilets are trial rooms with one critical difference - people flush when they leave!! The condition of trial rooms is getting so bad that you will often feel that there is no disgrace in changing in front of a hundred people - at least you can escape from that door-broken, stench-filled, cockroach-infested, secret-spying-cameras-installed extension counters of Hell Inc.
7. Alteration Counter
Blessed are those who have a body that conforms to fashion apparel standards set across the globe. Cos if they aren't, they will have to spend an amount of time equal to the first six steps just to get their apparel to conform to the standards that their body establishes. The alteration counter is the first place where you catch the wind of unhappiness over your decision to buy clothes. Cos this wait is longer than the billing counter, only the wait doesn't end there. Its an hour or maybe two after you patiently walk through the length of that queue (cos the number of people with disproportionate body structures is more than just a few) that you get your dress back, stitched as you want and all.
Shopping at Malls is a direct exhibition of the Darwin theory - only the fittest survive. Only the hardcore shopaholics can get through these 7 steps of the intense struggle for clothes and I certainly have a long way to go before I join that order. Not that I want to, but an obvious role of the grihasthi would be to take his family out for shopping once every Diwali and there will be a time when I just have to give in to the demands of a social convention so unfairly set against shopping haters.
For now, I just picked up something that vaguely looked like a jeans (cos thats the most versatile peace of garment I've seen yet), folded at the bottom so that I dont have to get it altered and all, asked my mom to stand in the queue 15 minutes before I got back with the jeans so I could straightaway bill it when I was done with my selection and ran out of the shop as early as I could. My, my, we certainly learn how to twist our way through the system soon, don't we.
Oh.. and ya, what if Samuel Johnson doesnt list an antonym ? I Rohit Subramanian, hereby declare that anyone who does not like shopping is to be called a shopaphobic.(Haha..Yes. even I read the roots/prefixes/suffixes section in Barron's GRE).
Just remember, its not bad to be a shopaphobic. We are humans too.
I instantly felt depressed. I mean in this Era of hyperactive shopping and consumers rights and shopping malls, it is not bad to be a mass-murderer, but its criminal to be a complete fail in Shopping. The gravity of this crime is evident from the fact that Samuel Johnson deliberately avoided listing an antonym for the term 'Shopaholic' while compiling his first Dictionary of the English Language. I mean that's so mean. Screw that man!!
But trust me, since times immemorial, I have never really seen a point in walking around kilometers of aisles and stacks and stacks of neatly/unneatly, folded/unflolded/hung clothes to pick up that one piece of sewn fabric that you believe will make an average 20-year old look any less hideous than he/she actually is. I mean its ridiculous to even think that clothes have that ability. If anything, good clothes reflect a good girlfriend. And if that is a social prestige you intend to show off to the World, then shopping is for you. Not for me... no.. I still dont see the point.
I belong to the 'gang' which believes that shopping was awesome when you just had to sit at home and watch Tom and Jerry while your Mom and her sis and that neighbour aunty and their daughter akka all went out together and when they came back got back orange colour shorts and baniyan from a kids shop. Back then shopping was so entertaining!! I dont know when suddenly the transition happened from orange shorts from a hosiery to trousers at Lifestyle, from watching TV while waiting for waiting your mom to call you and put on the baniyan to going to the trial room and trying them out yourself.
I mean look at the average process chart for shopping and you ll know why I dont appreciate shopping much.
1. Find a shop
You can base your choice of shopping spot based on a variety of factors as listed below
a) How much scene you want to put (Over scene, go to Louis Phillippe and John Players. Less Scene, go to Peter England)
b) With whom are you shopping ( If girlfriend, go to mall. If mom, go to hosiery shop)
c) Who are you shopping for (If Girlfriend, make some excuse like fever, cough cold, etc. Going there will be dangerous for your monthly budget. And in the extreme case, if you take her to Express Avenue for shopping, you either love her too much, or you have suicidal tendencies (Visit a Psychiatrist) For others - non-gf's - it is flexible)
d) Who will be buying (If you are buying, go to Pondy Bazaar. If someone else is buying, go to Lifestyle)
2. Decide what you want to buy - This could range from jeans and corduroys to flat front to pleated to khaki to mukka pants - a product of the acceptable social convention. Like for instance, wearing a mukka pant to play football is a great idea, but then it kinda looks odd in an office when you are wearing formal shoes, full hand shirt with a tie and all... Ew.. Just imagining it looks bad enough. Dress Sense is important.
3. Decide what you want to buy in whatever you want to buy - The "java-coupled-with-nuclear-energy-for-the-evolution-of-mankind" equation means that when you decide to buy any garment - like say jeans - you are only one step into the entire clothes buying process and thats the relatively easier part. Fashion has reached a phase where you have millions of possibilities for every choice you make, and as we can see today, dedicated data mining applications are being developed just for fashion retailers. Gone are the days when you could just walk into any shop that sold fabric and say "show me jeans", cos then he will ask you "straight cut ah boot cut ah basic denim ah washed denim ah acid wash ah stone wash ah dirty wash ah slim fit ah tight fit ah low waist ah mid rise ah ??" Asking for "jeans" in a garment shop is like asking for "alchohol" in a bar. There are too many subtle differences between the choices we have.
4. Look for the price of what you want to buy- In 1905, after the partition of Bengal, when Bal Gangadhar Thilak walked into a Levi's showroom (or maybe Pepe Jeans or even Wrangler, I dont know) in Kolkata, he was so horrified by the prizes that they had listed, the moment he came out, he started the Swadeshi movement to burn down anything foreign. His point - If the cotton was from India, the cost of the garment he bought should be affordable to the normal Indian too!
If the pricing of jeans is any indication of the timing, then trust me friends, it is the best moment for the Swadeshi Movement v2.0. There is only so much that the cost of a Tiruppur manufactured fabric can multiply before it becomes the final tee-shirt displayed in the Shopping Malls. But that isn't how it turns out, and when we decide to get ourselves cheated by the hi-fi looks of that showroom and buy that one small piece of transparent "Baniyan" which someone gave a fancy name "Round Neck T-shirt", it burns the proverbial hole in our pocket ! Who said imperialism died ? Go check out the shopping malls. At the current rate, it wont be long before we all start buying our charkhas and weaving khadi - that symbol of Indian technology.
5. If you still want to buy whatever you wanted to buy, you are doomed to use the trial room to check the size cos they "dont exchange goods once purchased"
The only good thing about modern day trial rooms in shopping malls is that they are not toilets- at least not by name. Toilets are trial rooms with one critical difference - people flush when they leave!! The condition of trial rooms is getting so bad that you will often feel that there is no disgrace in changing in front of a hundred people - at least you can escape from that door-broken, stench-filled, cockroach-infested, secret-spying-cameras-installed extension counters of Hell Inc.
6. Ok. You still want to buy it ? There's still the cash counter left.
Cash counters serve a bigger purpose than what their name may suggest, which obviously is collecting cash and giving you covers. It is the shop management's way of saying "You still haven't learnt you lessons ? We will give you one last chance". Cash counters are among the worst places to be in any Shopping Mall because even after you patiently await your chance behind that rich spoilt lady who has literally bought out the entire shop with a bill for 50k rupees, you may still not be able to get your stuff billed cos their inventory system crashed. Then again there is this entire range of ethical issues of breaking the queue and letting the woman who has a flight to catch (and also looks sexy) ahead so you can spend a few more mintues waiting. Honestly, the billing counter of a clothes showroom is the longest you have to wait to lose money. I mean even at Tirupati, you can look forward to Laddus at the end. But nothing here. You spent all the bad time to pay money to that small boy at the counter so he can give you covers (again, for which you pay now)
7. Alteration Counter
Blessed are those who have a body that conforms to fashion apparel standards set across the globe. Cos if they aren't, they will have to spend an amount of time equal to the first six steps just to get their apparel to conform to the standards that their body establishes. The alteration counter is the first place where you catch the wind of unhappiness over your decision to buy clothes. Cos this wait is longer than the billing counter, only the wait doesn't end there. Its an hour or maybe two after you patiently walk through the length of that queue (cos the number of people with disproportionate body structures is more than just a few) that you get your dress back, stitched as you want and all.
Shopping at Malls is a direct exhibition of the Darwin theory - only the fittest survive. Only the hardcore shopaholics can get through these 7 steps of the intense struggle for clothes and I certainly have a long way to go before I join that order. Not that I want to, but an obvious role of the grihasthi would be to take his family out for shopping once every Diwali and there will be a time when I just have to give in to the demands of a social convention so unfairly set against shopping haters.
For now, I just picked up something that vaguely looked like a jeans (cos thats the most versatile peace of garment I've seen yet), folded at the bottom so that I dont have to get it altered and all, asked my mom to stand in the queue 15 minutes before I got back with the jeans so I could straightaway bill it when I was done with my selection and ran out of the shop as early as I could. My, my, we certainly learn how to twist our way through the system soon, don't we.
Oh.. and ya, what if Samuel Johnson doesnt list an antonym ? I Rohit Subramanian, hereby declare that anyone who does not like shopping is to be called a shopaphobic.(Haha..Yes. even I read the roots/prefixes/suffixes section in Barron's GRE).
Just remember, its not bad to be a shopaphobic. We are humans too.
