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.