MPlus Lifestyle exhibition in Chennai Trade Centre

Flash back - Trigger the time machine to go back a few years.

Some three-four years back, me and my wife visited one such exhibition. To my knowledge, that was the first one of this size in Chennai. The entry was free, parking was real cool and there were nice shuttles that transferred people from the parking lot to the exhibition hall entrance. There were good number of stalls, but not too many. Food court was just okay - if my memory serves right, there was only one Sangeetha food stall.

Cut to the present now - 1 June 2007.

Trying to make an intelligent guess that there'd be a huge crowd on weekends, we went on the first day of the exhibition itself - It was a Friday evening. Parking was done at partly on both sides of the halls and on the road. There was a hefty entry - Rs 50 per head and interestingly, the place was still crowded. Why would I be surprised if this entry cost becomes Rs 100 next time and this exhibition will still buzz with huge crowd. There'll still be queues at every stall, predominant Hindi-only speaking stall attendants, international collection food court, etc etc.

The collections were pretty up-market this time and the international section was pretty good. Food court had a stall for every tastebud. The only case that I didn't like was that some of the open space with trees were covered and makeshift a/c arrangement was made to accommodate extra stalls. his became a glass house. Had the trees been talking, they'd say the yearn for sunlight, water, humidity and some level of darkness every 24 hours.

Wondering if the event is successful due to the entry price or due to the volume of economics and business.