Rebecca Solnit in her book "Wanderlust: A History of Walking" suggests that a city's health can be measured by its 'walkability', that walking through a city is like sending a canary down a mineshaft. On the surface, Kolkata could be considered virtually 'un-walkable' and Kolkata's only surviving canaries are legions of yellow Ambassador cabs. But while you won't find any sanitised urban renewal in the centre of this city, you will find a striking sense of neighbourhood and a palpable sense of history.

My partner and I did the 'Culture Kaleidoscope' tour with Manjit in the afternoon, as we couldn't make it the following morning (when things are no doubt quieter and more ethereal in the streets and back-alleys). Even with the added degree of difficulty, however, we entered into the slipstream of the streets with Manjit as our local flaneur, as sovereign to Kolkata as Baudelaire was to 19th Century Paris!

Manjit's tours provide access to abandoned, lost and off-limits buildings (such as clambering around in an abandoned Synagogue and uncovering a fire temple built-in 1838) as well as many old buildings (such as an 18th-century Armenian church and an Anglo-Indian bakery) still in use today. Manjit is particularly adept at finding the tiny local details of the past in the present and this is cultural tourism at its most experiential and immersive, while also offering a frame (or lens) for understanding something of the city's history and diversity.

Organised tours, even for adults, still so often trigger memories of interminable school excursions, but a tour with Manjit awoke my inner adolescent in a much more creative, adventurous and exploratory sense. Manjit brings a DIY ethos and energy to tourism that only makes you wish you could then take him for a walk around your own city in return.

Keri Glastonbury, Professor at University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia