I've been travelling northern Maharashtra and southern Madhya Pradesh (MP) by bus for the past couple of weeks. Very interesting, very productive, and very dusty. Everyone I met tried to convince me that a couple of months ago when the monsoon ended all these dustscapes were lush green. And a fellow bus passenger tried to convince me that normally the roads aren't as bad as this, that every year the government resurfaces them after the monsoon, but with poor quality materials that get washed away in the next monsoon. I guess the roads I was on were scheduled to be resurfaced sometime in the next few weeks. I don't know. How am I supposed to believe such statements when there is a city in northern Maharashtra called Dhule which, I am told, translates as 'Dust'? Presumably this city doesn't change its name during the monsoon.
A note on nomenclature. One of the things I discovered in my trip is what image should spring to mind when an Indian settlement is described as a) a village, b) a town, c) a city, and d) a metro. In England we don't use the term 'metro' very much, although London is one. The usage of the term in India is important, I think, because there's a lot of difference between Mumbai, with a population of 13 million (compare to Australia's population of 21 million), and a city I visited in MP with a population of 1 lakh (100 000), no functioning cybercafe, no rail links and no rickshaws in the morning. A town in India can be a crossroads with a few small shops (no Sainsbury's, Walmart or Reliance Fresh - at least not yet) and a market place. And a village is where people live. I'm not sure whether the small cluster of ten houses I sheltered in during the last, furious dying gasp of the monsoon rains counted as a village or a mere hamlet, as my Marathi wasn't up to framing such a tax collector question and my companion was a Keralan with less Marathi than me. At least travelling in MP forced me to revive the basics of my Hindi, which will be useful during the coming weeks when I'm once again out of Maharashtra (although having said that, half the people I spoke to in MP seemed to be Maharashtran).
