In villages and in an urban slum, the men usually wear white, it is the women who add color to the community. Gathered near a water tap collecting water, laughing and teasing they can be spotted from far. It is more pronounced in the northern villages, as well as the villages in the western parts of India. The men wear white, dhoti and a shirt. The women on the other hand wear bright red, yellow or other colors.
The color of the sky is taboo for anyone in certain parts in the north of the country, I have heard customers at cloth merchant’s (the places I have been to are a source of bewilderment to me), saying it is taboo to wear blue that matches the sky. I have not been able to ascertain why. The doors of most house in rural and semi rural India are sky blue, so are the windows.
The other facet of life in the rural areas and also the semi rural areas is that clothes are bought on special occasions and they are worn till the next event takes place…people wear them to work, they wash their clothes at night and put them out to dry and then put them on again in the morning. Whereas the uber classes in urban areas wear clothes to define the time of the day…office, school, college, party etc the men in the villages don’t want to stand out and be a subject of comments and perhaps jibes about new clothes or change of clothes since the person was last seen during the day…in the villages every one is under some sort of “surveillance.”
Down south in Kerala, a well dressed man would become a subject of someone’s comment, he would perhaps be compared to a prince or some such person…or there would be inquiries whether that person was getting married, with derisive laughter accompanying the remark. I must confess that all my observations may be dated…India has changed in many respects. Consumerism has permeated the peri-urban, semi-rural, rural communities.
graffiti [The Reading Wall] 
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