<b>Shekhar Gupta: </b>Writings On The UP Wall-I

Aspiration is turning into desperation. Nobody has much hope in an era of new Hindu Rate of Growth

The stand-out Writings On the Wall in this election-bound Uttar Pradesh tells us a substantively different story from what we’ve been reading and reporting in the past decade. We read aspiration on these walls then, as in Bihar and increasingly in other parts of our country. There was optimism, ambition and confidence, especially among the young.  Families had some surpluses and the markets boomed, from private school education in the heartland, to branded chicken in the south, immigration in Punjab, and that tell-tale sign that even hopeless Bihar had grown under Nitish’s first reign to start buying branded underwear.