MyTake

It was some five years back when I visited a Mall in Gurgaon with some friends and afterwards, thought of sharing my take on their present and future.  It was put on my blog and my friends, who read it, were skeptical as to whether what I was preempting was really something that was reality of the future. In this backdrop in all these years whenever I visited a Mall, whether in NCR, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Guwahati, Lucknow or any other small city my belief got confirmed.  Of late I kept reading stories of empty malls and some of them closing down, it started giving me a feel that business opportunities when not defended by viable research and when it is just following herd behavior, it is bound to result in what is happening in many of the cases.  And that is the challenge before entrepreneurs of all sizes and from all geographies, to respond and work on. One of the issue raised in my earlier post on sustainability of malls was that many of them were involved...

25th Sept 2010/Saturday////8:25 pm/Defence Colony, Gurgaon/ I am back to Ashutosh’s place after a visit to Metro Mall. We were five of us, me, ashutosh dash, and three of his old students from IIM Shillong. We had lunch together at MDI and thenafter came to his house, had tea etc,,, and then after walking for around 400 mtrs boarded an auto which dropped us at the Mall. The mall looked good, crowded by people, being a Saturday, a weekend, may be the crowd is still bigger, and today is World Daughters Day, a day which I never was aware of. As we walked through the mall looking at different showrooms, looking at people, couples of different ages, kids, safaiwalas etc, we followed the escalators and behaved perfectly like young kids who play with escalators taking a ride up and down. All through we kept talking to each other and tried relating our knowledge of books and business with what we were looking at. We reached on the top and tried to see which are the movies on show at the PVR...