A decade back, my first visit to US,
Cananda and Singpore had a bitter experience. I had never thought of
visiting these countries. Thanks to my daughter and son-in-law who got posting
on the foreign lands and really I was absolutely google-eyed to witness the
super-markets.
One cannot decide to choose any time
from the available of plenty of infinite varieties in a row even for break-fast
cereal.
But with the coming up of Easy Day,
More and Big Bazaars stores in all the major cities in India could give you a
feeling but these give a look of peanut-sized in comparison. But these
have definitely given way to the people to get all the things under one
roof. This has given a way to rediscovering the simple joys of
street-side shopping at home.
I recollect that the earliest
callers in our street were/are newspaper boy while the milkman has replaced
with the availability of packed milk of branded companies. The former had
always been in a hurry to deliver the paper by throwing correcting under the
door even while moving on the bicycle. Since, we used to have four papers
of English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, but always perpetually moaning about the
late arrival of the English paper from Delhi. Earlier, the ‘dolwala’ an old man
used to deliver the milk, too from a bicycle but never forget to ask me the
headlines from the freshly arrived newspaper.
But the mostly eagerly awaited by my
mother was ‘sabziwallah’, I still recollect his name Panditji as he was fondly
called by this name by all, who lets out a full-throated guttural cry of fresh
arrival of vegetable like – matter-e, gobhi-e. His peculiar voice sends a
message to the housewives scurrying for their vegetable baskets. His
advertisement strategy with special tone on the arrival of new vegetable round
the year was a marketing strategy as his customers flock to him eagerly, may be
due to his fair measures and the freshness of the vegetables or perhaps because
of his personalized touch by asking about the welfare of the family members.
But, by the afternoon, the pattern
of street vendors doing the rounds changes significantly with the entry of
breadwallah with musical tinkle of his cycle bell carrying a big steel trunk
with over-fresh bread, cakes, cream rolls and even ‘bundhs’ with sweek coloured
cheery on them. He was followed by cloth sellers especially pashmina
shawls and carpet sellers from Kashmir and pure golden honeywala straight
from flower-decked meadows of the valley.
Frankly speaking, those were the
days of ‘street mart’ with limited resources but plenty of stuff but now amidst
such an ambience of mini-malls in small cities, the trolley shopping has given
a new culture of forced purchases on seeing the items beautifully decorated in
rakes with price tag and available schemes, disturbing the budget of a common
man.
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