Kolkata

The capital of West Bengal sprawls shapelessly along the eastern bank of the Hooghly River. Once the glorious capital of British India, its urban horror story of squalor and starvation only began with Partition and a resulting massive influx of refugees. This plucky city, however, is keen to promote itself as the 'City of Joy' and, given half a chance, it reveals itself to be one of the country's most fascinating and congenial cities, the intellectual capital of the nation, and a thriving political and arts arena.

The area is large enough to engulf the massive Fort William, still in use today, although visitors are only allowed inside with special permission (rarely granted). At the southern end of the Maidan stands the huge white-marble Victoria Memorial, fronted by a statue of a frumpy Queen Victoria, which holds an extensive collection of British-Indian historical objects.

Kolkata's administrative centre is BBD Bagh (Dalhousie Square). The square holds both the whimsical and the brutal: on one side is the Writers' Building where 'writers' (a quaint euphimism for clerks) beaver away in the Kafkaesque labyrinth of corridors and vast chambers while quintuplicate forms and carbon copies pile up along the walls; on the other side is the GPO which was built on the site of the legendary 'black hole of Kolkata'. It was here that, on an uncomfortably humid night in 1756, over 140 British inhabitants were forced into an underground cellar causing many to die overnight of suffocation.