Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Hoardings

“Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes.” – Robin Leach

All over the routes we traveled in India, the roads were plastered with billboard signs featuring groupings of faces with no names and perhaps a political slogan of some sort. The Indians didn't particularly notice the signs. We asked if there were elections coming up or why they were posted. No answers.

The signs are called "hoardings" and they're not legal. The police ignore them.

The hoardings celebrate everything from politicians’ birthdays to appointments to cabinet, or visits of dignitaries to the city. Indian citizens on the whole, I read are not particularly interested in seeing these mug shots everywhere but they seem to just accept them as part of the landscape.

I read that The High Court has ruled against the unlawful use of public space; the municipal councils have pulled down hundreds of thousands of hoardings. But nothing has changed. The presence of hoardings seems to be a fact of life, sort of like our bumper stickers, only worse.


The line up of faces at the bottom kills me!

We loved these...no names, just rows of faces

Hoardings: noun

  1. a large board used for displaying advertising posters, as by a road .
  2. a temporary wooden fence erected round a building or demolition site

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