Michael Roberts
The British Empire was carved out over the centuries by intrepid adventurers aided by the weaponry developed in the British Isles and anability to organize their power to maximum effect. When pursuing my interest in cricket and taking in a Sri Lankan cricket match in my beloved home town of Galle on …., I met two intrepid Brits of the modern era, Nick White and Danny Byrne (see photo at Galle taken by me).
Yes ………….. two dinky-die Brits; both cricket nuts. But Danny outdoes Nick. He has invested a good part of his time in recent years travelling on local transport (and a few readers know full well what this means) and watching cricket in all manner of sites in India and Sri Lanka. His latest remarkable move has been to the match played at Dharamsala where a new venue was christened at Chandigarh in Mohali District in the Punjab (see ……………………….. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja_Yadavindra_Singh_International_Cricket_Stadium).
As it happens, Dharamsala is not quite British imperial. It is a recent offspring of the split between India and Pakistam. Note this summary: “Chandigarh did not exist during the British Raj; it was built as a direct consequence of the British Empire’s end. Following the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, the historic undivided Punjab province was split, and Lahore—the former provincial capital—was ceded to Pakistan. Independent India’s East Punjab state was left without an administrative center. [1, 2] The city was commissioned to fulfill this crucial need. While the celebrated modernist master plan was ultimately crafted in the 1950s by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, the core architectural and planning team notably included British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Drew and Fry were deeply influential in laying out Chandigarh’s residential sectors, drawing on colonial concepts of small-community village living while bringing radical modernist urban planning to the formerly agrarian foothills of the Shivalik range. [1, 2, 3, 4]
