This waking-dream is the creation of an entirely untrained artist by the name of Nek Chand. Displaced by the India-Pakistan partition in late 40s, Chand moved to Chandigah--Punjab's newly-built capital after the former one (Lahore) ended up on the Pakistani side of the line. Appalled by the amount of waste generated in building the Chandigah, Chand developed a secret identity to help solve the problem and became an engineer by day, stealth sculptor by night. Chand spent years dragging waste materials off to a secret site on the outskirts of the city where he would give them new aesthetic life.
The illegally-built garden went undiscovered for 17 years until city planners stumbled upon the (by now 12-acre) site in 1975. It technically should have been torn down, but it's value must have been obvious, as instead Chand was reassigned to work full time on the garden and given a staff of 50 to help.
The whole crazy experience begins when you have to lean down to pay the 10 rupee (AU$0.25) entry fee at the knee-high ticket window. You then walk through the gates and are led along a twisted path of bridges and tunnels, past waterfalls, ponds, and through thousand-strong armies of 100%-recycled sculptures.
After wandering the maze for about an hour, the garden opens up into a huge park. Down one side is long open-air auditorium which hosts the occasional symphony and recital, and snaking through the middle winds a huge lawsuit-inducing swing set - one thing I love about India is the no-safety-rails approach to life. Unlike the western world, where everything is someone else's fault, here you're entirely responsible for yourself. This is partly driven by public attitude, and partly by the fact that civil cases often face a 2 decade (and sometimes as long as 5) wait before they make it to trial. So with an average lifespan of 67.5 years, there's not much point in filing a suit when you're unlikely to be around to hear the verdict.
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