Rear view

As you enter Anna Nagar from the Koyambedu side of an evening, you cannot miss the multi-coloured tower of the VR Mall. Make that in plural, even though the traffic does not allow your eyes to wander around to spot the other towers. 

Meant to evoke the temple gopurams that are unique to Tamil Nadu, the multi-coloured towers of the Mall define its entrances. The temple theme is carried on into the mall itself, with its huge temple doors, a massive bell that hangs just inside one of the entrances and similar iconography, the mall deserves a visit to just figure out what it is about. Shopping can wait.

This view is not crowded at all, because it is from inside a gated community adjoining the VR Mall. Walking down to our vehicle, I was struck by the contrast of the sterile white-light inside the complex with the warm and colourful glow from its neighbour!

Metro to mofussil

That's a picture of the entrance to the CMBT, taken when passing by on an overhead train track. The "M" in the abbreviation is "Mofussil". A word that I haven't heard used in English very often, but one that gained currency under the British East India Company. A word that I have encountered so often in Madras and Chennai that it could have been Tamizh - and yet, one that unsurprisingly has its origins in Urdu. 

Mofussil originally stood for those areas beyond the administrative ken of the Company, outside the realms of their headquarters in Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Somewhere along the way, it gathered connotations of a hayseed provinciality, not compatible with the sophistication of the city. And yet, here is this facility, in the middle of the city, calling itself the "Mofussil" Bus Terminus. 

No, it is not as if the city expanded to swallow up a bus terminus that was once outside its boundaries. The simpler explanation is that this is the destination for anyone coming into the city by bus from its mofussil areas. It doesn't mater that the origin of bus could be another metro city - Benagaluru, for example - but that doesn't matter; anything outside the city is mofussil. And so here we are, looking down to the transport to the wide world outside, from a very in-city mode of transport - the metro!

Late bloomers

Well, if you get to this place at around 8 am, this is what you can expect - a general feeling of boredom, with the shopkeepers not too keen to talk to you. That's because most of their work has been done long before you arrived.

The Kamaraj Flower Market is one of the three specialized wholesale markets at Koyambedu, at the city's western border. The pookadai and the Kotwal Chavadi at George Town were relocated to the bigger, better market complex here sometime in 1996, implementing a recommendation from Madras' first master plan of 1975. Of the four blocks at Koyambedu, covering nearly 60 acres, two are for the vegetable market and the balance is shared equally between the fruit and the flower markets. Assuming an even split of visitors, the flower market gets to hose about 25,000 people, most of them traders looking to strike long-term deals on flower offtakes. The bulk of the traffic in this market gets in between 3 am and 6 am, so it is no wonder that these lads are ignoring you!

Summer fruit

Yes, it did rain a bit a few days ago, but the heat is very much back in business. The mangoes are not early this year (the ones that have come so far are best left untasted) and the city dweller seems to have given up his preference for jack-fruit.

The watermelon continues to be a favourite, both as a solid and a liquid - here are a few of the fruits stacked up at the Koyambedu market!

Leaving town

One of the good things about the Chennai Moffusil Bus Terminus (CMBT) at Koyambedu is that its buildings cover less than 1% of the area it is located in. That gives it, at least in theory, a lot of scope for expansion. Built in 2002 and expected to cater to the rise in traffic demand until 2015, this is supposedly the largest bus terminus in Asia. Though Shanghai's Zhixin terminus also stakes a claim to that distinction, their numbers don't support the claim: the CMBT's 2000 arrivals/departures daily is much higher than Zhixin's 600 - 1200 range and the number of passengers is also higher by a similar factor.

Now, with plans to build a 3000-slot parking lot for 2-wheelers, it is likely that all the traffic density forecasts will be hit for a six - and then we'll have to look for a new bus station soon!