I went to college in an idyllic spot in the US (otherwise known as the boonies), and never hung out in malls; there were none in rural Vermont. But at about the same time that I was engaging in the state's most popular pastime — cow tipping — a giant billboard went up on the interstate highway between St. Paul and Minneapolis. The billboard showed Da Vinci's enigmatic Mona Lisa smiling upon the passing traffic. Except she didn't look particularly enigmatic, her famous "is-it-a-smile?" expression had been replaced by a happy, toothy grin. The caption read: "She's been to the Mall of America". Many social commentators saw it as the abrogation of culture in favour of the new god of consumerism. Karachi's new malls are a far cry from the Mall of America (that mall boasts bigness: 140,000 hot dogs sold each week, 10,000 permanent jobs, 44 escalators, 17 elevators, 12,750 parking spaces, 13,300 short tons of steel, $1 million in cash disbursed weekly from 8 automatic teller machines, 4.2 million square feet of floor space and more than 400 purveyors of merchandise, food and entertainment). But are they too selling the same message: the pursuit of modern happiness ends at the mall?
Park Towers, Karachi's first slick mall, is a natural magnet for many young people. Teens from all parts of the city seem to flock there — gaggles of giggly girls walk past me, all in tiny t-shirts and low-slung jeans, all busy talking into little pastel cell phones. Across the atrium, a posse of boys, long hair peaking out of baseball caps that hide their eyes, check out the girls, who giggle some more. Hmmm mall rats meet cool cats?