Pictures from a ride around Delhi + Noida

Part of the extensive construction going on around Noida - flyovers, metro system, multiple roadworks, all in a rather haphazard manner with fragile-looking scaffolding and flimsy hoardings. This one appeared to be using steel... for residential projects, bamboo scaffolding are used.


Typical bus in Noida - this one's already in a better condition.


Dome of the ministry of finance. The gap between the grandeur of the government buildings and the poverty of the masses is just staggering.

Pictures taken on a Lumix LX2

Religion and Consumerism

Early next year would be the elections for India. From the local talk, it seems that politics is largely influenced by religion. My question is how much of consumer patterns are influenced by religion here?

The above image of chillis and lime strung together was taken in an auto, and it's a local formula to ward off evil. The basic raw food materials have been with humanity long enough to be integrated into culture and beliefs. In terms of modern necessities, of which I would include an array such as soap, mirrors, photos and metal cooking utensils used even in villages, it appears divorced from religion and married to the more evolutionary elements that is culture. Take for example - Indians, from all levels and castes, are enamoured of their Bollywood stars. The nagging thought is this: for a nation where religion and culture is as thick and pervasive as the dust in the Indian air, can products weave into the patterns of thought that are created through these unique rituals and culture ingrained in the lives of 1.13b Indians?

A couple of quick possible examples:
1) A respect for elders that extend to the eldest person in the family giving permission for significant purchases. This eldest person may be a female, which is a unique position in a patriarchal society;

2) This idea of significant fasting periods which are often accompanied by elaborate preparation leading up to the day of breaking of fast. Retail such as tailoring and food supplies are obvious beneficiaries of such traditions. What can modern products offer to bridge these traditions? Or perhaps one could create a experience of purchase for a premium product that is similar to a ritualistic experience in the local context. This can be achieved not just through the in-store experience a la luxury brands, but the way that advertising campaigns are constructed to the way words are phrased on a packaging.

A possible method of developing a new product in India could be to construct indices and corresponding studies/surveys that are a combination of typical market indices (colour studies, competition survey, pre-market testings, brand perceptions.. etc) as well as indices unique to the culture and social strata (why the most popular rituals are so popular, the most patronised Hindu Gods...) The fine art would be in the selection of these indices and keeping them closely relevant to the thinking and emotive processes of the target market, while providing sufficient novelty or points of differentiation.


Below: It is quite a common sight for drivers to have heart-shaped stickers of their favourite Bollywood stars on their rear view mirrors.

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Noida Streetlife

When switching on the light elsewhere, I had gotten used to the fact that it will stay on. Not so in Noida, although it could be considered a large industrial town. The electricity had even gone off for 2 hours in the middle of a hot and humid night. Delhi is supposed to be moving into autumn, but the heat and dust of India are certainly holding that off.











During my first day of work, we took a small CNG-powered "tuk-tuk". The government had moved into CNG for its public transport in a big way, but it was certainly ironic that the dust that covers the whole of Delhi and Noida did not improve the air quality one bit. Public transport here mainly took the form of overcrowded buses, CNG-powered auto-rickshaws, as well as trishaws. The trishaw riders were lean and wiry, with a number of them having ankles thinner than mine. It is a hard life when you have to ferry 2 to 3 customers at one time using a trishaw with no gears. Their wheels are threadbare, the paint is often flaking off and the trishaw rider's own clothes would sometimes be patched.

The streetlife betrayed the fact that Noida was still much in the third world. Countless beggars slept in their clothes along the streets, while entire families had stretched tents across tree branches. These tents often formed the shopfront where small businesses of selling tobacco, necessities (in satches) and sweets are found. Sometimes, entrepreneurial young Indian men would hawk their wares along stretches of the road, and I saw a stretch of inflatable floats (the type you put into swimming pools) today.

My Indian colleague tells me that the beggars are happy in the street of Noida. A newspaper did a survey of children begging in the street and found out that they could earn more than a worker in a call centre if they just begged 2-3 hours each day before and after school. This was hard for me to reconcile as just last week, I was in the small town of Dankaur, and the villages of Navrangpur and Derin. Although the people there are much poorer, I could see that each of them had a job and had a home to return to. Not so the beggars in the streets of Noida.

Having interviewed the villagers, it was apparent that their life was difficult - they wake up at 4 or 5am in the morning, milk the buffaloes and then work in the fields till the evening meal. Perhaps this is a reason why the beggars would rather beg in the town, then living a laborious life in the village. Furthermore, although all the villagers are sending their children to school because of the incentives provided, they often do not do anything about the education. Once a girl becomes of a marriagiable age, she stops school at about 8th or 9th grade. Sending a girl for further education is frowned upon and there is much social pressures from the other families in the village. Education has not done much to lift the villagers out of poverty, in comparison to industrial development and technology transfer.

XDRTB

TED is spreading news of an onslaught of extremely drug resistant strains of TB that has arisen from drug misuse and TB non-treatment. Head over to their site for a very visual representation of its implications. Naturally, most of the outbreaks are in third-world countries...

Grasping Noida

It's a little difficult to begin a blog on a first experience in India. India's too complicated with a multiplicity of things shouting at you when you're trying to form key impressions.

I'm staying in Noida, just outside Delhi. There are somewhat secure compounds for the middle-class families that congregate about common facilities. A very rough, hand-drawn sign serves as the map to the compound of 200 500 houses, and each cluster has another hand-painted sign (pictured) for further directions.

The native visual language, like its society, is stratified. Consumers at the base of the pyramid are communicated through hand-painted signs in basic and contrasting colours, are highly text-based, with what looks to be cheesy looking pictorial accompaniment. I want to get out to a supermarket in the weekend to have a closer look at the visual language for the consumer.

Just a layer up to the middle-class consumer, who would typically have a university degree - there are multiple local versions of what the West offers. In my short 3 days here, I've seen a cafe which is loosely ala Coffee Bean, a clothes iron that looks and feels like a Tefal but is a local brand, and several small shopping malls in Noida city. The building styles are mostly modernist-influenced, with an extreme freeplay of decorative motifs and styles in house designs that reflects a certain "each man for himself" mentality.

Next up, street life, entrepreneurship and poverty in Noida.