Mane space

Let us pretend that you were walking along the northern pavement of Sir Thyagaraya Road, Pondy Bazaar, on a busy afternoon. Naturally, you can't see the signs of the shops because they are right overhead. You look at the displays. And then you suddenly find this little shop door with a couple of stools put out in the front. No glass frontage, no mannequins on display. An old timer sits on one of the stools, contentedly looking on at life passing by. The wooden doorframe, set back from  the street, has the word "Kerala" written above it. Peeking inside, you are greeted with a row of empty chairs, display racks and shelves, for all the world looking like a reading room of sorts.

Welcome to the oldest salon in Chennai. It has been 76 years since Sankunni Nair hung up his shingle in Madras. Kerala Hairdressers is now managed by Sankunni's grandson Sandeep. It does not have the slick design or the chirpy conversation of a newgen coiffeur. You are considered a regular only if your first visit to this establishment was as a kid hanging on to his dad's hand - or if you bring your son over for his haircut. It is that kind of a place, where time stops to swap stories of the city, where the English and Tamizh newspapers provide the stage for the clientele to dissect the news for its relevance - and irrelevance - to the patrons.

Don't get fooled into thinking you can just walk in here anytime you feel the need to have your tresses trimmed. It just so happened to be a lazy weekday afternoon. If you have to come in on a weekend, or after office hours, you had better be prepared to wait and enrich the buzz of conversation with your observations. Else, it will be a long, lonely wait for you!

Crowdless

This is a sight that one might not get to see any more. The stretch of road between Panagal Park and Thanikachalam Road appears to have gained width over the past two or three weeks. And no, there has been no road-widening effort during this time. It is just that a major cause of congestion on this road has been shifted away. 

That's right. Walk along that stretch of Thyagaraya Road today and you will find that the walking is easy. Where even going single file on the pavement was a struggle, folks now walk three or four abreast. Nobody leaps into your face with - pretty much anything under the sun. Clothes, cutlery, lingerie, music, whatever takes your fancy could be found in the pavement shops of Pondy Bazaar. 

Those shops have now moved to a single building, a little closer to Anna Salai. Maybe the aisles in that building mimic the footpath the shops have been used to. However, the casual passers-by have no real reason to walk into that building; it will only become one more of the stores on the street. The charm of walking along and ending up buying a couple of those thingamajigs on impulse will no longer be felt along this shopping street, robbing it of most of its character!

A level above

It is not often that shoppers at Pondy Bazaar would look at anything above street level in this building. One of the oldest structures in this market, it has an eclectic array of stores on the ground floor, offering you anything from undergarments to 'gold covering ornaments', with a couple of 'fancy stores' thrown in.

It appears that the first floor houses a few offices, but for the most part, it seems to have living quarters - for those working in the shops below? And do the different colours indicate different owners or something? The square gable at the top, crowned with peacocks, shows Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth being greeted by elephants; if I'm right, this was a common feature of buildings from the 1920s and 1930s.

With much choice at the street level, it is the rare shopper who'd look up to a shop-less floor; but the next time you pass this way, take a peek. You may just get transported away to a time when shopping at Pondy Bazaar was less crowded and more relaxed - hard to imagine though it might be!

Bazaar man

Any visitor to Chennai desirous of shopping is well advised to visit Pondy Bazaar, a never-failing stretch that will meet all desires - within reason and budget, of course. And so the visitor ventures into that stretch, to be immersed in the sights, sounds - and smells - of the variety of products available. It is highly unlikely that the hawkers in Pondy Bazaar would be caught short of a customer's requirement. The origins of the name, however, are subject to constant debate. One version avers that Pondy Bazaar is so called because the first shops on Sir Theyagaraja Road were built by Devaraja Mudaliar from Pondicherry.

In 1992, the then Chief Minister of Tamilnadu unveiled a statue at the western end of Sir Theyagaraja Road, to kick off the centenary celebrations of the first Nadar to enter the Madras Legislature. The scion of a planter family from Kodaikkanal, WPA Soundarapandian was only 27 when he was nominated to the Madaras Legislative Council in 1920 by the Justice Party. He was by all accounts a success as a leader of the Nadars, but some schisms within the community saw him losing ground later, as the Nadars switched their alliance to the Congress, rather than stay with the Justice Party, after India's independence.

Along with the unveiling of the statue came the official re-naming of of the shopping area as Soundarapandianar Angadi; a name that has probably caused some curiosity, but hasn't lent itself to widespread usage. If you want stuff in Chennai, you will still have to visit Pondy Bazaar!

Who's the man?

It is one of the shopping hotspots of Chennai, but how it came by its name remains a mystery. The pavements along Sir Theyagaraya Road are chock-full of anything that you would ever need in life. Someone said of Harrods; "If you ask them for an elephant meat sandwich, they will ask you what kind of bread you would like". The traders of Pondy Bazaar would go further than that, I reckon and offer you the entire range of elephants, from African to the woolly mammoth. Of course, if you were showing off, you'd probably end up with the meat of some local mammal, which may not be the case at Harrods.

Who was the 'Pondy' of the bazaar? Was it a contraction of 'Pandian' the dynasty that ruled over Madurai of yore? Was it because the first traders came from Pondicherry - one version has it that a certain Devaraja Mudaliar from Pondicherry built the first shops on Sir Theyagaraya Road and called it Pondy Bazaar? Or, as a school mate averred, long years ago, is it a corruption of the lingerie that's one of the fastest selling items on the pavement?

Some years ago, the state government declared that the original name of this market - 'bazaar' in Hindi, 'angadi' in Tamil - is 'Soundarapandianar Angadi'. Conveniently, they did not mention what Soundarapandianar's claim to fame is, so I'm guessing he must be some party big shot's ancestor!

Low cost high rise

It went against the grain when Saravana Stores revealed their seven storied building a couple of years ago. The store had a reputation for being the lowest-cost-sellers of any product, from clothes to kitchenware and samosas to diamond jewellery. With that kind of a background, their new building was not expected to be anything more than a block of concrete maximising the number of people who could be contained within. Their older store, on Ranganathan Street was inspired by such a design philosophy and is always packed. Always.

And then they went ahead and pulled the curtains off this structure. Not much to look at in the daytime, the curved diagonals on its frontage are still a departure from the pack-them-in school of store building. At night, with the recessed lighting along the diagonals, it is a reasonably pretty sight when one drives down Pondy Bazaar to Usman Road. With this kind of a jazzed up departure from tradition, one expected the store to move out of the 'leading low cost seller' slot.

The building may be new, but the business model remains pretty much the same. Keep costs low, in whatever way possible, undercut on pricing, advertise on the Tamizh channels. And the customers respond in the best way possible: the crowds keep flowing in!

Gathering crowds

It's about 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Kids are just getting back from school. Mothers are rushing them through their tea and tiffin, changing them into street clothes, having them all ready by the time father comes home, slightly earlier than usual. Father will have a quick wash and then all of them will troop out, by car or two-wheeler or an auto or the bus, trying to beat a few hundred other families with similar motivations.

In a couple of hours, streets like this one (Prakasam Street, bordering Panagal Park) would have become parking lots for all the families trying to get to the shopping hotspots nearby. The Pondy Bazaar-Panagal Park-South Usman Road belt had already started filling up at 4.30. Over the next two days, the throng of people will be unimaginable, even though the wisdom is that pre-Diwali sales will be down by upto 40% over last year. It is easy to believe that figure when you think of all the doom and gloom around, but the crowds around the shops make you wonder how in the world did last year's shoppers get a toe-hold in there.

Much of this year's festival shopping may be over, but during the last weekend before Deepavali, there is bound to be a rush that waited for the rush to get over!

Hole in the wall

It really looks like it, doesn't it? A tiny shop, marginally broader than its door, with the big signboard at the entrance almost completely faded, it is strangely out of place at the entrance to Thyagaraya Road, one of Chennai's shopping hotspots. If you stop to think about it for a minute, however, you will find that there is nothing incongruous about it at all, this is the way it has to be, with the shops catering to the day-to-day essentials of a household being placed right up front and the other, once-in-a-while items pushed further inside. Problem is, times have changed. This shop would have done roaring business (literally) in the days when powdered spices did not come in handy packets, when everything from pepper to chillies had to be bought whole and then brought in smaller quantities to these shops where they would be ground into fine powders, the ones that make Indian cuisine what it is.

And in those days, you wouldn't dare step away from the shop to watch life go by, because you needed to be sure that your chillies were being done just the way you wanted and that they did not mix with others. Today, even if the shop seems anachronistic, it is good to see it there, offering proof that there are still some really old-fashioned folks in the city!

Heavenly tableau

According to Hindu mythology, the Holy Trinity is the Trimurthi of Brahma (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver) and Shiva (the Destroyer). Having finished the business of creation, Brahma reportedly takes little interest in matters relating to day-to-day living and He is therefore very rarely invoked by devotees seeking solutions to their difficulties. That load is borne by the other two; therefore any public celebration will see Shiva and Vishnu being depicted in forms that are traditionally associated with them; Brahma gets to be seen very rarely, if at all.

These deities are regarded as having their primary abodes in very specific locations. Shiva's seat is Mount Kailas (which is probably the only Himalayan peak that has not been climbed in deference to Hindu, as well as Tibetan and Buddhist, beliefs). Vishnu on the other hand lives in the Paalazhi (Kshira Sagar in Hindi), the infinite ocean of milk, lying on the coils of Anantha, the thousand-hooded Sesha Nag (divine serpent). Brahma is content to live on a lotus that grows out of Vishnu's navel. It would be considerably difficult if you had to see the three of them together - that panorama should stretch from the high reaches of the Himalayas to the ocean of milk and then again to the lofty heights where the lotus blooms.

Not for the next few days, though. All you have to do is to go down Theyagaraya Road, towards Pondy Bazaar from Mount Road. You would have to have a will of iron to keep your eyes on the road - every passerby turns to take a quick glance at this representation of the Gods in residence!

From floor to ceiling

The first of every month is marked as 'Theme Day' by the City Daily Photo bloggers. The moment the theme for August 2008 was announced, I knew I was going to post about this store on Pondy Bazaar, one of the shopping hot-spots of Chennai.

Even though I have walked into this store several times, I am always amazed by the sheer variety of shapes and sizes of cooking - and storing - vessels that they have on display. You step off the pavement, right into the store and this is the sight that greets you, from floor to ceiling along three walls. In the middle, there are narrow aisles for walking through, and from the ceiling hang various kinds of vessels that have handles. Somewhere just overhead, there is just a small gap, where the stalactites and the stalagmites haven't met - yet.

It seems to me that this is the way it must always have been, from the time Rathna Stores (Firm) opened for business more than 50 years ago. There would have been some change in the alloys: from the traditional cast iron and copper vessels through to aluminium - hindalium, especially - to the stainless steel and carbon steel vessels that are in vogue currently. The Firm has grown to provide you with everything that you would need for the house, including a whole lot of non-metal stuff.

I can't believe that I missed registering for the 'Theme Day'! I knew the theme, I was sure what I was going to post about, but - I just didn't register to participate. That leaves me without the list of the 183 blogs that are participating, so you'll just have to click here to see their thumbnails - or you can just guess the theme for this month!