Written by: Monalisa Changkija
Time was when shopping was a totally different experience—it was a person-to-person connect, forming lifelong bonds and friendships. Since then, a lot has changed, especially technology, making shopping indubitably convenient but deteriorating people-to-people connections and increasing alienation, especially after COVID-19. While it was imperative then to practise social distancing, unfortunately, that has also changed the shopping experience.
Shopping for any personal or household requirement was a day out for socializing in a different way for a vast majority of people. Markets have always been not only hubs for trade and commerce but also family outing destinations and platforms for social bonding and cohesion. Markets, as we knew them in our early years—decades ago—were also hubs for the arts, music, and other traditional cultural performances and wares. Business used to be brisk. These markets are not to be mistaken for weekly or periodical fairs, especially government-sponsored and managed ones. These organic daily markets, central to any village or town, catered to everything anyone could possibly want.
Another special shopping experience was in clothing, shoe, and jewellery stores. Shopkeepers would greet you like long-lost friends—and they were actually friends—offer you a seat and hot tea on wintry days and cold nimbu pani on summer days. You could feel the textures of the array of materials and decide which spoke to you the most. Shopkeeper and client would exchange greetings, pleasantries, news, and gossip. You felt as if you were visiting a family friend’s home.
With time, the economy and technology changed, and old ways gave way to new ones. But these old ways aren’t just about nostalgia, and the new ones aren’t only about celebrating progress. While both the old and the new have their positives and negatives, perhaps what stands out the most is that shopping is increasingly becoming an impersonal transaction, leading to the disintegration of human contact, bonds, and community cohesion that the old ways used to cement. Inarguably, the new ways have made life more comfortable and convenient, but in the process, the economy and technology are dictating and controlling human behaviour and interaction.
In several urban and rural areas of Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram, along highways or smaller roadsides, there are unmanned sheds where you will find fruits, vegetables, various local foods, and other items with written prices beside them. People buy what they need and leave the money in a designated container. Nobody cheats or steals, not even the money. Such practices underscore the human values of trust, faith, respect, honour, and integrity. They define the higher selves of human beings. They remind human beings to be human.
Today’s online and offline comforts and conveniences are tied to mobile numbers, instant payments, and CCTV scrutiny. These comforts and conveniences bury you under endless advertisements and seemingly irresistible offers, reducing you to a shopaholic—an economic idiot who is soon parted with her money.
Today’s shopping experience, while comfortable and convenient for those with money, has also cost millions of people across the globe their livelihoods. The neighbourhood papa-and-mama stores, neighbourhood kirana shops, and neighbourhood gela maal dukaans are disappearing in the blink of an eye, pushing their owners into reduced economic status at best and into poverty, hunger, and homelessness at worst. Economic and technological algorithms have created an unbridgeable gap that is changing the global community and redefining human alienation by patenting human values and the human ability to reason and act as part of the human race. So much for the new world order.
There are arguments in favour of technology because of its speedy and efficient delivery of goods and services. But it also impacts human behaviour and interaction. Besides providing comfort and convenience, technology has also subtly streamlined human activities, resulting in widening gaps across all human development indices, increasing social, political, economic, and educational disadvantages, and perpetuating ageism. When everything is digitalized, imagine the plight of those whom our educational system has failed, or never even reached, the elderly, and the tech-illiterate, who have been excluded from the technological revolution. Today, everything can be done online, except that you don’t know how to go online unless you own a smartphone and/or have someone to help you. Surely, this demographic is not negligible?
True, thousands of people are earning online by selling food and all kinds of items, and thousands of young people are earning through delivery services. The other side of the coin is best exemplified by groups in Meghalaya opposing online marketing outlets for fear that they would push small local enterprises and entrepreneurs out of business. Sure, they can integrate into the online market, but that would require tech-savviness and the ability to navigate a maze of procedures that confound small-time, village-level vendors. There have always been pros and cons to the old and new ways—inevitably, the small-timers have always paid the price. That has been the track record since the Industrial Revolution. The train of economic revolutions seems always to have destroyed the tracks on which it rolls.
But wait, what if it isn’t economic shifts and technological advancements that have impoverished, alienated, and divided the human race? Have economic shifts and technological advancements altered human values, bonds, and interactions, or have human beings used, abused, and misused them for “narrow domestic” ambitions and agendas?
In the early days of liberalization, management legend has it that an IIM professor, while researching poverty, heard of a middle-aged woman who was famed for selling delicious samosas to travellers along a highway in a prosperous Indian state. The professor visited her and found that her neighbouring vendors were selling individual items such as chai, fruit juices, coconut water, flavoured popsicles, water, channas, hand fans, and so on. So he asked her why she was selling only samosas and not the other items. He suggested that if she sold the other items, she would earn much more. She replied, “Then what would happen to them? How would they earn, and what would they feed their families?”
The professor was stunned by her reply because she centred everyone’s right to earn a livelihood and survive. She centred humanity, compassion, generosity of spirit, and a strong sense of community bonds. This semi-literate woman had an economic vision that encompassed everyone and actually practised it. Juxtapose this with big businesses swallowing small businesses and enterprises across the globe, not least in India. That poverty is increasing—never mind GDP—is undeniable. So maybe it is our economic vision, our economic ambitions, and our agendas that have led to tectonic economic shifts, resulting in the human race increasingly falling through ever-widening cracks. Maybe it is our perverse sense of values, rooted in our extremely narrow ambitions and agendas, that dictates and determines how technology is used, misused, and abused, resulting in the debasement and dehumanization of the human condition.
Change is inevitable—sometimes desirable—but change for what and for whom? An old song comes to mind: “When the world and I was young… it was easy then to know right from wrong…”
( Monalisa Changkija is a Dimapur-based veteran journalist, poet, and former Proprietor, Publisher, and Editor of Nagaland Page.)