Eat chocolate

Every time I pass this restaurant off Cenotaph Road, I am reminded of Marie Antoinette's saying something about bread and cake. Chocolate would probably have been a more vulgar way of distancing from the proletariat. 

It is not for nothing that this anecdote from French history comes to mind on seeing Bread & Chocolate. It was originally set up in Pondicherry before opening its first branch in Chennai in 2020, just after the first (and maybe the second) wave of the pandemic had died down.

Must go here; if it is half as good as its Pondicherry parent, it will be wonderful! 

 

Building shell

Tell me, does the building look like it has been the subject of some kind of attack? A few weeks ago, when the wall in front had also been smashed down, it was even more evocative of a war zone than it now is. You can probably notice that the interiors are empty, there is just the shell of a building now. 

Not to worry. This is most likely some long-due renovations being carried out on this building. There is some new construction coming up as well, a little further along, and closer to the wall. Shouldn't there be some kind of a set-back from the wall? Well, that might apply in Chennai, but you see, this is not Chennai, at least not the other side of the wall. 

Any guesses as to what this building is? No, I'm not telling, not here! 

Photo of the year

For a couple of generations to come, 2015 in Chennai will be remembered as the year of the floods. In November 2015, rainfall in Chennai was a shade under 105 cm (42 inches); it narrowly failed to beat the record of 109 cm set in November 1918. But it was enough to set up a wet December; the first two days of the month brought 34.5 cm of rain. To find a similar deluge, you'd have to go back to 1901. On those two days, the city was brought to its knees, officially being declared a disaster zone on the evening of December 2. 

This picture is from 3rd December, after the flood waters had been receding from this street through the day. A broken crate stuck in the middle of the road warns people of an open manhole at that spot. This was one of the less-affected areas of the city. In many of Chennai's suburbs, the waters remain, not finding a way to go out.

So, the city looks forward to 2016 being a 'normal' year. Sunshine for 350 days, and sixteen days of rain being spread out from October to December, helping us forget the wet end to 2015. So, a very happy New Year to everyone - may 2016 give of its best to all of us, getting us closer to our dreams!

Takeaway

Wonder what has happened to that Audi. It seems to be in good shape, so I guess it has not been lifted out from an accident site. Because it has an out-of-state registration, is it being transported to Chennai because its owner is shifting base to this city?

Or is it being re-possessed because the owner did not pony up the instalments in time?

Auto rank

Well, nice to know that transport is available at the gates. Outside the Apollo Clinic on Cenotaph Road, taken from a couple of floors above...

View of the road

Looking northwards from a window of the Apollo Hospital, you get a feeling that things are all oh-so-peaceful. The traffic at 5 o'clock, just before the evening rush hour, seems to be quite reasonable. 

But that is only because the traffic light is holding up the vehicles coming towards us. In a few minutes, this will become jam-packed, with the Cenotaph Road junction siphoning off a set of people and at the same time pouring in an equal volume into Mount Road!

Wait in line

They say that in Kerala, the only orderly lines you can see are the queues in front of the 'beverages' outlets. Looking for a Chennai equivalent, the closest I can think of is the queue of visa applicants outside the US consulate. In the past couple of years, the consulate has split the processing; things like fingerprinting and some basic document verification happens at a satellite centre on Cenotaph Road. 

And yes, the queue there is as orderly as those at beverage outlets!

Guardians

The only question is, what are they guarding? They loom large just inside the door of Mainland China's restaurant off Cenotaph Road. The culinary secrets of Cathay are safe with them!

On the street

It is indeed a secretive place. I haven't seen anyone go in or come out of this "Russian House" on Cenotaph Road. It is quite a large compound, but the Russian consulate is not located here - that's on Santhome High Road. 

Most likely, this is the Consul's residence. But he must certainly go in and out a couple of times a day at least, shouldn't he? Or is there a more cloak and dagger explanation? Anyone??

The theme day for December 1 is "My Street".... and this one is close enough. To see streets from different parts of the world, click here: City Daily Photo Blogs' Theme Day

Forgotten pedestal

Few people know why Cenotaph Road is called so; fewer still would have had the patience to figure out where the components of the cenotaph are located today. 

The original cupola, housing the statue of the 1st Marquess Cornwallis, remains untraceable. It's last shelter is now outside, on the grounds of the Fort St George, while the statue itself frowns imperiously on the visitors entering the Fort Museum. The base of the statue has this description of why it was erected. Maybe it is still not in tune with the wishes of Chennai's citizens, but Cenotaph Road has been spared the spate of renaming that the city's roads have been subjected to... and has remained the same for over 211 years, now!

Room under the stairs

It was in 1793 that the "citizens of Madras", as represented by the Council in Madras, sent a letter to the President of the Royal Academy in London, expressing a desire to memorialize the military achievements of General Charles, the 1st Marquess Cornwallis. During his tenure as the Governor General of India between 1786 and 1793, Lord Cornwallis defeated Tipu Sultan in the 3rd Anglo-Mysore War. That was the crowning glory of his military career; a career that might have been consigned to the ashes when he surrendered to George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau after the siege of Yorktown in 1781. Luckily for him, King George III was favourably disposed to him and instead of being left in the cold, he was sent to India as the Governor General, where he redeemed himself in no small way.

And so the request from the Council at Madras, that the Royal Academy send them a statue executed under the "inspection of the Academy". The Academy assigned the task to Thomas Banks; the final sculpture, 14.5 feet tall, showing Cornwallis in all his lordly mien, standing upon a pedestal reached Madras sometime in 1800. One account has it that the statue was erected in Fort St George, while another says its first home was under a cupola at the junction of Mount Road and (today's) Cenotaph Road. That's a fine point, but the statue did spend time at that junction, which was when Cenotaph Road got its name.

The pedestal shows Tipu Sultan giving up his two sons as hostages, to be held until Tipu was able to pay the multi-million pound indemnity to win them back. Many thought this particular depiction was in poor taste (compounded by poor execution - the work on the base of the statue suffers greatly in comparison with the detailing of his Lordship) and that was probably one reason why the statue was moved to the Fort in 1906, overlooking the Parade Ground. In 1925, it was moved to the gates of Bentinck's Building, the then collectorate of Madras. That location was too close to the sea and the salt air did not agree with his Lordship. In 1928, he was moved to the Connemara Library and then, in 1950, he was moved to the newly purposed Fort Museum - and here, he only has room under the stairs!

Waiting to fly

It was said this flyover would be ready in a year's time. It has now been fifteen months since work began on this, the latest Chennai 'high-rise' and it looks good enough to drive on. Problem is, the approach and side roads at both ends of the Cenotaph Road - Turnbulls Road flyover are in a state of complete mess, so it doesn't look like the flyover is going to be put to use just yet.

That's good news for a few of the kids from around the place. They have been using the nice, flat surface of the road as a cricket pitch over the past couple of weekends - at least there's some kind of 'driving' going on there!

Valet parking

Went out for lunch last month to a new restaurant just across the road from where we stay. We walked, but my son insisted that he would cycle down. And yes, he did get his vehicle valet-parked!

Location. And more of it.

Karumuttu Centre is one of those buildings that start off with aspirations of being monuments to the person they are named after. To develop on that start, it painted itself in a way that stood out from the 'half-white' and cream coloured neighbours to its north; to the south, it did not have any worthwhile building to compare itself with for a stretch of around half-a-kilometre and maybe more. The pencil-shaving kind of staircase (is that a fire-escape?) was certainly an oddity, because its neighbours do not have that kind of an external access.

It did attract some of the more swank names, especially a host of foreign airlines, who made it their flagship office in Chennai. But the building failed to capitalize on that good start; the majority of the space there is taken up by offices that are so cheered by the thought of being on Mount Road that nothing else matters to them. It is not as if the construction is bad or the rents exhorbitant; Karumuttu Centre is a perfect example for how the "three most important things in real estate are Location, Location and Location". If only this building had been a couple of spaces to the north, it would have had a long waiting list of people wanting to be housed there. As it is, being just to the left of the Cenotaph Road signal, it is a considerable pain for anyone coming in from Alwarpet or Adyar to get in - a long drive south to make a U-turn is called for. With the kind of traffic around, that is not an exciting prospect for anyone!

Rising up

A little over six months after the traffic police shut down one side of Cenotaph Road, construction of the flyover was inaugurated. During that time, the Metrowater folks dug up the road to re-lay their water and sewage pipes, the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board has shifted some of the power cables and Chennai Telephones has restrung their phone lines. In the meantime, a couple of landowners went to court challenging a notification acquiring their land. That last bit can be a complete dampener - some projects had been delayed for years together while the courts sorted out why who did what to whom. In this case the challenge seems to be only against the procedures adopted, so chances of work being affected are not very high.

For the moment, Cenotaph Road and the Chamiers Road junction look like badlands. The pilings on the Cenotaph Road side have been completed and ones on Turnbulls Road will begin soon. The pile driver moved across last week - it should have started its work out there a couple of days ago. Work seems to be moving ahead quite rapidly - this one might actually beat the target date for its completion, courts willing!

There was one, once

Continuing a bit on the theme of street names, I have to strike closer home. Cenotaph Road, near my apartment, is a short road connecting Mount Road to Kotturpuram. It is very likely that not too many people know what 'cenotaph' means - it is one of those exact words that is used very rarely. I don't think I've heard of it anywhere but with reference to the road in Chennai and in P.B.Shelley's poem 'The Cloud'. Unlike Shelley's Cloud, Lord Cornwallis must be silently fuming at what has become of his Cenotaph in Madras.

When it was first set up, the Cenotaph marked a significant limit of Mount Road, if not its far end altogether. The Cenotaph was a cupola housing a 14-foot high statue of Lord Cornwallis and it was set in the centre of an oval garden. This marked the outer limit of an evening's ride or drive out from Fort St George. For the residents of the Fort, it was a good way to pretend they were in London and the Cenotaph Park was Hyde Park, where they could spend the evening and get back to the Fort before it became really dark. In the 1800s, Cenotaph Road was merely one of the spurs from this park, going down to the Adayar river. Over a couple of centuries, Cenotaph Road became well known, but the Cenotaph itself has been scattered around. The statue of Cornwallis is now in the Fort Museum and it's last cupola, in the photograph, is at the entrance to Fort St George.

Of the cupola that was the centrepiece of the Cenotaph Park, there is no trace. Separated from its shelter, Cornwallis' statue is hidden away inside the Museum. And Cenotaph Road carries on, with just a faint memory of an empty tomb that once stood there!

For your information

Yesterday, the traffic routing through Chamiers Road, Cenotaph Road and Mount Road was shuffled around a bit. This, they say, is the first step to building a flyover / grade separator (??!)at the entrance to Turnbulls Road. The flyover itself something that has been spoken about for a long time; initially planned on Chamiers Road, it has now been turned around 90-degrees and will take off from Cenotaph Road to land on Turnbulls Road.

So, since last morning, both the 'C' Roads have been swarming with policemen. Basically, traffic is now one-way on both of them; The good thing - for me - is the opening of a right turn from Chamiers Road on to Cenotaph Road; while the latter is one-way towards Mount Road, the former runs in the other direction. Normally when a change like this is made, all of it is explained to each motorist, but there was a difference yesterday. Most of the policemen had these pink leaflets with them - despite the numerous mis-spellings, this is a good attempt by the Chennai City Traffic Police to document the changes it implements. I believe it is the first time that something like this is being done.

The leaflet came in handy to convince a policeman that while I could not make a right turn from my street on to Cenotaph Road, there's nothing stopping me turning left into my street!

The fine print

It is said that Indians speak rapidly. Even so, the consumer boom of the past few years had brought into being a new class of quick speakers - those who speak the fine print. To protect market participants in recently decontrolled insurance markets, the regulators for insurance and for mutual funds imposed quite a bit of mandatory declarations on any advertisement material - "Insurance is the subject matter of solicitation", "Mutual funds are subject to market risks", "Please read offer document carefully before investing" being the most commonly used phrases.

It is funny enough to hear these words running into each other so as to take up less than 1.5 seconds of a 10 second radio ad spot. But the virus spread to other places, too; the neighbourhood grocer started putting in signs saying "Potatoes free (conditions apply)" and spotting the fine print, whether in the written or the spoken form, has become a challenge.

This sign on the wall of the LR Swami building at the intersection of Cenotaph Road and Mount Road seems to be predicting a day when those 3 little whispered words would be followed by four others, said in a much softer tone - and if you are used to picking up what those "Mutual funds blah, blah, blah" announcements mean, you can surely catch on to what 'Terms and Conditions Apply'!

Menagerie City - 4

The TPL Building, at the corner of Cenotaph Road and Chittaranjan Road, has a frontage that seems to have been designed for beehives. Even though the building management cleans up the overhang and brings down the hives every once in a while, their number has only gone up. There were 3 when we began keeping track of their growth a couple of years ago and there are now 6; I'm sure we can expect more.

Their resilience is comforting for two reasons: one, that the building management is not completely averse to the hives being there (somebody must be making pocket money from having the honey collected once in a while?) and two, that within a reasonably short distance from the TPL building, there are enough flowers to sustain the growth of six colonies. The second is one more data point to show that Chennai is still not all concrete, there is some jungle, too!

A Bend in the Adayar

It is very difficult to believe that just north of this bend in the Adayar is one of the most crowded intersections of Chennai: the Chamiers Road-Cenotaph Road junction, which is where quite a lot of the traffic from the IT Corridor pours out as it flows towards other parts of North and West Chennai. But noon traffic was light enough to stop and take this picture.


A carriageway is being planned along the sides of the Adayar - sure hope that it will not affect the river itself, or reduce the greenery along its sides.