Designing for India is like designing font for ransom letter

I dropped into Pune after a gap of few months. When I left, the whole city was undergoing construction and road widening.
The deal was to have the city (some parts of the city) ready for the youth game events. But the city municipal corporation in their usual style kept missing the milestones and then somehow on the eve before the d-day fixed the ‘stuff’ to adorn the roads; even the paint was wet when guests arrived.
Think of a bachelor’s house and girlfriend drops in unannounced, how the things are shoved under the bed, tucked under the pillow, forced into overflowing cupboard, giving a temporary look of tidiness; it’s the same.
But it is a city, a larger living space we are dealing with. It affect the mind and psyche of its inhabitants and it feels bad when you look at such gross misuse of power to decide in what kind of place 'we' live in.
When I look at the graphics and visual identity designed for the youth games; it’s like crude, unfinished makeshift thing. Giving insights into how bad we are at detailing or how insensitive we have become to the visual and the visible aspects of the things around us. I am not a kind of person who believes in real design is what comply with the taste of Europe or few cartelised bunch of people. But it takes deep dive into the collective consciousness of the people, which we forgot about as a design community.
I remember we discussing kitsch as a way of ‘filler’ design back while studying design, think of how meters in the auto-rick are adorned or small town furniture are detailed by stuffing the motifs and elements with no regards to the end result.
Our lack of taste or lack of ‘consistent’ taste with definite personality is visible in every aspect. May it is a result of the fact that we are not a homogeneous society anymore, we are one 'big layered cake' if they like to call US as 'melting pot'; or it reminds me of one sanskrit song we used to taught in texts about 'Sthala-pistatakam' a dish like theple (guju) where all ingredients maintain their tastes . We are bad at discovering the values and mores that are so much authentic and original. The days are of fusion and not khichadi.
In our childhood, we used to hear “Pune thethe kai une” (rhetorical – “what on earth you won’t find in pune?”) now i guess i know the answer. We lack good designs.

Canadian : Sweet Hereafter

In the back drop of serene Canadian village, a story, hypnotically told, of a tragedy and its aftermath. Two parallel stories run through the movie - one of the ambulance chaser who him selves have troubles back home...and of a surviver of the accident, a more sensitive one of the bunch.
She gets to live her favorite bedtime story of pied piper.

There is this opening scene of car wash that sets the mood for the things to come.
Sense of community among distressed is paramount and it gets its rightful place in the scheme of things.

The film's tag line "There is no such thing as a simple truth" lives it up to show how.