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June 27, 2005
No Mall-Practice in Matunga
This was published in today's Mumbai Mirror.
There is a small shop called Vijay Stores, on the market road from King’s Circle, just after the turn. It sells undergarments, socks, handkerchiefs, pajamas and all items that come under the heading “hosiery”. The owners sit at the till and also look after the customers – they know my preferences – the moment I enter the shop, all the right stuff is laid out for me to see – new items are also tentatively displayed, in case I might want to look at something different – and they have most of the new brands and styles that are advertised and found in other upmarket shops as well.
The same thing happens when my wife goes to Pramanik or West View or when my Mom goes to Chheda Stores.
Compare this to the SOP and script driven service, rendered by shop assistants and clerks, in big stores and malls. Sure, they’ll be nice and courteous and polite and sometimes may even be really interested in helping you…but they will be gone tomorrow and deep down, have no commitment to want to be nice to you and sell to you. And no amount of CRM software can match the innate superiority of a neural circuit that makes the bhajiwala outside Matunga market remember my Mom and her specific preference for a particular type of potato, even after an absence of six months.
So when the rest of Mumbai sings paens to the glory of malls, I wonder where the real progress is. Customer service? Naah! Choice? Absolutely. Even though the whole of the Circle and the station road upto Matunga Gymkhana (the Matunga downtown), is a huge open-air mall anyway, choices are restricted. Whereas, if you don’t like the stuff at Wills Lifestyle, there’s always Pantaloons, or Marks & Spencer, or other more focussed niche-shops, all enclosed within one common space at Phoenix Mills.
So it actually becomes very simple. When I know what I want, and I want the personalized service I am used to, I shop locally. When I am not sure of what I want and I need a lot of choice, I go to the malls. And drive out of Matunga. Which is as it should be!
Most of Matunga is a pretty nice place to live in. Most roads are quiet, there is a reasonable sense of camaraderie with the neighbors, the kids can play gully cricket in most streets and there is minimal noise and air pollution the further away you are from the “downtown” and RAK road.
Malls and multiplexes are magnets for people and cars…traffic…noise…pollution. All cumulative. All of which makes the adjacent area a bit more painful to live in.
Take the area around CineMax (CinePlanet, until last month), in Sion, for example. There is complete chaos. These days, it can take upto around 15 minutes, just to get from Sion Circle into the theatre. The area is noisy and crowded and an impossibly difficult place to walk through as well. Its definitely not a very nice place to live in. As compared to our single-screen theatre, Aurora. Though it rarely has a worthwhile Hindi movie running (Tamil films are not counted)…there is never ever a traffic jam outside.
My take! Let Mulund and Malad and Borivli and Parel and Vashi have their big malls and multiplexes and five-star and seven-star hotels…we’all come there to have a good time…but, please, don’t bother returning the favor to Matunga. We’re fine the way we are…thank you!
PS:
After the last piece on “Dimple Ice-Cream”, Dineshbhai sought me out and called me to clarify that only one brother had migrated to the US. He himself is still living in Matunga and makes Dimple ice-cream for wedding caterers. Wow…and all these years, I was completely clueless…
Posted by bhavinj at 06:43 PM | Comments (3)
June 16, 2005
Dimple on the Cheek of Matunga
Way before Baskin Robbins almost killed Abbas (the circulating library), way before the softy ice-cream wars erupted along the southern corner of “the Circle” and way before Kwality, Vadilal and other similar brands…there was “Dimple Ice-Cream”.
Dimple Ice-Cream was “home-made” ice-cream, made manually in an ice-cream churner, by Dimple, which was a snack-bar opposite Don Bosco. It doesn’t exist today…about 15 odd years ago, it was bought over and in its place today stands a typical fast-food joint called Classic, which serves everything from Chinese to pav-bhaji to South Indian food (though why anyone would want to have idlis in Classic as against Mysore Café is beyond me!).
Dimple used to serve sandwiches, bhel, juices, milk-shakes and of course, their signature ice-cream, of which “sitafal” was the best. The owners were Gujarati and used to sit at the counter and knew their customers by face and name. I was a regular there during short-recess from school. I was given Re. 1 by my Mom, which I had to hand over to the guy at the counter, in return for one sandwich and their pumpkin-tomato ketchup.
The mezzanine floor was air-conditioned and during the day, was used by couples from Khalsa college. As school-kids we would often sit below and try and figure out from the shadows moving against the partly opaque glass, whether those couples were necking or not.
People used to come from all over the place to eat the ice-cream or to order out. Home-made ice-cream is different from the factory-made ice-cream that we are used to. It is colder and takes longer to melt and if you’re not careful and eat too much immediately, the cold can hit your frontal sinuses instantaneously.
The owners eventually left, but I didn’t know where they had gone, until an incident that occurred in 1994 in the US. This is one among similar other instances, that makes me less and less surprised at coincidences and the fact that we are such a small world.
My wife and I were traveling from New York to Atlantic city, with an older friend, when we stopped for a quick lunch in a small, one gas-station town in New Jersey, that I was told was an “Indian town”. It had saree shops, a dosa place and other Indian shops. We were having dosas in the dosa joint, when I saw across the road, a fast-flood parlor called “Dimple”. I mentioned to my friend that we used to have a similar snack-bar back home and then on an impulse I walked across the road to have a look. And…you guessed right…they were the same people, who had migrated to this small town in New Jersey and transported their snack-bar here along with their home-made “Dimple” ice-cream. And to top it all…they recognized me by name. Wow!
Classic used to carry a board saying Dimple ice-cream, and I guess it used to sell the ice-cream as well for some time, but we never bought it again. And somehow, I just couldn’t get used to Dimple not being there. And despite Classic’s popularity, something inside me just doesn’t let me patronize this place – in the last 15 years, I must have been inside precisely thrice and that too because I was forced to. Its just…one of those things.
Posted by bhavinj at 11:18 PM | Comments (1)
June 04, 2005
Mapless in Matunga
This is the first Mumbai Mirror article
We, Matungaeans (I hope I get the credit for coining this word) are a bit schizoid…at least those who live in the “right” part. Oh! You don’t know which the “right” part is? Let’s save that for another time.
So, coming to the “schizoid” part. When you ask people in Wadala or Sion or for that matter, even those in far-flung, remote places like Powai or Napean Sea Road, where they stay, they’ll say that they stay in Wadala or Sion or Powai or Napean Sea Road, as the case may be (or swap places, depending on who they are trying to impress). When you ask people in Matunga where they stay, the majority, and especially those who stay in the “right” part will say, “King’s Circle”.
Why “King’s Circle”? I am not entirely sure, but this central garden on Ambedkar road, though now called Maheshwari Udyan, does serve as the epicentre of Matunga, the other magnet being the Matunga market area. But the preference for “King’s Circle” may also have to do with our innate preference for old British names as against “Indian” names.
Having said that, a good number will actually just say things like, “behind Aurora”, “next to Don Bosco”, “opposite Sahakari Bhandar”, “behind Gandhi Market”, smug in their insularity that the entire world knows exactly where these places are.
As if that’s not enough, the entire swathe between Nathalal Parekh Marg (i.e. the road on which Don Bosco school stands) and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road (“char rasta” in local parlance) is called “Sewri-Wadala Road, Scheme xyz, Rd 123”. I am sure this has some historical basis, but both Sewri and Wadala are reasonably far away and except for driving courier and delivery boys crazy, these names serve no purpose whatsoever.
And things, don’t get any simpler. There are two stations; King’s Circle on the Harbour line and Matunga station on the Central line. On the other side of the tracks from Matunga station, is another station on the Western line, called Matunga road, which supposedly is a part of an area called Matunga (W), a tiny place nestled between Mahim and Dadar BB. And though our Matunga is actually Matunga with an unfashionable (E) for East, in a perverse reverse snobbishness, most people in King’s Circle / Matunga, don’t even bother to acknowledge the existence of Matunga (W).
Worse off are those at the boundary zones of Matunga. Does Sion start at the end of Gandhi Market, or at the end of King’s Circle station. Does Wadala start after UDCT or at the Wadala (E) bridge. Does Dadar start after Matunga Gymkhana, after Ruia college or after King George school. Which part of Bhaudaji road is in Sion and which part is in Matunga. The reason this is important, is because the “Matunga mentality” actually extends beyond these physical boundaries, making many of the border zone inhabitants reasonably confused as to their actual status. Oh, and now you want to know what the “Matunga mentality” is? Have patience…
Are you confused? Think about what we have to go through, living there, not even knowing what to call our place of stay! And you thought I was kidding about the schizoid part…
Posted by bhavinj at 09:45 PM | Comments (1)
June 03, 2005
A New Beginning
Its been almost 3 years now since I last updated the site. At some point, I guess, I just got bored with the site. I was also facing a losing battle with time. Professionally, things have grown to an unanticipated level over the last five years. And, the twins are growing up fast as well, and are now 5 1/2 years old.
I have started writing regularly on a weekly basis for Mumbai Mirror for the last couple of months. That has now spurred me to re-start the site as a proper blog. In the next month or so, I will try and get all the old posts in as well.
My immediate plan is to understand how to use Movable Type properly and to try and redesign this site the way I want it.
Posted by bhavinj at 09:26 PM | Comments (8)
