Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  A few more steps to the north is the dusty electronics shop where we’d refill our mobile phone. I never knew the name of the store because its signboard was completely obscured behind ads for Havells Climate Engineers, Roma Tresa Modular Switches, and vinyl banners for various mobile phone companies. The shop owner, an elderly man with thick glasses and an infectious enthusiasm for both Barack Obama and Manmohan Singh, was a pleasure to talk to. But as nice as he was, his way of business was rapidly becoming extinct. His inventory was stacked chaotically on shelves, stuffed haphazardly in boxes, or hanging unattractively from the ceiling. I have no idea about the extent of his product line because most of it was hidden from view, and certainly not organized in attractive displays to encourage point-of-purchase sales. Low-margin products like light bulbs were the only thing within the customer’s reach (covered in dust as they were), while high-ticket items like satellite dishes and cable boxes were in the back, behind the desk that kept out pedestrian traffic, hidden in piles so that customers couldn’t pick them up and read the boxes and transform that inventory into cash flow. His transactions were laborious—I once waited twenty minutes while he filled out the forms required to buy a SIM card for my mobile phone. He slowly and agonizingly scrutinized each page as if it was the first time he’d ever conducted this transaction, asking me my information and carefully forming each letter with his pen. A line of customers grew behind me. And then it shrank as people went elsewhere to spend their money.

  I loved to chat with him. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes sparkled with vigour and intellect. But with his capital tied up in inventory and his operations running comically inefficient, how much longer can he survive? All around him, the storefronts that were built during Anya’s grandfather’s day are now filled with boutique clothing stores, a Reebok store, a 7-Eleven-style convenience store called “Big Apple,” a modern pharmacy franchisee, and a Café Coffee Day lounge. They all boast computerized tills, barcode scanners and national distribution systems that lower costs and increase efficiency far beyond what this poor old man will ever be able to compete with. His cubbyhole store will inevitably be glommed on to those next door to accommodate some future upscale hair salon.

  In fact, outside of the NIIT technical training center just a few doors down, a group of laughing college students are eating momos. They may buy thirty rupees’ worth of mobile phone talk time from him today, but in that very building they’re learning to network the very computers that will run the very supply chains that will soon drive him out of business.

  We did most of our shopping for packaged goods at Shri Morning Palace, right in the middle of Hauz Khas market. They specialized in an improbable mix of imported groceries, pet supplies, eyeglasses and underwear. And as is typical in Delhi’s hyper-competitive environment, Shri Morning Palace’s main competitor in the market—Shri Sant Lal Ramji Dass—was right next door. Shri Sant Lal Ramji Dass’s signboard contrasted Shri Morning Palace’s emphasis on product breadth (“Hair care / Varieties of Cheese / Confectionaries / Pet food / Undergarments / Skin care”) by focusing narrowly on its depth of food offerings, showing a photo of fried vegetables and a bottle of Smith & Jones Tomato Ketchup. Although Shri Sant Lal Ramji Dass had the better selection, its aisles were so narrow as to induce claustrophobia, and the store always smelled unidentifiably but tangibly wrong. So we stuck to Shri Morning Palace.

  The proprietors at Shri Morning Palace grew familiar with us. Two smiling, soft-spoken men, perhaps brothers, they both had gray hair that they dyed a shocking shade of maroon, as was the style in the city. They were always good for a gentle hello, a friendly smile, and a subtle flick of the hand to order one of their employees to follow us around the store holding our basket for us. The employee would stand patiently by as we scrutinized their selection of Italian pasta or peered into the small mini-fridge that contained the full gamut of their “varieties of cheese.” Whenever we’d thank the employee for carrying our purchases, it was one of the proprietors who would say, “You’re welcome.”

  One day I asked them about their store’s name. Back in 1956, when the business was founded, they needed a name that reflected the fact they opened up early every morning.

  “We chose ‘Morning Palace’ because we used to open at 5 a.m. and ‘Shri’ because that’s an honorific in our language.”

  “Why not just ‘Morning Palace’ on its own?” I asked.

  “Because that would have been unlucky.”

  The very fact that Shri Morning Palace carried so many brands we recognized from the US is apparently a sign of how much Delhi has changed since the early 1990s. That’s when India underwent drastic liberalization and deregulation. Even just twenty years prior to our residency, Delhi was a city without the malls and espresso machines and Mexican restaurants we frequented so regularly. (“I remember what this ‘city’ was like in 1991,” wrote a blogger named Tarun Pall. “There were no coffee shops, no Delhi Metro and very little in Gurgaon or Noida, with no toll expressways connecting them to Delhi. There was no such thing as a shopping mall. Khan Market and GK-I were fuddy-duddy markets where women wearing salwar kameezes shopped. There was no Maharaja Mac. There were a total of four ATMs in the city.”7) And at that time, Shri Morning Palace would have stocked the same inventory found in every other general store in the city—except, like many other general stores, they might have had imported perfume, chocolate and American breakfast cereal hidden under the counter, available only to customers whom they knew and trusted, and then for no less than three times the price.

  So we can thank the economic changes of the early 1990s for the fact that Shri Morning Palace legally satisfied our day-to-day cravings for imports. But Shri Morning Palace couldn’t satisfy our more obscure desires for, say, canned Lebanese stuffed grape leaves or Smuckers’ Goober Peanut Butter and Grape Jelly Stripes. For a broader selection of imports, we had to head elsewhere in the city.

  While a number of local markets, like Defence Colony and Basant Lok, catered more specifically to foreign tastes, everyone told us that INA Market had Delhi’s best selection of imported goods. But our visits there led us to conclude that INA must have earned its reputation in the days before liberalization. Because the Doritos and Rittersport we found there are now sold all over the city, and the only import we found to be unique to INA Market was an unfamiliar variety of avocado that was too mushy even for guacamole.

  The city’s most famously foreigner-centric market is Khan Market. This market is also one of the more enduring mysteries we found in Delhi: everyone told us that Khan Market was the most expensive commercial real estate in the world.

  Really? Khan Market?

  Khan Market is a U-shaped collection of buildings, with storefronts lining the perimeter of the U and a semideveloped alley inside of it. The market’s main entrance is flanked by magazine vendors, a store selling electronics and music, and a delightfully chaotic bookshop. It attracts a certain class of shoppers: rich foreign mothers wearing jeans and salwar shirts pushing their strollers towards Chokola, young men in pink polo shirts tweaking their collars in the mirrors at the sunglasses stores, and tourists taking photos of the dusty inner alley. It has a McDonald’s and a Subway, some coffee shops, and a few upscale home décor boutiques. In the inner alley, clothing boutiques and trendy restaurants compete for attention with dust-covered power cables and open manholes through which the tourists gape at men clearing blocked sewers by hand.

  Khan Market does have a number of unique offerings. But many of its tenants—kitchen appliance vendors, butchers, chemists, stationery stores—are indistinguishable from those that are found in every other market in the city. And their prices are only marginally inflated above the rest. Most telling of all, there are very few luxury brands. Delhi’s Diors, Guccis and Louis Vuittons are all ten miles down the road at the Emporio Mall in Vasant Kunj.

  Khan Market is a nice market, but it’s not most-expensivereal-estate-in-the-world nice. And beyond aesthetics, the elite economics
aren’t there: Khan Market isn’t particularly expensive to shop at, its product mix doesn’t comprise particularly high-margin goods, and the foot traffic it generates is not that much heavier than other major markets in the city. The differences aren’t significant enough to make us believe that its fruit vendors would be paying rent on a Cartier scale.

  When we finally decided to research it, we uncovered a truth that was slightly less grandiose but no less implausible: Khan Market was actually the twenty-first most expensive shopping real estate in the world in 2010,8 according to a survey by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. (That’s down from 2008, when it was sixteenth on their list.) With a reported rental price of $284 per square foot per year, Khan Market was supposedly more expensive than the most expensive shopping districts in Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Brussels, Taipei, Stockholm, Oslo and Tel Aviv, and only around ten percent less expensive than Orchard Road in Singapore.

  We don’t buy it. We moved to Singapore after we lived in Delhi, and there’s no way that Khan Market’s squarefoot ratios are equal to Orchard Road’s billion-dollar malls. Khan Market has neither the foot traffic nor the highmargin products to greatly distinguish it from the inner circle of Connaught Place, much less Orchard Road. Still, bizarrely, another Cushman & Wakefield report says that CP’s rents are only around half of what Khan Market’s rents supposedly are.9

  Something doesn’t add up. We don’t know how Cushman & Wakefield got their numbers, but we can’t believe they’re correct.

  Perhaps Khan Market, like INA Market, is still coasting on a reputation earned before India’s liberalization. In the ’80s and ’90s, with its location near many neighborhoods favored by expats, Khan Market was the place where the rich and foreign would spend their time. Now, though, legalized imports have rendered under-the-table cheddar cheese obsolete. And while Khan Market retains its reputation, its revenues are probably a different story because both foreign and domestic wealth alike hang out in the malls.

  Delhi’s malls showcase the divide between the old India we’ve been told about and the changing India we experienced. We can’t imagine Delhi without them. Any time the city threatened to get the best of us—when the heat melted our wills, when the pollution choked our excitement, when the chaos sapped our spirits—the malls were there to revive us. Though we’d left America in part to escape American consumerism, Delhi’s malls made us appreciate that there are actually things to appreciate about malls. They were climate-controlled, spotless, and modern: a sanctuary from all the things we needed sanctuary from. Nobody even stared at us in the malls—white people were just as much a part of the mall’s scenery as domestic cheese shops and motorcycle showrooms.

  Nowhere is the split between Delhi’s generations better observed than on a mall’s escalators. Teens hop lightly off the escalators, with the girls demonstrating all the good and bad that comes with Western mores and the guys preening in T-shirts printed with phrases they may not fully appreciate. (We saw one alpha-male-in-training who wore sunglasses, a whisper of a mustache and a stylish shirt that read, “What part of the word ‘dyke’ don’t you understand?”) Midway down the escalator, parents hold children who point at what they want to buy next and bored couples laden with shopping bags show dissatisfaction on their faces that all their shopping apparently didn’t alleviate. And at the top of the escalator, grandmothers in saris gather their courage and time their leap onto the moving steps; as soon as they make their move, they grip the handrail with both hands and lock their eyes on the sari-gnashing teeth waiting at the escalator’s bottom.

  It’s not just the air conditioning that draws people out of the local markets and into the malls, although that’s obviously no small factor. The bigger draw is that malls do everything they can to attract customers, whereas local markets do the bare minimum to avoid completely driving customers away. Malls are clean, well maintained and safe for kids to run around without falling into festering ditches. What’s more, malls go out of their way to create an environment that makes people want to return. Saket Citywalk Mall, for instance, hosts everything from flea markets to yoga camps.

  The majority of local markets, meanwhile, are nice to visit only within the threshold of any individual shop. With very few exceptions (the two markets in GK-I come to mind), the local markets pay lip service to beautification with a sweeper here or central park there, but little is done to make the experience of walking between the shops as pleasant as being inside of one. The state of the markets may provide business owners a competitive advantage in day-to-day bargaining (the shoddier the market, the cheaper the perceived prices), but that race to the bottom won’t sustain them in Delhi’s evolving retail environment.

  I don’t think that the local markets are run by profiteers who revel in decay. Rather, I think they’ve just never felt any competitive pressure that would force them to put their customers’ needs above their own. (“Khan Market has enough parking for about 500 cars,” reports the Times of India. “About 300 of them belong to the shopkeepers themselves.”10) The markets have been protected from competition by Delhi’s street grid, which makes it so difficult to travel between neighborhoods that, for staples like food and household goods, the local markets had a monopoly.

  But the malls’ amenities are more powerful than the markets’ geographic monopolies. They provide clean and safe public spaces where families can stroll without SUVs running them down from behind. They sell everything from consumer electronics to furniture to vegetables, and in a climate-controlled environment with nice bathrooms to boot. They’re worth traveling for, in other words. And until the markets improve, the malls will continue to siphon their business.

  I’m torn by this. On the one hand, I’m a progressive American who is repulsed by the rampant consumerism back home. I hate to see Western-style shopping assimilate yet another culture, creating one more link in the global chain of Wal-Marts and Ikeas that will one day stretch unbroken across the world and ensure that all of humanity is never more than ten minutes’ drive from a Starbucks latte and a President’s Day sale.

  On the other hand, the spread of malls could actually help the local markets by sparking a customer-centric arms race in Delhi. Local markets will finally feel competitive pressures, which will make them desperate to re-attract the people who have abandoned them for the comfort of the malls. And because they’ll still retain the powerful advantage of location, they’ll just need to improve the infrastructure and environment.

  I foresee a coming boom in market beautification. And if I squint into the future, I can imagine this beautification extending to the surrounding neighborhoods and then across the city as businesses realize that when they invest in the collective good, the collective responds by spending more money.

  Khan Market is already leading this charge. At the time we were leaving Delhi, it had pledged to modernize its inner lane, to bury the high-voltage canopy of overhead wires, to install a functional drainage system, and to replace the gray tile sidewalk with attractive red anti-skid granite stone.11 Other markets are sure to follow its lead. Perhaps one day we’ll return to a Delhi in which Defence Colony market has replaced its chaotic parking lot with a lush pedestrian garden, Nehru Place has evolved into a cultural hub complete with loft apartments and outdoor theater performances, and Hauz Khas market is now the world headquarters for a vast electronics retail empire headed by that elderly shop owner with the thick glasses who sold us our mobile phone top-ups. He’d read this book, considered our suggestions, and hired those NIIT students to take his own business into the next century.

  1. http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/field-notes/mediamarkets/nehru-place/

  2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/business/global/16brands.html

  3. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=8059804

  4. http://thedelhiwalla.blogspot.com/2009/07/city-landmarknyc-unisex-salon-hauz.html

  5. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125480846252666899.html

  6. Ibid.r />
  7. http://ourdelhistruggle.com/2010/01/21/future-openquestion/#comment-2908

  8. http://www.cushwake.com/cwglobal/jsp/kcReportDetail.jsp?Country=GLOBAL&Language=EN&catId=100003&pId=c31300002p

  9. http://www.cushwake.com/cwglobal/jsp/kcReportDetail.jsp?Country=GLOBAL&Language=EN&catId=100003&pId=c37100002p

  10. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Delhi/Glitzy_makeover_for_posh_Khan_Market/articleshow/3888181.cms

  11. Ibid.

  8

  Working (Late, Again)

  The eighteen months during which I was employed in Delhi were defined by my commute. I don’t diminish the experiences I had on the job, where my responsibilities far exceeded those I’d had in New York and extended to teaching everyone in the office how to throw a Nerf football. But when I look back on it, the commute that bookended each workday weighs more significantly in my mind. And I believe that I derived more important lessons about life in India from my time sitting in my taxi than that spent sitting at my desk.

  Jenny’s time working in Delhi was defined by something more agreeable: a feeling of fulfilment. Jenny experienced job satisfaction of the sort she’d never imagined possible at any of her other jobs. She was employed by a charity called the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society, and she spent each day improving the lives of a thousand poor girls who were enrolled in the organization’s school out in rural Uttar Pradesh.