Have you ever watched lines of busy ants carrying ten times their weight to the hidden pores they call home? I have often wondered at their sheer grit and determination to fill their communal larder for more difficult times. If you try to break their line by lacing it with perverse water, you’ll see a new line emerge in no time at all. Ants are known to be the most hardworking of all the creatures of God. The innocuous smaller variety of black ants is curiously funnier to watch. In their daily labour of searching, lifting and carrying, they are almost imperceptible beneath their massive treasures. Sometimes all that is visible is a relatively huge bit of moving morsel. Only a closer inspection will reveal the tiny feet under it, scampering away with urgent ardour. If you watch for longer, you will catch them stopping for brief intervals, face to face with the comrades lining up from the other side. I have also wondered what that was for..I like to believe that they exchange information and not pheromones alone. Do you think they would follow something like this?
- ‘Hi! What did you find today?’
- ‘Oh some fine crusts of bread and also some really sticky dessert.’
- ‘How lovely. I was lucky too. I picked up the scent of sugar and led the whole brigade towards a hole into a bag full of sugar.’
- ‘Really? Where did you say it was?’
- ‘If you go to your left and bend the corner, you’ll see it. Or easier, just follow the trail...but better be careful, the human morons have brought out new mops to wipe us out…try to keep to the crannies.’
- ‘Thanks for the tip, sister’ (amongst ants, it is the female of the species that labours!)
You must be thinking that I am suffering from an overdose of imaginative disorder. Well, as much as I will not own up to the allegation of a surfeit of fancy, I can humbly accept all accusations of a mind that tries to find patterns of existence. I like looking for links that connect the great chain of being. I have thought of ants when I have passed a quiet moment at a branded coffee shop inside the recently built mall at South Kolkata.
The mall is a modern day five-story architectural wonder replete with stores satisfying every kind of consumer demands. There are designer adverts beckoning customers with the lure of labels. It is now chic to parade a posh Prada, a graceful Gucci, a modish M&S or the high class Armani in your peer group and you can proudly flaunt your upmarket conquests with élan and not even spell out the titles. Gone are the days when almost everyone would make a beeline for local tailors. Gone are the days when mothers would knit jumpers for you, twin needles bobbing up and down swiftly in deft hands - the sound of coral and conch bangles reminding you of the familiar jingle, or stitch your clothes in the popular Usha sewing machines.
Nowadays, almost no one darns a ladder in their socks, or hems in a loose lining or frill. It is all use and throw. It is all ready-made. Instant coffee, instant noodles, instant gratification!
I have mollified my mulling over malls in more ways than one. I have watched with amusement how unemployed youths hang around in a cluster craning their necks to get the best view under the shortest of skirts going up elegant elevators. My eyes have fondly followed housewives stroll through the well lit marble corridors window-shopping to their hearts’ content, huffing and puffing from the sheer excitement of the exercise. I have seen teenaged college-goers hunting for bargain deals to outsmart the class fashionistas. I have also marveled at kids no older than five putting their tiny feet down to articulate their express desires for a Ben Ten Omnitrix that comes for a dear Rs 1200. And the new purchase freak on the block is the urban middle class man, who happily gets sucked into the vortex of shopaholism with a pair of Levis denim or a pair of Nike tucked away under a proud but over-worked elbow.
The addiction has caught up like wildfire. The innocuous time-pass has turned into a chronic psychological condition. In fact, we do have psychiatrists prescribing retail therapy for the rich depressed. The brands’ motto is to catch them young…everyone succumbs to the lure of flashy ware! The retail razzle-dazzle is here to stay and rattle you out of your senses. The adverts scream, ‘Happiness is Hi Design!' or ‘Be Trendy with Titan!’ In a moment’s span ‘happiness’ or ‘trendiness’ get circumscribed by ‘having’ a couple of labels.
In a spree to possess everything that is touted as a must-have, the average metropolitan shopper becomes blinder than an ant in following the retail trail more out of herd instinct rather than any real need. In spite of having the 'compound eyes' of commonsense, intellect, and rationality, the urban consumer is rendered a puppet in the hands of string-pulling retail kingpins. Like overfed ants that strive for life and dies a hapless death trapped in the paralyzing surfeit of treacle or jaggery, the contemporary shopper dies a slow albeit spiritual death, engorged with the lust to possess: the death of his sensibility, creativity and rationality. Not to mention the steady drain in his pocket.
And as the brands slug it out on the battlefield of a five-star mall with the consumers as petty pawns, we, the ant-people can only remember Gloucester’s wise reflection in King Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport’.
My cynical re-make would have to be something like this: ‘As ants to wanton mops are we to the Brands, they kill us for their profit’ What’s more, I must add with a chuckle that even I am not immune to this slow death.
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