How do you ever figure out what goes on in India? You can read newspapers and books, imbibe unlimited (and usually repetitive) gyan from a cartel of about a dozen talking heads who control the opinion industry on the newspaper op-ed pages and TV channels, talk to experts, listen to politicians, professors, godmen or astrologers. But having tried all of these and more, some from both sides, I have come to the conclusion that there is no better teacher of what’s going on in India, particularly if you love travelling by road, than reading writings on the wall. This is particularly true of the India, or Bharat, that we usually know so little about. In decades of travelling, I have figured that if you keep your eye on the walls as you (if you are on a decent strip of asphalt) sprint past them or (if it is the usual north Indian minefield of a road) bounce up and down and move a mile in five minutes, you know what is going on, what is changing and what is not. So if you go to a really rich part of India, say, Punjab, the walls will display advertisements and messages from airlines offering cheap tickets to England or “Kanada”, discounts and freebies for buying mid-sized cars, even services to fix your visas and passports. You go to the slightly less rich regions, and you find the writings on the walls selling you tractors, fertiliser, cement, farm loans. Even poorer regions will have walls displaying advertisements for snuff, itch creams, bidis. And the really, really poor, will either have no walls (as in parts of Bihar and Orissa) or will either have no messages or, wherever a little awakening is now visible, particularly since the arrival of Nitish Kumar, advertisements for the one industry that signals a national renaissance — in howsoever twisted a fashion — education. So you see “English-medium” schools and IIT-IIM-medical college entrance-test coaching centres advertised in places where walls would have been blank a few years ago.

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