Day 83:

Chandigarh, now. It's still hot here, but it's getting to be a little cooler as I move north. The city is not quite as interesting as I thought it might be, but it has some charm. It's still too hot to put in a lot of effort, so I've just done the usual walking tour. This city is fun to walk about. It's a planned town, built on a field of green - from the ground up - by a French architect/city planner in the early 1950s. Fitting the whims of that designer, the city is full of big concrete government buildings ("temples of democracy," they say) and a grid of roads, all intersecting at 90 degree angles and laid out into 40 or so "sectors."

This is a rich town, and a clean town.

I paid a visit to the National Portrait gallery, which houses a display of photographic and textual exhibits depicting the Indian Independence movement from the 1850s to the time of partition. The exhibit includes some delightfully grizzly dioramas, as well as the text of articles written by both Marx and Engels decrying atrocities committed here by the English in the 1850s.