Saving the 'Feriwala'

The last trip to India left me slightly troubled and until recently I had no idea what it was that was bothering me. Until that discussion at Manisha and Taral’s place which somehow meandered into the reasons for going back home. “As it is, you find all the high end shops there nowadays and huge shopping malls too…there is no brand that you won’t find in India now”. Manisha was speaking, as usual, at the top of her voice. And then it struck me….India had started looking too much like the west. The same things that you tire of here- shopping malls, restaurants, multiplexes all looking the same, showing off the same merchandise in every city/town, row after row of the same names…..topshop, newlook, warehouse, oasis and so on. In fact if you were to transplant the high street from one city into another, I doubt people will even notice.


My memories of shopping back home invariably drift to the little shops selling everything from cosmetics to jewellery, the tiny shops with shelf after shelf of garments and dress material which offered free alteration services – yeah, try asking for the price of alteration in one of the UK shops, it might just turn out to be more than what you’ve paid for the dress…but that’s beside the point.

As a kid, I’ve seen my mum buy fresh vegetables from the ‘thele wala’ who’d come to the door and implore ‘lauki, kaddoo, tamatar le lo….’ until either my mum or the kam wali bai opened the door and told him off for being too loud. But this would always result in some purchase being made, even if just a stack of coriander or a bunch of chillies. Organic vegetables, delivered to your doorstep, without the hefty premium on being ‘organic’…

Then again there were these numerous ‘feri wala’ guys who brought merchandise from far and wide- Kashmiri shawls, Saris from Orissa, jewellery from Rajasthan and went from one doorstep to another. A different world altogether. And the social side of all this is rarely appreciated….my mum would call on her friends who’d all come over for an afternoon of chit chat, purchasing and cups of tea. In my heavily blockaded and compartmentalised world, these memories seem to belong in some distant past. And one of the reasons is that our society, in a bid to copy everything western, has turned its back to these quaint little rituals and these people who now themselves seem to be an anachronism .

In the last few years we’ve seen corporate giants like Tesco and Marks and Spencer make a bid for the Indian market which of course is quite a lucrative thing to do, given the size of the Indian consumer-force. The sad bit though is that these peculiar, curious shops each selling something different and original will all be replaced by giant stores all selling factory produced goods that we are so sick of seeing everywhere. Jai Ho!