We used to call it the 'Electricity Road', or the 'TNEB Road', because there was a Tamil Nadu Electricity Board office somewhere along this stretch of road. It was probably a private road in those days, with the barriers on the Commander-in-Chief Road (now Ethiraj Salai) / Binny Road side being almost always closed. With the barriers shut, even with their high clearance, it was rather daunting prospect to ride a bike down this road. If they were open, it was always a good excuse.
Over time, we found the barriers were not closed as often as they once were. This road became a familiar path to avoid the traffic along Anna Salai, zipping over from Binny's Road to Dam's Road, bypassing the traffic and the lights. The stench of the Cooum was a relatively small price to pay, for this road runs along the eastern bank of the river where it runs parallel to Mount Road, coming from behind Spencer Plaza.
These days, the barriers never seem to be shut. The road still does not seem to be a thoroughfare - maybe there is still a feeling of impropriety in using it. And the road itself continues to be anonymous. Without any proper name, it shows up as 'Link Road' on most of the maps!
Well, 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' it ain't, for sure. It is nice to see the shed at this park painted with pictures of wildlife. For a change, the painting is pretty good: in fact much, much better than what one has been led to expect from artists working on a government commission. Over the past few years, Chennai's parks have become less known as hangouts for riff-raff and are being more used by average citizens on a regular basis. And I think it is really a good idea to have such pictures of wildlife near the parks, because the message is going out to an audience that is reasonably receptive. And with parks becoming more popular, that audience will only grow.That's a good thing for wildlife in general, of humans becoming more sensitive to their needs. With so much of threat to their natural habitats, it is a conservation challenge; at least the animals shown here are not so endangered that conservationists have to resort to borderline methods to shore up the genetic pools. None of these animals is native to Chennai; but if you travel out the Vandalur zoo, you can see at least the lion, deer and kangaroo. I'm not sure about the rhino, but I'm certain that the giant panda hasn't been anywhere close to the city.But then, that's what I used to think about ostriches, until I saw close to a hundred of them near Chennai!
They say that about 25,000 people visit it every day. With that kind of 'footfall', a shopping mall can surely hope for fairly large daily sales turnover figures. One thing to keep in mind about shopping malls in many parts of India is that it would be difficult to correlate visitors to sales, except during the festival season. There are many reasons to visit a shopping mall, but shopping would possibly come at the bottom of the list. Escaping the heat would likely lead all the rest.All the more so in Chennai, where the heat continues to remain at fairly high levels even in September. So, even though the festive season is at hand, Spencer's Plaza is still seeing a lot of traffic that comes in just to stay cool and hang around, rather than to tick off any shopping list. The airconditioning at the mall must be overworked with all that crowd; this view from across Binny Road shows many individual airconditioning units working to supplement the mall's cooling tower!
