This post comes late, more than a month after my arrival in Chandigarh. The capital of the state of Punjab, Chandigarh is also known as the city beautiful, so named after the radiant city movement that came out of the Chicago school of urban planning just about at the same time of the birth of the post-modernist movement. Chandigarh was the first planned city in India, and one of the first in the developing world, it came from necessity, after the 1947 separation of Pakistan, and India needed a replacement for Lahore.

Many if not most cities in the old part of the world feature narrow winding streets, a product of development outside of the automobile era. The buildings are constructed organically, one sharing a wall with a neighbor, each growing from another like a vine following a path of its own making, take for example the Iraqi city of Ur, one of the world’s first.

Chandigarh, however is constructed of “sectors” and produces a perfect grid like pattern of order, that the disordered daily life of rickshaws, street vendors, and drivers must fit themselves into. The fit seems to come easy for the citizens, everything is compartmentalized, even the slum areas are cordoned off. The city however isn’t totally devoid of what Europeans talk about when they mention India, stray cows and dogs, litter, “curious” smells and wild driving. It is however, home for now.