Reviewing Boring Things - Brookefields Mall, Coimbatore
Welcome to a new series in Could Be Worse
I harbor certain mad bucket-list fantasies:
Sailing the azure seas of southern France or Italy in one of those modern yachts. I neither know how to steer a boat nor to swim.
Running a coffee shop on a hill with amazing vistas, preferably with an attached mini-library. However, I suspect I’d prefer to be a customer in the said coffee shop than an owner.
Make at least a single trip to the edge of the atmosphere and watch the Earth from space.
Like I said, mad.
But the good news (for my happiness) is that the older I get, the more I am fascinated by the mundane. In addition, the fact that everything can now be fodder for my next post helps a lot. The most boring places and activities become interesting Petri dishes filled with amusing anecdotes.
For instance, the other day I stood at the balcony of my seventeenth floor and watched little people walk across the tiny bridge over the canal for a long time. When I told N about some observations, she didn’t quite appreciate the moment with the same vibe. “You need to find something useful to do,” is all she said.
In the words of our world superstar, haters gonna hate so, shake it off.
This post is the first of many such future posts celebrating the mundane. A review no one asked for. A review that will benefit no one.
In this debut post of this series, we will be reviewing Brookefields Mall in Coimbatore, an uninspiring rectangle that stands in a place that used to be a green space.
Brookefields Mall, Coimbatore
Back in 2009, around the same time the United States elected its first black president, another seminal event took place across the world in Coimbatore. The Brookefields Mall opened its door to the public. This was quite an extraordinary leap to the future for a city that still prided itself on RS Puram being the most happening place.
Even though people in Coimbatore talked about this mall with the same zeal as many talk about the temple in Ayodhya today, I hadn’t visited it all that much. I haven’t lived in Coimbatore for nearly twenty years now (after I left for work in Chennai in 2004 after my undergraduate degree, then to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Bangkok in that order). The mall hasn’t been high on the agenda whenever I’ve visited (why would it be). However, I have visited it a couple of times - the most recent being to watch a couple of movies including Leo.
If you make a list of top malls in India, this might just about cut a top 100. If you look at the malls in Tamilnadu (as per this Wiki article), Brookefileds ranks 9 out of 20 malls in terms of size. As we know, size isn’t everything. There’s uniqueness. Fun quotient. General ambiance. And of course, the quality of the food court. But do not worry, I am not going to seriously break down this review.
In my opinion, this is a middling mall in the land of middling malls - a solid 5 out of 10.
It’s a typical Indian mall: there’s a bunch of shops with overpriced stuff; there are hardly any places to sit; it is difficult to find bathrooms and the road in front of it is a mess. I guess, it’s a typical mall.
On the positive side of things, it put Coimbatore on the map as the most happening place between Palakkad and Tiruppur. So, there’s that. It also introduced the idea of overpriced shopping and walking aimlessly in airconditioned spaces to the people in the city. More importantly, by bringing PVR to the city, it added a new perspective that popcorn could cost as much as grocery shopping for a family for a day.
But, 14 years later, it is now grunting under the weight of its age a bit. When I visited this time, a set of escalators was not working and was being repaired. The lifts were a chaotic mess to use.
It’s worth spilling words on the lifts in this mall.
The Lifts
In Brookefields, there’s a bank of 6 lifts which is more than sufficient for the 4 floors of this mall. However, it is set up more like a social experiment than a mechanism of convenience. Each lift in the bank has an independent call button with its own up and down. If you wanted to call a lift, you’d need to do a quick temple run across the lifts pressing all the buttons so you can hit whichever comes first.
Now, this is where the challenge level increases.
Some of these buttons are hidden. At some point in the mall’s storied existence, some genius decided to add false wall decorations near the lift bank, and in the process, portions of the fake wall now cover the buttons (which are placed on the rear wall). For the citizens of most cities, this level of challenge would suffice but not for hardy Coimbatoreans. Like a town bus that decided to cut the route short, not all lifts went to all the floors. One of those six did not go to the top floor and another of those did not go to the basement. Of course, none of this is specified anywhere.
As if this wasn’t enough setup to drive people insane, you have a bunch of Indians using the lift.
It could be argued that our entire universe can be generated using some very simple fundamental rules. Stephen Wolfram posits that “very simple rules, instead of producing fairly simple behavior, actually produce extremely complicated behavior.” A lift has two simple buttons with simple rules on when to press what. However, using these simple rules, Indians can create complexity of incredible proportions.
If you ask me to list things in the probability of them likely to happen, I would say (from the most likely to the least likely):
Cure for Cancer
AI becoming sentient and destroying us all
Solving the Middle East Crisis
Indians figuring out how lifts work
Ignoring globally established principles, the key rules that most Indians use to operate lifts are rather unique:
The more buttons, the merrier - pressing both up and down is more likely to get the lift moving (like multiple calls to a plumber checking if he is coming to fix your pipes).
A lift is like a dog. You command it to do things rather than provide your intent. E.g. Pressing up doesn’t mean you want to go up instead it means, “Hey lift! come up now!”
Any lift that arrives at the floor is meant to take you to your destination irrespective of which direction it’s going. It’s more like the Uber of 2017 and less like the Uber of 2023.
These same simple rules were applied at the lifts in Brookefilds Mall leading to a very complicated existence for us. It took fifteen minutes and jumping out of a couple of lifts, to go up a single floor. The strangest part of it all was that it seemed that the crowds had somehow managed to convince the lifts to work to their principles rather than universal elevator etiquette and we were the ones who weren’t quite clued in.
Way to spark some excitement, Brookefields Mall.
Could be Worse,
Tyag