Roadside fire

Like many of the others on the Old Mahabalipuram Road (now called Rajiv Gandhi Salai), this installation too, does not have any description. This, however, is one of the easier ones to figure out; most of the descriptions - none official, though - call it 'The Flame'.

At the time of its installation, about 3 or 4 years ago, the roadside was rather barren; the white, orange and yellow of 'The Flame' kind of blended with the red-brown dirt of the roadside. But now, with the verge having become quite green, the colours of 'The Flame' sparkle against the green; with a couple of plants having grown tall enough to partially screen it, 'The Flame' plays peek-a-boo with its colours, allowing you to fully see them only from an angle on the road (of course, you can choose to park a bit of a way away and walk down to the patch around it).

Just goes to show that even a little roadside fire can grow on you!

Village women

That's what this statue (installation?) reminded me of the first time I saw it. One of the idiosyncrasies of the pieces of art along the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) is that they seem to have absolutely no relation to each other. It is likely that one needs to walk down the road and see them close up before their secret bonds are revealed, but when you get on to the smoothest road in the city, you are always trying to see how quickly you can get through it to the next bottleneck!

Another curious thing about art on OMR is that many of them seem to be untitled (again, likely that one needs to get really close to them to read the small print) and also uncredited. That's good, because you can use your imagination to even label them differently at different times, if you so choose.

But somehow, this work seemed to be the most intriguing to me. Once 'village women' crept into my mind, I haven't been able to shake it off; I've been trying to conjure up connections between village women and the IT Corridor since. The closest I can get is to think that with many villages along the OMR having been displaced and the people re-settled, this work at the entrance of the OMR is tribute to the spirit of those home-makers.

Any other ideas?

Playful Park?

A couple of years ago, one of my friends from Delhi misunderstood where I was going to on a workday morning. He thought I was going down to a beach for the day, while I was trying to let him know I was going to be working out of the most high-tech office space in the city. For a while there was confusion, while we were trying to understand what each other was saying.

To me, that bit of conversation highlighted how much part of us the Tidel Park has become. No one in Chennai will think of anything other than IT or ITES if you say 'Tidel' to them. But I must admit, it does sound like a theme park by the Bay of Bengal, fed by the tides!

The building itself looks grand and it is quite a good start to the IT Corridor - and to think that, less than 10 years ago, it was the beginning and the end of the Corridor!

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.

Crossing the corridor

Somehow, making an extra effort to ensure safety while crossing roads is something that very few Chennaiites like to do. In the days when the IT corridor was still Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR), people getting to the other side were a speed-breaker; but IT corridors should not stop for anything and road-crossers have now been given overhead walkways that thankfully do not look out of place on the road.

All these walkways are near the MRTS stations. Obviously. But, considering the platforms at these stations are elevated, wouldn't it have made more sense to also enter the walkway directly from the platform? Was that thought of at all? Here's a view of the Indira Nagar station, with the walkway in front of it. With most of the station buildings themselves not having been completed, it would have been far better to have made that platform-entry provision now, rather than break down walls a few years later.