As Indian calendar art goes, the current crop of 'welcome' calendars deploys a very restricted semiotic code. Nonetheless, as one looks across the whole archive, one finds several more levels and dimensions of meaning than would first meet the eye. Of course, there is the celebration of the child – male child, girl child, androgynous child, God-child -- as sign of auspiciousness and blessing. Similarly, the prominence of feminine images in the ‘welcome’ calendar genre draws attention to the attribute of auspiciousness as an important aspect of the feminine in India, though this may also have a pathological side when the concept of the bride as the bringer of prosperity is translated, as it often is in present-day India, into a catalogue of the consumer items that her parents can be expected to provide in her dowry.

This set of calendars also says quite a lot about the genre of calendar art in general, its location in the total range of contemporary mass media, and the industry that manufactures and distributes the prints. This is a genre in which sacred and secular imagery are constantly interplaying; it is a medium which has a crucial mediating role in the total range of mass media, between the fine arts, cinema and television, commercial advertising, other print media and the matchbox and fireworks industries, and product packaging in general. It is also an industry where plagiarism andcopying, and the recycling and refurbishing of images are commonplace strategies, as manufacturers seek a middle path between the reiteration of old themes and the quest for novelty in a market which is reputed to be almost as fickle and unpredictable as the Indian cinema industry. And that is saying something!

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