Chandigarh and Lucknow

I think of myself as a conservative, cautious, shy man but yesterday morning at 7:30 AM I was on the back of a motorcycle racing through Lucknow looking for an auto taxi. We found one and I was on my way to the Tila Wali Masjid, a mosque built by Aurangzeb that predates the founding of Lucknow which is, by India standards, a very recent place being founded in the mid-18th century. Persians were invading India and a fish jumped in the Gomati River and this was taken as a good sign and they built a city that became a cultural capital in India noted for the purity of its language and the skill of its poets, musicians and dancers. I have taken two walking tours of Lucknow. After the uprising of 1857, the British took control of Lucknow and the cultural life of the city pretty much disappeared although even today the citizens of Lucknow think their Hindi-Urdu is more refined and polite than elsewhere in India. On the first day in Lucknow, Robert and I went to the Residency where the British residents were beseiged for five months before being rescued. It is a large area with many multistoried brick buildings, all now in ruins and showing signs of fire. It is a moving site. The episode had tragic consequences for both the British and the Indians. Yesterday, at the mosque, I was shown the tree from which the British hung the rebels after the Uprising. The walk this morning was in Hindi and my Hindi wasn’t up to it, but I enjoyed walking through a series of crumbling palaces, libraries and other buildings of which I never understood the nature. Oh, one, I found out belatedly, was a tomb for someone’s mother that was finished by her grandson. On the first Heritage Walk, we visited the building where Ghandi and his two goats stayed. He traveled with goats apparently so he could have fresh milk. Before Lucknow, we were in Chandigarh. Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab-Haryana and is a planned city built in the 50’s and designed by Corbusier. We went for a auto trip around Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Except for the High Court we couldn’t get too close to the buildings because of security. If we had had more time, we could have obtained a pass, but we didn’t. I saw enough. The buildings are enormous in scale. Robert says they are designed to make people feel small and powerless. Now in their decaying state, I think they seem fragile themselves. Sic transit gloria mundi. But they are still very active. There were crowds around the High Court with a lot of attorneys dressed in black with white neck bands of various sorts. Quite British. In the morning we had been to a folk art rock garden built by one man over a period of 40 years. It is big in area and enormous in scale. It is truly amazing that one man could do all this. The builder took refuse from the building of Chandigarh and turned it into his fantasy. The first part is small and cramped and then it opens into a small ampitheater and a waterfall, one of two. The first part, as I remember it, is less colorful than the later sections, more monochromatic. The first part is largely white and gray with a lot of free form shapes. Later he became more representative. We had an excellent dinner last night, three kinds of chicken, kabob, a mirchi korma and one whose name I can’t remember but it was a large chickend ball in a sweet, mild gravy. The whole dinner was delicious. For lunch I had a kathi roll and that was also delicious. The Aroma food court is attached to a quite fancy hotel and has a range of food from fast food outlets to quite good places. The chicken place had it’s name in Urdu. The kathi place was Australia. After eating we went upstairs to MacDonald’s for desert and Internet. The hotel in Chandigarh did not have wi-fi. Tomorrow morning we head out for Ayodyah. It was reading about Ayodyah that first got Robert interested in India so it will be a pilgrimage of sorts. Then we think we are heading out for the place where the Buddha died. By then it will probably be Christmas.