It lives inside me

A week passes and I'm still not up in the mountains. I thought I was better. In fact I was so sure, I decided to make one last attempt at sight-seeing northern India. First up was Agra and the Taj Mahal (my camera broke), then Jaipur (crazy hot, with palaces and things) and then Bikaner (even hotter with extra camels - I was now in the Great Thar Desert, which sounds exciting).

Trouble is that I wasn't much better at all. So when I finally made it to relative civilisation in Chandigarh (India's only 'new town' - it's as if the Jetsons moved to Milton Keynes) I decided to visit a doctor. His verdict was amoebic gastroentiritis. Which sounds explosive. The poor amoeba and its family are dead now, but they had a good innings. And I'm reacquainting myself with regular bowel movements. Which is far better than acquanting myself with the toilets on Indian night trains.

Chandigarh is nice enough. Tons of open space and not a cow to be seen, but with a rigid geometry that borders on the fanatical. Its creator, Le Corbusier, was apparently a genius and is now lauded on the Swiss 10 Franc note. But I think he was surely a nut. As he put it,

"The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous, it is a paralysing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into all human aim, into every human act."

Ok... He also named the new parliament building "The Hyperbolic-Paraboloid Dome of Assembly" and modelled it on a power station chimney that he saw in Hyderabad.

The main reason that I'm here though, is to watch some cricket. India has been caught by the Twenty-20 bug and most of the world's best are here to pocket Indians' hard-earned rupees. So I'm going to do my bit for poor cricketers and head for the Kings Select XI Punjab versus Mumbai Indians tonight. Very exciting. Maybe the most exciting thing to happen in my twelve months.

I was beginning to wonder what I was doing in India. But now I know - I'm here to watch the Little Wizard, Sachin Tendulkar. If he can just get himself fit...