What the AP x Swatch chaos says about modern aspiration

On the morning of Saturday, May 16, the police were called to a shopping mall in Mumbai. A crowd had been gathering outside the Swatch store at Palladium since before five, and by the time the shutters were due to lift, it had become a crush that the mall’s security could not hold. Barricades went over. People at the front were pushed out by people behind them.

The sale was called off on safety grounds. Somewhere inside the chaos, a man was filmed shouting that they were not animals, that the store was not opening today.

The same morning, a similar scene unfolded at Phoenix Marketcity in Bengaluru and at DLF Avenue in Delhi. Across Europe and the United States, Swatch closed stores in multiple cities. A brawl was reported outside a store in Milan.