There are worse things to do at this time of year than head off to Mumbai. If you can take crowds that is, for the city’s millions of Hindus are right in the thick of their annual Ganesh Chaturthi festival. That means rivers of people chanting and merrymaking their way towards the many beaches, carrying purpose-made statues of Lord Ganesh that are eventually set afloat into the Arabian Sea.

Shopping in Malta today is a very different species to what it was in the 1980s- Mark Anthony Falzon

Whatever one’s religion or lack of it, it’s hard not to warm up to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh. Tough to beat iconographically, he is also worshipped as a remover of obstacles. Most Hindu shopkeepers, for example, will start their day with a little puja (a prayer or ritual) to their resident Ganesh. Only this year, Lord Ganesh is being called upon to do some extra work. The obstacle in question is a major incarnation and one doubts it can be resisted at all. Or at least that’s what the grand globalisation narrative would have us believe.

Earlier this week opposition parties and trade unions called a one-day nationwide strike by way of a protest against Government plans to open up retail to the multi-national supermarket chains. What that means in brief is that big retailers like Walmart and Tesco will be able to become majority shareholders in retail companies and sell directly to consumers in India. I won’t attempt to say much about the economics of this change or its tangled political moorings; that partly because I’m scarcely competent to do so but mainly since readers will have access to commentaries by leading journalists and analysts.

There is, however, hope for the marooned columnist. That’s because I think there are telling parallels between what’s happening in India and our experience here in Malta.

Take Costa Coffee, a ubiquitous chain that’s set to become more ubiquitous when it expands in Malta in the coming months. Judging by the way it was reported in the media as good news, the orthodoxy seems to be that the more foreign retail investment we can attract, the better.

That kind of cargo-cult economic thinking is certainly not alien to India. It’s 20-odd years now since ‘phoren’ (‘foreign’, as in imported) ceased to be the rare privilege of the very few and instead became the requisite trappings of a rapidly growing middle class. For most Indians I know, big brands, aspiration and optimism make an inseparable threesome.

One would have thought the current plan to be the next logical step. Whatever the logic of that, it leaves a nation of shopkeepers uncertain about their future.

The question is whether or not the local will be able to compete with the economies of scale of the global. Never mind that we’re talking about a local of 1.2 billion wallets.

I remember spending my parents’ money in Valletta in the 1980s. The big chains were all but absent and particular lines came with the Maltese surnames that sold them. Groceries were bought at tiny hole-in-the-wall shops lined with a few old shelves.

Wembley Stores is a perennial favourite of mine but back then it was much more than that – it was an Aladdin’s cave where on a good day you might come across wonders like Parmesan or the stray coconut. All of that changed when it became clear that chocolate and toothpaste had been mere symbols.

The inseparable threesome had finally come to Malta and boy was it universally welcomed. And yet, I do remember rumblings in the direction of what would come of the shops with Maltese surnames, the quaint groceries, and Wembley Stores. Certainly, they’ve had a heap of rethinking to do. Shopping in Malta today is a very different species to what it was in the 1980s, in at least three ways. First, it seems to me that the main draw are supermarkets (that now include multi-nationals that sell directly to consumers) and the big high-street chains.

Second, we’ve seen the rise of what one might call ‘drive-by window shopping’. By which I mean roadside showrooms where drivers window-shop and by which they learn where to buy what when the need arises.

Third, and this is again linked to our love for our cars and our penchant for double parking, convenience shops have mushroomed. These are places one stops over for a pint of skimmed and ends up buying much more. I’d say the bulk of the money Maltese shoppers spend on groceries goes to convenience shops and supermarkets.

All of which does beg the question as to what has become of small shops. It’s a question lots of Indian shopkeepers seem to be asking as they burn effigies of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and scream into their megaphones. The simple answer is that some have survived and others haven’t.

The longer and more useful answers are twofold. First, it’s clear from the case of that ‘limited good’ arguments do not work. It’s not as if an extra euro spent at the supermarket means a euro less spent at the corner shop.

Sometimes people just work harder and harder, shop more and more, and fret and fret about making ends meet. The advocates of this particular system call it ‘growth’ and assure us it will make us happy, eventually.

Sure enough, the brains behind the proposed changes in India are saying that more and larger-scale shops will lower prices and that the outcome will ultimately be more stuff in people’s shopping bags and less trouble in their souls. The second thing to keep in mind is that new ways of shopping are without fail embedded in broader social contexts. Eurostat may put us at the bottom of the EU-27 table, but the decrease in small corner shops in Malta has also had something to do with the increase in women’s participation in the labour market, among other things. A working woman is unlikely to spend two hours every morning discussing the viscosity of kunserva at the grocer’s.

Perhaps the key distinction is that between the market and the marketplace. The first brings to mind a faceless global force hoodwinking us all into queuing at the latest chain store and getting more for less. The second has a ring of socialisation and diversity and hubbub about it.

If Malta is anything to go by, no matter how much market we have, we still seem to need the marketplace. Indian shopkeepers may well find that Lord Ganesh will have the last laugh.

mafalzon@hotmail.com