Four-wheelers whiz past
To collect and convert
Every drop of sweat
Into cash and profit.
– Ramesh Dutt Dubey in Teji aur paisa
Words change their meanings over time. Malls once meant shaded avenues open to the public where one could go for a stroll, window shop or merely watch the world go by. Now it refers to multi-storeyed shopping plazas where hawk-eyed security guards shoo away the poor. Often from the lower classes themselves, these sentries of the rich are trained to believe that the masses throng to megaplexes merely to escape the heat of the street, have a free ride on the escalator or use the lavatory. In Hindi movies, innocent-looking visitors are shown being thrown out of the premises for naively trying a cologne spray from the racks. The implicit message of such scenes: The underclass should keep out of facilities built for their social superiors.\
Multiplex, meanwhile, used to be an adjective to denote complexity, and a verb to describe certain ways of communicating. Now a noun, it indicates a movie theatre with different auditoriums in the same building, sharing a common toilet but having multiple eateries to suit different tastes and pockets. The meaning of the term multitudes, however, has remained constant: they are the common people, the masses that vastly outnumber the comfortable classes in developing societies.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh believes that his job is to placate the social elite and protect the interest of domestic and foreign investors. Mother Sonia and ruler-in-waiting Rahul Gandhi are enough to assuage the rising expectations of the great unwashed of Mother India with their polemics. In a move to further 'liberalise' the Indian economy, the United Progressive Alliance (it is difficult to see what is progressive about the agenda of the Congress-led UPA government, though) is on the verge of allowing unlimited foreign direct investment (FDI) in the retail trade.