Comrades of Kerala, salute!
Your goal of an egalitarian society is close at hand.
We have new malls!
No, no, opening mega malls is not consumerism.
Consumerism is a bad word – a very bad, dirty word.
Foreign direct investment on malls, convention centres and smart cities is exactly what Kerala needs now.
Thankfully, the cash flow for these doesn’t come from the ugly, scoundrel America or its slimy, fat capitalists. No more faceless corporations and its associated scandals for us.
Since most of our professionally qualified youth are working outside the state, it befits those who passed with their degrees in literature and humanity studies to take on the white collar job of cash counter and sales executives, ushers, bouncers, security staff and merchandisers, at these shrines of modern Kerala .
Young girls in Varappuzha will not have to take up the taxing job as unrewarding sales girls in textile shops.Nor do they have to slog it out as nursing staff in small-time clinics in Kochi or Aluva.
And if they do look undernourished for your taste, we can recruit the unemployed from Meghalaya and Manipur.
After all, we are an equal opportunity society.
We pride in our One India solidarity so much that we import labour from Bengal and Bihar to do our homestead work.
Our sons and daughters, including yours truly, meanwhile, living abroad, will send foreign exchange, so we can continue to fatten the Kerala State Beverages Corporation’s coffers.
We do not have to wait the ‘Pandi’ lorry for our chicken, beef and vegetables. Nor do we have to fear labour activism.
We don’t need to climb our coconut trees nor depend on experts in it or suffer their ‘attitude’ problems.
We don’t need the stinking bylanes of Broadway or MG Road. Let the waste bins swell.
Let us convert those once-thriving perfectly competitive markets, which had a consumer spread benefitting hundreds of tiny retailers as against one or a few individuals, as an exclusive zone for textile shops and jewellers, who will revel in their periodic NRI melas.
Oh yes, that also means our place of pride goes up in the Forbes list.
And who needs kottakas and single-theatre complexes when we have multiplexes?
Hotels and restaurants can pull down their shutters because we will now have read-to-eat pathiri and shawarmas made under your watchful eyes.
The local markets and the arikaari Ammus who were part of our folklore can sit at home and watch Kumkumapoovuor Parijatham.
We don’t need to cook at all.
We can simply watch the unending tamasha unfold on television, even the unparalleled fun of two anchors battling it out, as if their frivolous living room discussion makes for prime time television.
We live in fun times, of course.
Our politicians will bury all differences for development – if it is a mall – but not if it is a technology zone or an unwanted mega power project that can sink the best of exotic species in the Western Ghats.
We will have more airports; you can hop stop shop from one mall to another in Kochi to Kozhikode to Aranmula, so the bloody roads can stay potholed.
For cultural delight, our new generation filmmakers will feed us, along with the McDonald’s quarter pounders, a profusion of ‘f’ words. So what if they don’t have the balls to use the ‘m’ word that is more ubiquitous?
And when it comes to Sabarimala season, you can always opt for the Aloo Tikki.
Did I say McDonald’s?
Yes, that is palatable if it comes under the umbrella of malls. Don’t trust the Ambanis though with fresh vegetables. Those ‘ghosais,’ you know, they mean the death knell for our farmers. Farmers, what farmers? Duh!
Everything is fashionably laid out.
We have learnt to bury all differences. The statements on TV – for and against harassment, love, extramarital affairs – those are just to buy 15 minutes of fame.
Soon everyone in Kerala would have got that too.
But when some 5,000 people are directly employed and 20,000 indirectly, thousands also die a silent death.
But should we care? They are a blemish we don’t need.
Those murukkankadas, where friendships were made and nurtured… the small bunk shops that defined a way of life with their ‘Palayankodan’ bananas, ‘gas mittayi’ and bonjees, the titillating reads… and yes, the very murukkan.
We will never have our youngsters goofing around town as in an Odaruthammava Aalariyam.
They won’t have the spine to pass an innocuous comment against women. Love will spill over to Facebook.
And if you dare do an SMS, beware the wrath of the NRI husband.
On March 10, 2013, our murukkankadas died.
So with it died a part of our society, a fabric that had space for the likes of Ponjaan (pictured alongside), whom Nalancharites loved and hated in equal measure, as he stared at passersby from the murukkankada.
Every town and village has a Ponjaan.
Ponjaan can never step into a mall.
So with it, the maverick Ponjaans in every one of us also dies.
Put a temple in the mall too: We will live there.
Hallelujah.
ENDS
