Express Avenue – A name meant for human life!

Express Avenue is the largest shopping mall in Chennai Metropolitan, built by the subsidiary of The Indian Express newspaper group. Though I went to EA for umpteen numbers of times, the last visit kindled my thoughts about shopping malls and hence this article incepted. Lets us analyze the association between the history of shopping malls and the history of human mindset.

Flow chart for the origination of shopping centers is given below:

Town Centres->Markets->Shopping arcades->Shopping Malls/Centers->Online Shopping

Transformations in the shopping centre structure do have some close associations with the transformations within the human mind. In the ancient Europe, every village or town will have a main building called ‘Town Centre’. This is where the people traded their produced goods.  After the initial days spent in caves and river banks, man found freedom in house-oriented civilization, which is the main reason behind the formation of town centres. But after the advent of modernization in trade, such trade buildings started to diminish. Next step in the transformation cycle led man to categorize or segmentize his environment based on his specific needs.  Hence the inception of markets began and it almost continued till the end of 20^th century. 

With the ingress of Information technology, human mind is blessed with a faster medium of communication which led to the next step in the transformation process. Researches show that the amount of information gained by an average person of 21^st century is much more than the total amount of information gained by an average man from the beginning of this world to 1920 A.D. This shows the rapid age at which we live. Due to such a pace of life, categorization of environment based on specific purposes is dissolved. Now, man wants everything at his touching distance.  Thus, the malls or shopping centers are invented.  A mall is nothing but a coagulated series of shops providing all sorts of A to Z products. The parade of shopping malls has started with the first mall being built in the City of Damascus in Syria.

One of the realities about men is that they will lose their precious things right in front of their eyes, then search for it everywhere, then embed an exact hoax of that precious thing, from which they will try to ‘extract’ satisfaction.  Man lost his real happiness within his own family, then searched for it everywhere else, then embedded it in his surrounding environment in the form of ‘entertainment factors’. Malls are also included in this search of enjoyment. Hence, the theatres and other sorts of entertainment factors are being bumped into shopping malls and destroyed the functional categorization of environment. In this continued transformation cycle, online shopping malls are readily waiting to replace the real shopping malls. There might arrive several good and bad results due to such civilization transformations. And the best way to understand such changes is by wait and watch.

All the definitions are defined by ‘time’.  In the past, the term ‘shopping’ is synonymous with ‘trading’. Man shopped for his needs; he did things with specificity as the core; he ate dishes he liked; he went to places for specific purpose.  In short he lived a unified life in which everything is a part. There, Society is defined by what the man stood for. So men made markets.

In the present, the terms ‘shopping’ and ‘trading’ became anonymous with each other. Shopping became the second nature of man’s social status; he is doing things with no specificity; he orders buffet, not sure what he likes and eats what his par people eats; he goes to places for collective purposes. In short, he is living a diversified life in which he is a part of everything. Here, Man is defined by what the society stands for. So malls are made for men.

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