Singapore economy makes a killing in Diwali
Soumya Sarkar
Singapore, Nov 6: The Indian economy is looking up. In fact, it must be doing really well if you go by the hordes of Indians who descended upon Singapore in the Diwali week this year. Flights were booked to bursting weeks in advance. Some actually went west to Mumbai before striking it east.
It was what you call a 'win-win' situation. The Indian economy starts doing well and some Indians start to splurge. Result: The Singaporean economy makes a killing. Talk about global integration and free flow of funds.They tell you Singapore is an island city. Make a small correction there: Singapore is an island mall. Take a wrong turn and you are in a mall. Take a right one, you're in a mall again. And before you know it, you have gone and bought something altogether different from what you had intended to in the first place.
Not that the Indians who were in Singapore this week were complaining (except some toiling scribes like self, slogging it out at a conference). Shopping with a vengeance, they stormed intoevery shop, leaving dazed but very happy shopkeepers in their wake. You could spot the Indians right away among the hordes thronging the stores from the fixed gleams in their eyes as they walked past arrays of shelves as if dream-walking, stopping ever so often to pick up things that caught their eye.
From the storm that hit the Singapore malls last week, you would think that some Singaporeans await Diwali more eagerly than many Indians. But to its credit, the city does get decked up for Diwali on its own as well. With a large number of ethnic Indians on the island, every Diwali lights the city up in thousands of lights. The Singaporeans also let loose their inhibitions once a year and start on their own shopping binges. The streets of Little India, a locality with lots of ethnic Indians, look startlingly like an Indian city during Diwali, with the same bustle and lights, the same dirt and noise.
The real action, of course, is a little further ahead, at Mustafa, synonymous with paradise to Indians withmoney burning holes in their pockets. Not that they were in any smaller numbers on Orchard Street or the Sun Tec City Mall. All over the city you could find fellow countrymen, and women, representing all corners of the good old country, all with a single mind and a single purpose: SHOP. If we could achieve but half such unity of mind and purpose in making things as we do in spending on them, an economic miracle could be just around the corner.
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