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INDIA, October 7, 2003: The annual Hindu festival season feels more like a trade fair this year than a holy event says this article. With declining interest rates and a booming stock market, India’s middle classes are consuming on a scale and in a style that is unprecedented. In the past 12 months, the number of mobile phones in India has almost tripled, to 20 million, and is on target to double again within 18 months. The number of shopping malls, which are proliferating in the booming satellite towns around Delhi, Mumbai and other big cities, are set to double in the next year. In Mumbai alone, 22 new shopping malls are under construction. One long-standing taboo — the use of religious festivals to promote consumption — is evidently defunct. Traditionally, Bengalis have treated the annual Durga Puja as an occasion for reverence. But in the tents erected to the Goddess this year, Durga’s effigy was hard to find among the clutter of product stalls and brand promotions. Most of the devotees were congregated around counters selling life insurance, pharmaceuticals that relieve stress, DVD stalls and promotions for home appliances. “Almost two-thirds of Indian annual consumer spending takes place in the festival months of October, November and December,” says Suhel Seth, chief executive of Equus Red Cell, a UK advertising firm. “What is new is the degree to which sponsors have encroached on what were community events.”

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