Monday, November 26, 2007

Addresses

* One of my mailing addresses in USA -
34B, Camelot Drive,
Pittsburgh,
PA - 15222.

* One of my mailing addresses in India -
5B, "G" Wing,
Godavari Annexe,
Shri Krishna Nagar,
Borivali (E),
Mumbai,
Maharashtra - 400096

As you can tell the Indian address is 2X longer and bigger than the USA address.
Mumbai (Bombay) being a Metro, it still has a cleaner and efficient system of Address. It gets worse when a letter is mailed to a remote village of the country.
You have to mention the district, taluka, panchayat etc. Sometimes the space provided on the post card is not sufficient and i remember in old days people would write smaller and squeeze in as many letters as possible on the three black lines provided for Address.

Sometimes the Address would be bigger than the content of the post card itself.

Point is, can there an efficient way to describe an Address? One that is simple and neat yet effective?

Can't we make Zip code / Pin Code the primary identifier. Like for example there can be 1,00,000 Ram-nagars in India but there can only be one Ram-nagar per Pin code.
Wouldn't that change everything?

Like in above example i can only have a plot number instead of Godavari Annexe and Sri Krishna Nagar. Wouldn't that be simple 3 line address?

So it could read - 5B-G Wing, 9999, Borivali(E), Mumbai.

Just a random thought