Punjab's public writing is a record of what it wants: painted shop signs in Gurmukhi and English, IELTS and visa consultancy hoardings on every district town's main road, political wall writing, and the names of donors on every gurdwara extension.
The visa hoardings are the most numerous commercial signage in a Punjab town and they name the destination countries, the test scores required and the fees, and they constitute the clearest public statement of what the state's young people intend.
Painted hand lettering in Gurmukhi is a craft with its own conventions and it is being replaced by flex printing, which uses a small number of digital fonts.
Older painted signage, on shops, on wells and on the sides of buildings, is disappearing at speed and nobody is photographing it.
Wall writing during the militancy years, the farmers' protest and every election is a political record that is painted over within a season.
A photographic survey of one town's signage would produce a document of what that town was thinking, and it costs an afternoon.
The walls carry three things: political party colours and symbols, advertisements for immigration consultants and coaching centres, and government scheme slogans.
The immigration advertising is the most widespread commercial writing in rural Punjab. A wall in a village of two thousand people will carry four agencies and three IELTS centres.
Before all of it there was the wall writing of the movements: the unions, the left, the Akali morchas. Some of it is still legible under the paint in the older towns.