Distance Is Not The Only Thing That Separates Two Places

Two towns can sit close together on a map and belong to entirely different worlds of weather, work and diet.

Open a map and the eye does what eyes do: it measures gaps. Two dots close together read as similar, two dots far apart read as different. Across much of India this instinct fails badly, because the variables that actually separate places are not laid out along the same axis as distance. Altitude changes faster than kilometres do. A few hours of travel can lift you from humid lowland into cool hill country, and with the altitude goes the crop, the building material, the roof pitch, the food, the clothing and the working hours. The map records none of this. It records only that the dots were near each other.

Rainfall does the same trick in the other direction. There are stretches where the wet season is the defining fact of existence and stretches where water is the scarce thing around which everything is arranged, and the boundary between them is not a line anyone drew. It shifts with the land. On one side of a range the air arrives loaded and drops what it carries. On the other side it arrives wrung out. The two sides may share administration, road network and language, and still run on completely different assumptions about how much water a household can expect.

The practical consequence is that generalisations travel poorly. A statement about how people farm, or eat, or heat a house, or plan a wedding season, is usually true of a band of territory rather than a country, and the band is defined by climate and terrain rather than by any border you could point at. Reading India well means getting comfortable with the sentence that begins in some regions, and resisting the urge to finish it with everywhere.