24 Nov, 2014
Thailand: Malls here, malls there, malls everywhere – The Nation
The proliferation of shopping malls here has reduced entertainment to acquisition, success to greed, interaction to purchasing, and humans to mere buyers and sellers. Our mall culture has sown the value of money and material things as absolute. Everything can be measured by the act of consumption. It is, in turn, providing a fertile petri dish for corruption.
This column is not meant to condemn shopping malls. We live in a capitalist market-driven society, and malls are part of our modernisation. These words are only a call for increased awareness that, as a nation, Thailand needs more than an ever-growing number of retail shopping spots. It needs more public space for libraries, museums, art galleries, indigenous cultural and performing arts venues, and sporting facilities. We need to be more reflective of what truly constitutes a balanced rhythm of life, so we do not grow only materialistically and superficially. Continue to uphold the creed that “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping”, and one day our children will wake up as shallow as a puddle, with the backbones of jellyfish. As a nation, we will wander aimlessly, forward, backward, sideways, eventually becoming a mere ghost of what we once were.
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