ByThis city offers a whole lot of creative diversions but Mumbai chooses to spend its weekends in malls.Last Sunday, I went to see a movie at a mall that had a PVR in it. By the size of the crowds, it seemed all of Mumbai did also. If not the whole of the nation.Just like they institute curfews with section144, Mr. Fadnavis had instituted a new law that stipulated that Indians living in Mumbai must spend their Sundays somewhere close to a PVR cinema, then a couple of hours inside it (mandatory like army service in Israel), or face harsh imprisonment.So there I was, with 4-5 hundred million people, all eating Haagen Dazs and staring at Satya Paul window decorations. It doesn’t matter which mall or which PVR, or which part of the city, they are all essentially one homogenous blob of sameness. I say that not as an urban planning value judgment, nor that they are better or worse than the world that existed before but I’m yet to meet a person that walks into any mall in Mumbai and says, “Whoa. What is this place? I know malls but this one…I’m totally lost- what are these brands, instead of a food court they have a yoga area – so different. I need to ask for directions to see what leads where”.That doesn’t happen. Malls have a Zara shop, a Shoppers Stop, an Anushka Sharma film, An Irish House, A Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a Forest Essentials, so if they joined all the malls, it would essentially be one large Mumbai suburb, like an air conditioned Malad.And it is in these billion square feet of air-conditioned retail that we, by law, have to spend our Sundays. Or risk death by firing squad.I jest but by the swarms that fill our malls on Sundays, it appears there isn’t another justification.There is. One that I’ve heard from lots of people. That there is nothing else to do on the weekends. There’s restaurants and drinking Friday and Saturday nights and malls on Sundays.This of course isn’t entirely true but a mix of lack of information on alternatives and laziness and prejudice, makes it true.By which I mean some don’t want to go to a water park or theme park on a Sunday, because the phrase often heard is, there are “cheap people”, an upper middle class phrase meaning there will be a class of people, like clusters of juvenile boys, ogling as posh young women sliding down a water slide. The same logic is applied to city parks because the homeless often sleep in them. Ours is perhaps the only city where people are shooed away from parks by constables if they look reasonably sophisticated, suggesting, “What is your class of person doing in a public park?”This of course leaves the elite with their Bombay Gymkhana sorts of clubs but there is a whole new generation of 20- to 30-something working people who don’t want to be around old Indian uncles pretending to be British. They just want to have a swim or play squash without anyone asking who their dad is or have their lineage approved by a posh Harry Potter accent. They’ve got disposable incomes and want alternatives – all they get is Bollywood and a massive mall.Afriend in the corporate world explained life in Mumbai thus: “The city outside is so mad that once in office, there’s a café, there’s AC, nice furniture, less noise, you never want to leave. So you leave at night when things are calm post 8 pm. And on weekends you want no hassle, stuck in some line in the sun, so you go to this place because if nothing else, you know you are doing nothing, in AC. On Sundays, am I culturally growing from diverse experiences intellectually and geographically? Like hiking or taking violin classes or learning Spanish? No. But I know I can watch Piku and get a table at Mainland China, so that’s at least something.”Most world cities have inhabitants that want to expand their knowledge of the city and travel it extensively on a weekend to learn and see. Or have the option to see what the city has to offer. Our bliss seems to be in how much we can reduce our engagement with the city. Nirvana is work, flat, mall near each other and the airport accessible by Ola cabs under 45 minutes.Mumbai offers, like all cities do, a whole range of things, probably. Learning musical instruments, dance, pottery, languages, watching comedy, opera, doing karate, and that’s probably just the few we know. What hits us relentlessly with their marketing, is Bollywood. Your car radio, the hoardings, the ads on google, on YouTube, the ads on every TV show, every fast food you hold, so once in the mall, its like the Venus fly trap, you think, “What the hell, I’m here” and end up watching movies just because they’ve been shouting in your face all week. Producers need to thank the mall owner’s AC supplier for 90 per cent of hits, not the screenwriter.We aren’t unique in this. If we’ve brought life into a mall, places like Dubai and Hong Kong have brought in golf courses, ski slopes, football fields and sharks into a mall, so rather than go to the outside world, they’ve just brought the outside world (mountain, grass, ocean) and put it under a roof. On Sundays, there will be future generations of kids around the world, at a thing that was once outdoors, like football practice or scuba diving, complaining that the AC is too cold.There are of course those that defy the norm and the plastic nature of urban life spent in malls and say we’ll make a different Sunday life.A man in a building close to mine, fed up with malls, had convinced his society to set up bungee jumping infrastructure. Naturally, these ad hoc fun set ups don’t have any safety procedures so that came to an end when one of the drivers in the building got drunk, bungee-jumped and ended up in a neighbour’s tree. He was fine but the flat residents returned to their Sunday mall plans.