Chandigarh

In short, meet the Indian Milton Keynes. It's a planned city on a grid, with straight obstruction free roads, organised traffic and intersections, and a good bus service (if perhaps the least friendly government staff I have encountered). The city is divided into numbered sectors, with residential areas, parks and retail and so on. Naturally it's completely without character, and pre-monsoon is a bit on the dusty side. It's also one of the cities which has the enforced lack of cheap rooms, so I can't recommend it as even a stopover. The one upside is the clean looking housing neighbourhoods, the sight of children playing cricket in the small green park spaces between the houses, there is potential. However, all my daydreams of a planned Indian city are smashed. I've often considered what it would look like to design a city as it should be, with free space and working sewers and no encroachment and slums and so on. I see now.