Over what?

When you come over the Anna Flyover, from the US Consulate side towards the DMS offices, you can look to your right and check the time. 

The clock faces on this building show the correct time and can easily be seen. Opposite this, the Lebara Tower (LBR Tower?) used to have the time, too; I'm not sure if they are still there, after the building went through some renovation a few years ago. In any cases, those clocks were too high for someone driving to check them.

Is that why this is considered Rajam's Triumph? Who is Rajam, anyway? And why is the "s" in a different colour from the other letters? So many questions. Who has the answers?!

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!

Square of the Polygon

This is one of the newer office buildings in the city. It came up in the last couple of years and is yet to be fully occupied. The developers however did not worry too much about maintaining any connect with what the real estate was being used for earlier and just went ahead in naming it the 'Polygon'. 

The Polygon, at Teynampet/Nandanam, stands on the site of what was once the 'nursery of Madras'. For about half-a-century, since moving to this site in 1952, P.S. Swaminatha Iyer's Soundarya Nursery was the go-to place for saplings of any kind. If you needed flowering plants for your 'front garden' or fruit trees for your 'back garden', Soundarya would supply them; Swaminatha Iyer was known for walking around with a pen-knife all the time. That way, he was able to mix and match cuttings to produce hybrid varieties of hibiscus and bougainvilla. Soundarya Nursery continued that good work even after Swaminatha Iyer died in 1972. It was only more than a generation later that the property changed hands. The Nursery itself has now grown branches, with one at Vettuvankeni and another in Pudupakkam, run by Swaminatha Iyer's youngest son and a grandson.

In the evenings, the Polygon's colour-changing lighting detail provides a relief to the unblinking bright blue of the nearby Apollo Hospital's signage. That is probably the only connect the developers have retained, channelling the colours of all those flowers in the Nursery into the LED lights on the building's facade!

The first of the month, and it is Theme Day for the City Daily Photo group. Take a look at squares from over the world here!

Good night

I don't think I agree with that statement entirely, but you can't fault a restaurant for trying to push the idea of eating!

The city's sculptors

As Mount Road runs through Teynampet on to Nandanam, there is a quiet piece of land tucked between some commercial establishments. The gates are mostly closed and all the busy people scuttling along do not look at those gates - they are easy enough to miss, anyway. But should they do so, they would likely be taken aback, seeing those 'people' standing and sitting around. What they may not realize is that they have seen the studio of Kishore Nagappa, a third generation sculptor, whose father and grandfather have crafted so many statues around the city. 

Kishore's father, Jayaram Nagappa, was the one who made the twin horse-and-man statues that are placed at the Gemini Circle. Off-hand, I am not able to point to one defining statue that is Kishore's; but that could also be because some of them have become so popular that there are probably many rip-offs pretending to be originals. 

The next time you pass that way, pause. And take a look at the place where all those statues you see around the city - and other parts of the state - are made!

Morning light

The morning sun striking the aluminum & glass sheathed building gives it a golden sheen. This building - belonging to Cap Gemini, through its acquisition of Kanbay - has been constructed on a site where there was an old shed going by the name of Goschen Home.

Haven't been able to find any reference to that building anywhere. It used to house the office of the DIG of Police; but that was quite a while earlier, almost 12 years ago. The demolition of Goschen Home does not seem to have troubled anyone in Chennai!