It’s 6:30am and the Inorbit shopping mall in Mumbai has already been open for an hour and a half. But it’s not shoppers who are using the deserted aisles and the empty car park outside.
Every morning, groups of walkers and even the occasional runner descend on the 34,000m2 center in the northern suburb of Malad to exercise before the rest of the city wakes up.
“The walk makes me feel energetic and sets me up for the day,” said Ravi Wikar, whose daily constitutional takes him on a circular route past shuttered shops and up and down the switched-off escalators.
Photo: AFP
“I walk every morning from 6:30am and do about 3km on average,” said the 37-year-old businessman, dressed in a white baseball cap, white T-shirt, red tracksuit bottoms and running shoes.
The concept of using a closed shopping center as a place to exercise doesn’t seem strange to the 50 or so regular mall walkers of Malad, most of whom are senior citizens with ailments from arthritis to diabetes. It’s born out of necessity.
India’s financial and entertainment capital is chronically congested. Haphazard urban development has seen green spaces covered in concrete for apartment and office blocks, leaving those that remain packed even before dawn.
Roads and pavements are poorly maintained, while daily traffic gridlock combines with extreme heat and humidity to push up smog and pollution levels. Add rash driving and exercising outdoors becomes difficult or often impossible.
In contrast, the smooth surfaces of the shopping center aisles and flat, tarmac car park are less stressful on ageing joints than the often rutted, undulating tracks of nearby public parks.
“Someone can pick you up afterwards, but if you go to the parks, they can’t,” said Ranjan Kar, a retired media executive who is Wikar’s walking partner.
The walkers also say that with lighting and security guards everywhere — anyone walking inside the center still has to go through a metal detecting arch and be searched — it’s also safer.
“Walking on the roads ... there’s bad people also,” Wikar said, fingering the gold neck chain under his T-shirt. “It’s possible you can get mugged.”
“It’s calm and quiet and there’s no fumes from the cars,” added retired draftsman Prabhakar Kishambare, 70, who typically does three to four laps around the car park every morning.
For Neera Punj, convenor of the Citizens’ Forum for the Protection of Public Spaces or CitiSpace, the emergence of mall-walking sums up the problems facing Mumbai.
“The state of the remaining open spaces is deplorable,” she said. “That’s why we’re getting to the point where we’re getting mall-walkers.”
CitiSpace says there are just 380 hectares of parks, recreation grounds and gardens for an official population of about 14 million.
The unofficial population is thought to be over 18 million — more than in the Netherlands as a whole. In comparison, London, with nearly 8 million people, has more than 4,000 hectares of publicly accessible open space, while New York City has about 11,700 hectares for about the same number of residents.
“It’s miniscule compared to what the national building norms recommend,” Punj said. “It recommends four acres [1.6 hectares] for every 1,000 people, but what we have is 0.03 acres. Space isn’t a luxury. It’s absolutely mandatory and essential for a person’s well-being.”
The mall-walkers, meanwhile, are just happy to have found a suitable place to stretch their legs in relative comfort.
“I’ve been doing this [walking in the morning] since 1984 in different places. Now I’m doing it here,” Kishambare said. “You can always find somewhere.”
There are also other advantages, Wikar said with a smile.
“It’s a good way to go window shopping,” he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS