India, March 3 -- It is time to break the heritage noose before it completely strangles the life out of "The City Beautiful." Let us stop worshipping the brick and mortar and start caring about the flesh and blood. The preservationist dogma is suffocating Chandigarh's future. Chandigarh was never meant to be a heritage museum, slowly melting into the Harappan mould in a fast moving world. When Le Corbusier worked upon the dusty plains of Punjab in the 1950s, he didn't set out to build a static monument to the mid-20th century, a would-be relic frozen in time.

Yet, today, a small but elitist microscopic vocal minority of self-proclaimed "heritage enthusiasts", living in huge bungalows around the Sukhna Lake, wish to romanticise their feel...