I am an incurable mall hopper. Malls provide three of my favourite things – shopping, good food and movies – that too in a clean and air conditioned environment. So on most weekends that’s where I head to. My Mom, on the other hand, hates malls. For her they are a big waste of money. For her shopping doesn’t mean just buying something she likes, it also means haggling for the right price. Sometimes I feel she gets more satisfaction out of making the salesman agree to the price-cut than the product itself. And that’s the reason she intensely dislikes shopping in a mall – you have no option other than paying the MRP. The few times she tried to haggle in a mall, the salespeople looked at her as if she has dropped from another planet. She soon gave up.

So this is one area where my Mom and I don’t agree at all. I always found her dislike of malls unreasonable. But an incident few days ago made me ponder.

There was a mithai shop near my house for as long as I can remember. As a child that was the place where I and my friends headed whenever we had to give each other a treat. That’s where we headed whenever my family wanted to have samosas with tea in the evening. My Mom would give me a 100 rupee note and tell me to hop across the road and get some samosas and jalebi. The shopkeeper recognized us, and many a times when there was a problem of loose change he would just say, “koi baat nahi, next time adjust kar lenge”.

The sweet shop suddenly shut down a few days ago. The shutters are down and there is no sign indicating that they have relocated. I don’t know what the reason for this sudden closure is. I pass that shop everyday on my way to office and I am surprised at the sadness I feel every time I see the closed shutters. There was a time when there was a sweet shop at every corner and most of the time it was called ‘Aggarwal Sweet Shop’ (no they were not a chain of shops like Nathus or Haldirams). But now finding a non-branded sweet shop has become next to impossible. Till a few years ago there were at least four local sweet shops within 3 km radius of my house but one by one they have all closed down as the big players have taken over.

Anyway, life goes on. One doesn’t miss sweet shops so much now that there are packed mithais available at general stores. Also a great range of chocolates, cookies etc. But when it rains and we feel like having hot samosas with tea, we are stumped. The nearest sweet shop is Nathu’s in the posh Sector 18 market (Noida). The other option is the Haldirams outlet in a mall nearby. Both the places are too far to walk. Taking a cycle-riksha is not a good option as the samosas will be cold by the time we reach home. So that just leaves driving. But driving down to a mall, parking, standing in line to pay for the samosas, then standing in line to take delivery and then driving back home – its too much trouble for just 8 samosas. So we just end up frying pakoras at home.

In the event that we do drive to any of these sweet shops to buy anything, I find the whole experience tasteless. There is no personal equation here, the whole assembly-line way of buying sweets jars my senses as against the earlier experience when I walked into the old sweet shop and the owner greeted me with a warm smile.

Now I understand why my Mom dislikes shopping in malls. The same reason that I have started disliking Haldirams. The polite and impersonal smiles of the sales staff bother her. Just like it bothers me that the Haldiram cashier will never say, “next time adjust kar lenge”.