Chandigarh: The City where Autos are Pink

Off late there has been a lot of uproar about police force in India. I remember a friend once told me of how corruption was institutionalized in the police of his city. Apparently a new law was passed regarding use of helmets for two wheeler riders. My friend had not yet bought one and as luck would have it, the police caught him.


“Take out 50 Rs.,” he had demanded.

My friend paid up but raised a genuine concern, “It will be difficult for me to bribe the policeman at every signal.”

But the resourceful policeman was ready with a solution to the problem, “Tell any policeman who stops you that you have already drunk Pepsi.”

My friend tried that and it worked like a charm and every policeman let him through without a bribe.

The next day again my friend set out without a helmet armed with the fact that he now knew the words to let him pass through without bribes. So when the first policeman stopped him, he said,

“I have already drunk, Pepsi.”

The Sardar policeman broke into laughter, “Nice try, my friend! Today it is Coca Cola, not Pepsi. Now take out hundred bucks!”

That was more on the lighter side, but frankly given the general impression of police, we were pleasantly surprised to be welcomed by a policeman the moment we landed in Chandigarh airport. He politely gave us information on places to visit, how to get to our hotel, where to get a taxi and how to avoid getting cheated by taxi drivers. Then he told us it was an initiative by Chandigarh police to make the city tourist friendly and took our comments on a register. That gave us a very good first impression of the city.

We had heard a lot about the city’s planning. So the expectation was very high. The roads were indeed wide and it did look better than many Indian cities but having already seen foreign countries, I was not really awed as such. Also the local shopping complexes looked rather jaded. Maybe it would have been a much more impressive spectacle when it was just built. Also with the entry of so many malls across India, shopping complexes no longer hold any charm. However when you enter one of the supermarket stores, you can sense a difference in the kind of things being sold: a reflection of higher standard of living. Or should we say higher disparity of incomes? We could see many more homeless people on the streets as well.

Like people, cities also have some eccentricities that help us remember it by. And for Chandigarh, it was the pink colored autos. Wonder whoever got this idea to have pink auto rickshaws! And apparently you can’t hail these pink autos off the road. You need to call up a number and book them like a call taxi.

As far as sightseeing goes, since we had just two days, we decided to have just two places on our itinerary: the rock garden and the rose garden. As you get older, every place starts looking the same and you don’t get the child like excitement at seeing new places. Vacations become more of a ritual: something you do because all people of your status do it. I do get cynical about some places, especially the ones with a lot of hype associated. But I often do stumble upon places that charm me every now and then as well. Both these places fall in this category.

The rock garden has a unique history of being established illegally by a former roads inspector: Nekh Chand Saini. When the government had discovered it, they had wanted to demolish it. But then bowing to public opinion, chose to regularize it instead and further make it a city memorial. A testimonial of how things work in India! But then I am happy they did. I really loved the place. It had a magical feel to it with all those sculptures assembled from an ensemble of recycled materials. It was indeed amazing how one could create such beauty out of ugliness. Seeing those sculptures of people and animals from various materials, it seemed to me as if I had entered the fascinating land of Oz. I wonder if Frank Baum’s stories had any influence on the design of this place. The creator apparently still has an office in the garden and people could interact with him. But though I admire his creation, I had no clue what I would say to him. So I decided to skip that part.

Unfortunately, it was not the right season to visit the rose garden. But I really loved how the garden was organized. In most of the gardens I have seen, plants are just randomly put together all over the place. Here however, the different species of roses were neatly arranged in rows and columns with small placards naming the species. I was surprised to learn that this park alone had 800 species of roses. It would have been fascinating to see them all. But unfortunately they were just planted and the roses would be in full bloom by March only. But we still spotted one or two stray flowers of over twenty different species of roses. We kind of enjoyed playing a game of rose spotting, trying to spot the stray roses that had bloomed among the barren stumps.

So that was Chandigarh, the starting point of our week long north India tour. We stopped by briefly to see Pinjore gardens as well on the way back. It was a nice garden built in Mughal style but did not really leave any lasting memories as such. Unless one wants to count a horde of large bats that were raising a ruckus right outside the garden!