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TO many, they are escapes, fluorescent havens of light when there is darkness at home, literal or metaphorical. Like the urban dwellers of most cities, the upwardly mobile of Karachi have begun to look to malls, and specifically to retail shopping, as entertainment. Whether they are nominally ventilated, partially crumbling, and tarnished versions of the no longer hip Tariq Road, or the more recently arrived oceanside venues, the malls of Karachi are now permanent fixtures of the city’s retail landscape.
All this is fine and easily digested. Security guards and metal detectors at the entrances of many Karachi malls have helped keep up appearances of safety. In this city, perhaps even more so than in the urban heart of other developing nations, the spectre of brightly lit buildings, insulated from problems, is attractive even in lesser malls, the ones where the air-conditioning is dysfunctional, the shopkeepers often bored, and the housewives mostly harried. Corridors loop around atriums with shoppers transported up or down by escalators at various levels of functionality.
Except in the oldest of malls, stairs are hard to find, for mall developers know that a mechanised way of bringing people up and down better ensures that they are exposed to a maximum amount of advertising, a paced visual in which they can see just how many ways there are to store-bought satisfaction.
In whatever way the shopper goes up or down, and whatever the wares meant to beguile them, the idea is to envelop the customer in a cocoon of consumption, and in an ailing Karachi its invitation is more beguiling than ever.
Thirsty travellers, or in this case the entertainment-starved population of a terror-ridden place, are not supposed to be selective about the sources of their solace — whether the water from the well was passed through the sieve, or whether the brightly beckoning towers of hopefully named malls are really peddling positivity. But as the towers continue to go up, it is necessary and even crucial to be just that.
Measured by acts of consumption, the arrival of malls in Karachi defines the city’s entry into the global culture of consumption — the centrality of the belief that retail shopping is entertainment, that success is directly, equally, and completely proportional to the amount of things you can purchase.
Ironically, the target market for popularising this perspective of consumerism as creed is no other than the normally neglected middle-class woman. While childcare for working women, harassment-free workplaces, legal gender equality and other such much-lamented lapses may languish, mothers and girls and children are hurriedly and uncritically indoctrinated into believing that the ultimate task of the lady of house, especially a blessed and loved one, is to shop, shop, and shop.
To love your wife is to take her shopping; to respect your mother is to take her shopping; and, yes, to spoil your daughter is to take her shopping. The recipe for female gratification is unerringly simple and unwavering. Even the courageous few aspiring to empowerment can use its lingo. To be truly liberated simply equals the ability to shop at a mall with your own money. Consumerism is a gendered product, and it is sold first to women.
The shopping mall also represents a colonisation of public space, with class and consumer power the sole denomination of use. In Pakistan’s deeply stratified culture, where class mobility is limited, it also declares that the only people entitled to some modicum of safety in moments of leisure are those who are engaged in the process of purchasing something, or, if not exactly that, in the process of wanting something. The world of the mall is the world of dreams, and all dreams are denominated in price tags.
In many parts of the Western world, including the US where the mall was perfected as the instrument for consumer colonisation, the design, concept, and greed underlying it is the subject of criticism.
Critics point to all the reasons listed here: the disregard of indigenous architecture for often ugly structures; the equalisation of entertainment with acquisition; the diversion of public space from much-needed parks, libraries, and sporting facilities.
Surprisingly, in Pakistan, otherwise sporting the highest percentage of anti-Americanism in the world, this particular failing of American culture is not too unpopular. When it comes to selling things and buying things, the bearded and the shaven, the corrupt and the craven, all agree that the mall is far better than the park.
After all, even in the holy city of Makkah, one of the first things many pilgrims do after performing Haj is to make their way to the now very conveniently located shopping malls situated close to the holy sites.
To argue against the proliferation of shopping malls in Karachi is not to argue against entertainment for the stalwarts who call it home. Enumerating what shopping malls do by reducing entertainment to acquisition, success to greed, and interaction to purchase, is to instead highlight what the malls can sow in its population. The act of trade and commerce is indeed an ancient and necessary one, but the modern malls’ reduction of a human to just a buyer or just a seller is new, nefarious, brightly lit, and beautifully packaged.
The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.
