Cool back

They say that about 25,000 people visit it every day. With that kind of 'footfall', a shopping mall can surely hope for fairly large daily sales turnover figures. One thing to keep in mind about shopping malls in many parts of India is that it would be difficult to correlate visitors to sales, except during the festival season. There are many reasons to visit a shopping mall, but shopping would possibly come at the bottom of the list. Escaping the heat would likely lead all the rest.

All the more so in Chennai, where the heat continues to remain at fairly high levels even in September. So, even though the festive season is at hand, Spencer's Plaza is still seeing a lot of traffic that comes in just to stay cool and hang around, rather than to tick off any shopping list. The airconditioning at the mall must be overworked with all that crowd; this view from across Binny Road shows many individual airconditioning units working to supplement the mall's cooling tower!