Landmark on the left

It started life as a small shop south of the 'periya gate' - the gated railway crossing between Kodambakkam and Nungambakkam - in 1952. Buildings did not go beyond the ground floor then and S. Chandrasekaran thought a small shop, with a sign over the entrance would suffice for the business he wanted to run. But he must also have been a thoughtful man, and probably one who was a little more learned than his contemporaries. 

He did not go with the norm of naming his store "Sekar Dresses" or "Sekar Clothing". In choosing the word 'Emporium' to go with his name, he was signalling his ambition to expand. Within a couple of decades, it did expand. More storeys were added to the building and it filled out a little more. For all the variety that Ranganathan Street, or Pondy Bazaar, across the Kodambakkam Bridge (the railroad was now traversed by a bridge, rather than a gate) had to offer, Sekar Emporium was the place to shop for residents of Kodambakkam and further south. 

It has grown to be a true emporium, offering much more than just textiles or dress materials. Cloth remains the mainstay, but the firm has branched off into groceries and consumer durables as well. All of those are around this building where it all started. The Sekar brand has not expanded geographically; with the third generation of the family now managing the business, they well might now. However, having stayed at this spot for over 70-years, it has outlived even the Liberty Cinema as the landmark for directions to Kodambakkam and beyond!

 

Morning light

This road in Kodambakkam is usually a low-traffic zone. But with changes to traffic flow on Arcot Road due to the Chennai Metro's construction, the volume of traffic close to this road has increased considerably. 

Sometimes, a driver who does not entirely believe in the Metro's signs tries his luck in finding a shorter route. One through Dr. Gopala Menon Road (this one, yes.) might have been possible a few years ago, but with a new flyover shutting off one end of the road, it is a bit of a challenge using this road to save time!

What man?

It is quite a nicely done piece, that Spiderman climbing down from the TeaBoy outlet's signage. But what is that he has in his hands? A glass of lassi and a pav-burger? 

Is he chai-man or lassi-man, this Spiderman?

Landmark

The building is called Cine City Hotels, firmly establishing the connection that this area has to the film world. If that is not enough, it has named its restaurant 'Kollywood Kitchen'. Kollywood, of course, is the moniker for the Tamizh movie industry, because it is centered around Kodambakkam. This hotel is right there in the middle of Kodambakkam; it has come up in the place where there used to be a landmark for movie makers, mostly from Kerala - Uma Lodge.

At the edge of United India Colony, Uma Lodge was close enough to the studios at Vadapazhani, without being so close as to the studios' presence overwhelming it. It was therefore a favourite spot for several young men - almost never women - aspiring to make their mark in the movie world. And many did make it big, even though there are likely several who continue to be on the fringes. It is not often that those who made it big talk about their time in Uma Lodge - but if I remember right, the movie Udhayananu Tharam makes a passing reference to it.

The list of Malayalam film makers who spent time at Uma Lodge, if it can be reliably compiled, will be long and distinguished. From what I have heard, it will include Srinivasan, Raveendran, Cochin Haneefa, Adam Ayub (and maybe Priyadarshan and Mohanlal as well?) and several other technicians. In the early 1970s, one of the residents of Uma Lodge - who had bagged a role in Thikkurissi Sukumaran Nair's 'Urvashi Bharathi' - would regale the others with his anecdotes from the sets; he was one of the earliest 'graduates' from Uma Lodge, who moved to a different orbit, going on to become not only a well-known actor, but, in the elections of 2014, a member of the country's Parliament - Vareed Thekkethala Innocent!

This month's theme is "Landmark": and Uma Lodge was certainly a landmark in its heyday. For landmarks from other cities around the world, head over to the CDP Theme Day Page!

The good doctor

It was sometime in the late 1910s that Gopala Menon, of the Mokkil Maruthur tharavad in Vadavanur landed up in the city of Madras. The eldest of 6 siblings, he had to move to Madras to study medicine - and stayed on in the city to set up practice. Within a short time he was very popular in Kodambakkam, where he was practicing from. His popularity came not just from his medical abilities - which were considerable - but from his seemingly boundless compassion as well. He discriminated patients only on the basis of their health condition and he drew his clientele from all classes. It helped that he was fluent in several languages: Malayalam, Tamizh, Telugu, Hindi, Sanskrit, English, and, it is reliably said, the dialect of Narikoravas, the nomadic tribes of the region. He could relate to his patients and talk to them in their language.

And they flocked to him from all over the Presidency. It was common for his clinic to have indigent outpatients from from as far away as Pazhaverkadu and Nellore; patients in similar straits from Malabar were a constant factor. The doctor would treat them, very often gratis, and then give them free board and lodging for a couple of days, besides giving them "theevandikooli" (steam train fare) to get back to their villages. Such largesse was partly subsidised by Dr. Gopala Menon's well-to-do patients, who included the zamindar of Vizhuthamangalam (more about that connection in a later post) and others. The generosity of such patients also enabled the doctor to acquire lands in the Mambalam / Kodambakkam area, on which he settled some of his patients, helping them find gainful occupations. That was very much in keeping with his belief, printed on his letterhead, "लोका: समस्ता सुखिनो भवन्तु" ("lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu" - may everyone everywhere be happy). 

His generosity extended to his siblings and their families. He brought all his sisters to Madras and had them married off; one of his brothers died young, but the other was brought to Madras and settled down. Meanwhile, his nephews were coming of age and they needed residences of their own. As many of them as possible were accommodated in a 'compound' in Kodambakkam, which was given the name of the ancestral tharavad - Mokkil Maruthur. Having all these members of his extended family around made the doctor forget that he had to get married and have children of his own; he died, a bachelor, on December 26, 1976. The family had little say in the post-mortem ceremonies; dignitaries dictated and the residents of Raja Pillai Thottam, the neighbouring slum, took over the funeral, for he was their doctorayya, the one whose kairasi ("goodness of hands") set right their malaises without ever failing. It was they who made sure the road next to Dr. Gopala Menon's house was renamed in his memory. In the manner of most street signs of Chennai, this one also has got the spelling of his name wrong - that alone testifies to the greatness of the doctor!

Multiscreen opening

When it opened, thirty-seven years ago, it was one of the first public cinema theatres on Arcot Road. AVM's Rajeshwari was more of a preview theatre in those days, and Kamala Theatre filled the gap between Liberty Theatre and the studios at Vadapalani. With a capacity of almost a thousand seats, it was one of the better halls to watch a movie in; being at the edge of the movie industry's hub, there was also a chance of getting to see a star, too. The lobbies and the stairways used to be lined with all the industry bigwigs who had visited Kamala Theatre - actually, not just the bigwigs, there were photos of just about anyone. None of them had any signs, so it was a fun game to try and identify all the lesser lights of the industry, each time we went to see a movie there.

Filling a thousand seats, show after show is a huge challenge these days, and the hall is doing what it can to meet the challenge now. Even then, they are going with just one additional screen - with their plans of adding about 600 seats, the challenge of filling seats does not seem to have got any easier. Let us hope they continue to grace their walls with bits and pieces of Tamizh cinema history; that might yet prod me to go watch one (or two) more movies there!

Mixed colours?

I'll give you one guess as to what kind of a shop this could be.

Noticed this shop a few days ago, but when I passed by it today, the fallen buntings of some political party showed up a nice contrast of colour with the blue and pink...

Famous theatre

It has been around for quite a long while, now. I am sure it pre-dates many of the other cinema halls in the area broadly known as Kodambakkam - an area that includes within its definition almost all the famous movie studios of yesteryear, all those bits and pieces of the industry that grew to be called Kollywood. The halls that came after it are gone or, at best, are in the same state of poor repair that Liberty Theatre is in today.

But in its time it was the lord of the west side of Kodambakkam bridge. It was the landmark; businesses nearby have used its name to further their interests, be it Liberty Park (the hotel) or Liberty Xerox, a photocopy shop tucked away in some recess near the theatre. I know of at least two movies, Jaganmohini and Oru Thalai Raagam that played here for over 25 weeks, in those days when 25 weeks meant 3 (sometimes 4) shows of the same movie, every day, for 25 weeks. Such glory days are well behind it, now. It visibly looks like it can't make the effort to screen a new movie and ekes out an existence by re-running all those hits of decades ago.

I read somewhere once, long ago, that Liberty is the only cinema hall (of good standing) in Asia that projects pictures on to a white wall, rather than onto a screen - don't know how true that was, but it looks like even that wall may be completely sullied, now!

Which Queen was that?

Over the past six years or so, the number of people working in call centres in Chennai has surely gone beyond the six figure mark. Call centre jobs were slow to come to Chennai, mainly because of two reasons: one, with Tamil Nadu contributing to just under 20% of the country's engineering graduates every year, it was a hot destination for software recruiters - and even science and arts graduates were aspiring for software jobs rather than settle for less. The second reason was some kind of a myth that English in Chennai (or south India in general) is much more 'accented' than its cousin in the Gurgaon belt.

The dotcom bust of 2001 meant that engineers from the class of 2002 found their dream software jobs drying up and turned to a couple of companies which were establishing their technical support call centres in Chennai. Once that barrier was broken, it did not take long to bust the my-accent-better-than-your-accent myth. Part of that was thanks to several 'training institutes' such as this one. All kinds of accents could be heard coming from these buildings as the accent gap between the supply and demand was narrowed. Most of the demand was from North America, so that was the first offering from almost all such institutes. And then, to differentiate, newer accents were developed, and courses went beyond verbal calisthenics to grammar and suchlike.

At least the sign reminded me that I cannot take it for granted that any Queen would speak English!