![]() ![]() Major continental gradations, like west Africa’s strata of Sahara, sahel and forest or the North American progression from plains to deserts to mountain divide, do not apply…There are, of course, exceptions in India there are always exceptions, mostly big ones. It could be Bihar or it could be Karnataka, equally it could be Bengal or Gujarat. Distinctive features are lacking the same mauve-flowered convolvulus straggles shamelessly on trackside wasteland and the same sleek drongos – long-tailed blackbirds – festoon the telegraph wires like a musical annotation. ![]() A distant hill serves only to emphasize its flatness. ![]() India’s countryside is surprisingly uniform. Not for nothing are unspoilt landscapes invariably billed as ‘timeless.’ Boarding at random an overnight train, and awakening twelve hours later to a cup of sweet brown tea and a dawn of dun-grey fields, the traveler – even the Indian traveler – may have difficulty in immediately identifying his whereabouts. Dynamic, the one hurtles forward inert, the other holds it back. “If time is the locomotion of history, place could be the gradient against which it is pitted. ![]()
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