An architectural tour

Un peu francais
Before India was partioned after Independence in 1947, the capital of the Punjab was Lahore. With Lahore now in Pakistan, a new first city was needed and in the spirit of a newly freed and modern country, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked a firm of American architects to design a brand new city.

Unfortunately, the main architect on the job was killed in a plane crash some time into the project started and the firm decided to pull out. After a bit of argy-bargy, Frenchman Le Corbusier, he of nun's hat fame (and some fabulously curvy furniture), got the task of completing the task. Next year, Chandigarh will celebrate its 50th anniversary, and the locals are very proud of the capital that is so unlike any other Indian city.

And different it is too. Vast green spaces, broken up by angular, concrete cells that form the hub of commercial life to form Sectors (30-odd of them). Think London's South Bank cum nasty British council estate from the 1960s, and it gives an idea of the design ambivalence it evokes. Each Sector also has a residential area attached to it, and it's in Le Corbusier's houses that the beauty of the "urban planning scheme" comes into its own. We love it, and drool over the sharp angles, curvy corners and no few reminders of the nun's hat. And in the house of Mary, where we're staying, the furniture is still the original from the 1950s.

We're both permanently glowing in the sweaty heat, but Mary can't get over how cool it is compared with a couple of weeks earlier and compares it to British weather...

Amanda, that blond film star with whom I tag along, gets stopped everywhere by beautifully dressed ladies, keen for a photograph. (In return, I get to snap them in their fantastically stylish clothes - and giggle at how boorish we look next to them.)

And a very British affair
In the vein of true Brits (not counting myself) we retire to a hill station for some respite from the heat, but also to gawp at Shimla, the Empire's summer seat of government. It's a massive schlep up the mountain, and yet they created this strangely Alpine, with a spattering of Disneyland, monument to the grandeur of the Raj. Pics will follow shortly (as soon as I find an internet cafe with an accessible USB portal. The computer I'm working on at the moment, for example, has a PC mouse somehow squeezed into the DVD drive.)

Shimla is spread over 12km on a ridge to which life (and an army of monkeys) clings in a much more sedate pace than we've seen so far. Cars are forbidden on the main (and very long) drag, the Mall, and a local tells us that the average Shimla-ite walks about 6km a day. We welcome the exercise after a week and a half of non-stop rickshaws and auto-rickshaws.

In the Viceregal Lodge, the Scottish castle-like summer pile of the Vice-Roy (the Empire's main man in India) that is now a Centre for Advanced Study, we go on an interesting tour of the very impressive Burmese teak-panelled main hall, the old banquet hall and the vice-roy's morning room. In another sumptuously decorated room our tour fizzles out when we realise, after a 30-min wait, that our guide had done a runner, presumably because it was lunch time.

I get my own share of funny stares, on account of the rather hefty pole of a sun umbrella I've acquired to protect us from the unwelcome attention of the cheeky monkeys.

Now we look forward to leaving the European architectural legacies behind, and are heading for Dharamsala (seat in exile of the Dalai Lama) and Chambra, the town of many temples. Although the 10-hour bus-without-loo journey will verily test our inner strength.