Somewhere between Tamil Nadu and the coast of Brittany, a French colonial town got left behind on the Coromandel Coast - and it never quite let go of either identity.
Pondicherry, or Puducherry if you're going by the road signs, is the one place in this catalog that genuinely doesn't look like the rest of India. Walk into White Town at seven in the morning and the streets are still wet from washing, the church bells are going, and every wall is some shade of French mustard-yellow or bougainvillea-pink. Walk two streets west, back into the Tamil quarter, and you're in a completely different town - same city, different century, different language on the shopfronts.
That's the whole pitch. You get the postcard - cobblestones, colonial villas, a promenade with a lighthouse - without leaving the country, without the visa, without the currency conversion. It's 72 hours that reads like a much longer trip.
