29 Problems But Good Taste Ain't One

There is a city in India called Chandigarh. It is divided into some 60 Sectors, the original 29 being designed by acclaimed European architect Le Corbusier. Coincidentally, there are also 29 broad reasons why Chandigarh sucks:

1) Sector 1 is meant to be the "head" of the city, but is clearly devoid of a brain. Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab state and of Haryana state, but is located in neither. Good going.

2) It serves as the capital of Haryana state, by far the least interesting of all the 28 states of India. Even backwaters like Chattisgarh and Jharkhand states manage to pull off rustic scenery and interesting local cultures. Haryana is just a big shitty field half-covered by suburbs of Delhi.

3) The entire city is hideous. The main buildings were all designed personally be Le Corbusier, who apparently figured (correctly) that the Indian authorities don't know jack about modern architecture and would approve of whatever hideous design he concocted.

4) Worse, the rest of the city was designed by local architects imitating Le Corbusier. Dear god.

5) Every house in the entire city has the same pattern of brickwork enclosing its patio, and it is a design that might have been just slightly interesting in say, 1963.

6) The people of Chandigarh are very proud of being the only Modernist city in India, and have multiplied the aesthetic atrocities threefold as the city expanded over the decades, so that now the disease has filled the whole of Chandigarh Union Territory and has spread into the neighboring states like an outbreak of smallpox.

7) It is unjustifiably expensive, because apparently people will pay a premium to reside in this dump.

8) It is fucking cold.

9) The legislative assembly building of Punjab and Haryana looks like a nuclear plant, and it was designed this way on purpose.

10) Fittingly, the rest of the city looks like the result of a nuclear meltdown.

11) Actually, the rest of downtown looks like a giant community college for ex-Soviet immigrants.

12) And uptown looks like a Belgian suburb.

13) Le Corbusier designed the traffic system to be efficient, with wide, straight boulevards, and different sizes of road in every sector so that different types of vehicle could go at their own speeds without interfering with each other. This of course assumes the rule of law on the streets. Le Corbusier had clearly never met an Indian driver, nor attempted to steer a bus around a bullock-cart.

14) CONCRETE EVERYWHERE

15) It's too big. Each sector is a kilometer long, which makes rickshaws indispensable (already an annoying fact). As auto-rickshaws are almost extortionate here, one is obliged to take cycle-rickshaws in the winter rain.

16) The symbol of the city is the Open Hand monument, an ugly bronze hand on a concrete base. The only use I have for an open hand in Chandigarh is bitch-slapping anyone who has the authority to bulldoze the entire city but hasn't.

17) The "heart" of the city is Sector 17, a gigantic shopping district of the utmost awfulness, a place where someone has apparently lifted a shopping arcade from a declining mill town in Wales, repeated the design tenfold, filled the lowest two levels with stores and filled the upper levels with pigeons, crumbling bricks, rusting rebar, and flickering, unused light fixtures.

18) They have the gall to call Sector 17 a "Pedestrian Shopping Paradise" when the only Paradise-like feature about it is that it is impossible to be run over by a rickshaw or step in cow shit. India; A Bright New Dawn. Stepping Into The 20th Century!

19) The loudspeakers of Sector 17 do not blast terrible Filmi pop. "But wait, that's a good thing isn't it?" you may be thinking. No. Chandigarh is so determined to be modern that they blast Muzak.

20) As I've mentioned, Chandigarh is also the capital of Punjab, and thanks to the glory days of Sikh terrorism, large sections of the city are under paramilitary guard, preventing the only morally defensible act of terrorism: destroying Chandigarh.

21) The "outer sectors" (even the phrase sounds decrepit) are planned grids of modernist structures that nevertheless still have all the downsides of your traditional Indian heap, particularly the Sisyphean battle against piles of dust which shall be blown back onto the stoops they were swept from for all eternity until somebody invents the dustpan and the rubbish bin.

22) The city, which is located directly in the path of cold air blown down from the nearby Himalayas, is heated exclusively by trash fires.

23) It is a city of large buildings and large open spaces, which is all well and good until the gray skies, gray buildings, and gray ground blend together and make it impossible to find anything more than 200 yards away (although not being able to see anything in Chandigarh is arguably a plus)

24... Chandigarh actually has one feature so awesome I am going to excuse a handful of its other failings. Fittingly, the one good part of Chandigarh is the one part that completely escaped the notice of planning authorities for years. It turns out that they entrusted a large swath of unused public land to one Mr. Nek Chand, a humble civil servant who, unbeknownst to the world, was and still is a crazy artistic genius. He turned his patch of unused woods into a "fantasy rock garden."

Starting from humble beginnings, by the time anyone stumbled across it, Nek Chand's rock garden already covered several acres of land completely filled with bizarre sculptures, tunnels and gorges lined with junk, and vast armies of junk-statue people and animals. Completely doing the opposite of what you would expect Indian officialdom to do, rather than bulldoze it all they actually hired Nek Chand a staff to continue his work. Now the rock garden is a massive, surreal wonderland of crazy waterfalls, junk-palaces, and even larger, creepier armies of junk-hewn statues. Stairs are made of toilet parts, archways of broken plates. Every now and then you see a wall made completely of electrical plug adaptors or have to scale a rock covered in lampshades. It is excessively cool. It is the weirdest place I have been to in years, and although it does not surpass Salvador Dali's personal museum in terms of insanity per square foot, the scale so huge that one becomes lost in a magic forest of awe-inspiring...something.

I'm going to count that as canceling failures #25-27. Thanks, Nek Chand. You my homie.

28) Apparently, the rock garden draws millions of tourists from across India a year, an attraction second only to the Taj Mahal. Most of these visitors escape with their lives, while the only thing preventing visitors to Chandigarh from committing mass suicide is the illusion that they are already in Hell.

29) All told, the city is a massive, hulking facade of modernity that was outdated decades ago, while behind the godforsakenly butt-ugly facade is the same derelict crap as the rest of contemporary India. The only thing that distinguishes it from its awful urban brethren is that its type of atrocity is uniform and premeditated. Sure, the bubonic plague killed more people than the Holocaust, but which was worse?

I rest my case.