Gold and dust

On one side, the sparkling showroom of Bhima Jewellery; opened in October 2021, it is one more of the many jewellers on Usman Road. If you look a little closer, you can also see the sign of GRT Jewels beyond the old building on the left. 

And that old building? It has a few businesses working out from it, but it looks like it is just waiting for a good price to show up before it gets dressed in finery; if it can't be jewels, it will be silks!

Combined temple

Of the Hindu pantheon's trinity, it is very rare, almost impossible, to find a temple to Brahma, the creator. And given a very marked division between those owing allegiance to Vishnu and those favouring Siva, it was very difficult to find a temple that allowed one to worship both these deities at the same time.

The earliest such temple in Chennai is in T.Nagar, close to the bus terminus. In fact, for a long time, it used to be the only such temple. Somewhere along the way, it became more economically viable for temples outside India to include all possible deities; temples at Lanham, MD, Livermore, CA and at several other places were all 'dual purpose' institutions. With that, there was probably more tolerance to such temples in India as well - Chennai itself now has at least three, if not more!

High Price!

Someone remarked a few years ago that the only advertisements on Malayalam TV channels were for umbrellas, wedding sarees and gold jewellery. Since then, a few other categories have been added, but gold seems to be ruling the roost even today. Tamil Nadu has several other advertisers, but even then, advertisements for gold jewellery are common enough to be noticed. For those with upward economic aspirations, gold is a significant measure of their having arrived - to the extent that McKinsey Global Institute titled their recent report on consumerism in India as 'The Bird of Gold', recalling a description used by traders in the first millenium CE.

Today, it looks like only those who are at the top of the pile can think gold once again; prices have touched a 10-year high and are expected to break the $1000 / ounce barrier soon. The grouchy investment scenario does not offer too many alternates to the metal and jewellers are probably having a good time.

This 10-storey showroom of Joy Alukkas in Chennai was inaugurated barely a year ago; touted as the largest exclusive gold jewellery showroom in Asia, it is symbolic of the firm's plans to become the leading gold jeweller in the world by the end of the decade!

The fare that got away

It is a lull after festival shopping, waiting for the next burst at Christmas and New Year time. Sales are affected and the crowds are much thinner than normal. Even during the great shopping buildup to Deepavali, when this picture was taken, the crowds were not what they could have been.

Apart from the crowds, this picture shows most of what happens around the jewellery shops; let the imagination run unchecked a bit and you can hear the girl at the entrance saying that she's been here before, this place doesn't have exactly what she wants; the man in the white shirt, with his back to her is letting someone know that he has managed to get a good deal; the trinket sellers on the right are hoping that some change would come their way, to reward a small child for behaving herself during the time in the shop. And look at that small alcove, housing Vinayagar, the remover of obstacles, where the faithful shopper can pray for a strong negotiating arm (and make an offering too, which in all likelihood will be collected by the shop!). Not just any ordinary Vinayagar, but Selvarathna (wealth of gems) Vinayagar, very appropriate!

Finally the auto drivers, in their uniforms, looking at that group with the bulging shopping bags, ruing the lost chance to have taken them in their vehicle - happy shoppers might be too tired to negotiate one more item and the auto drivers could have made a packet, but someone else seems to have got there first!

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!

Who goes over?

When this flyover was being built, I'd hazarded the premise that the traffic around Panagal Park on Usman Road has thinned out. A couple of days ago, I was walking down that road to take a look at the completed flyover, which was inaugurated on August 14. I noticed a decent-sized traffic jam, the very thing that the flyover was expected to minimize. The reason? Many vehicles were skirting the flyover and several of them were pausing to let people off in front of the GRT showroom. Those that weren't interested in GRT's jewellery were possibly looking at going to the shops just beyond, and on Prakasam Road; there were others making a U-turn under the flyover to get at some other shops. I guess the story was very much the same at the other end of the flyover, for there was little traffic coming down it, too.

I am sure there will be several explanations for the flyover not being used. Maybe people didn't know that the flyover is open for traffic; maybe they thought it was operating only one-way. Possibly, the weekend traffic does not need to use the flyover. Once the pavement shops are relocated, people will not need to crowd under the flyover. Whatever explanations are offered, I hope that none of them tries to claim it was unnecessary to have a flyover there!

Crawl-under

While there are flyovers coming up at several places, the construction activity at those places has made regular traffic much more difficult than it was earlier. That's only to be expected; but to me it seems that the Panagal Park area is a little less congested than it used to be. I'm basing this on shaky ground - 2 trips through the area last week and neither of them during the peak hours.

For those who would have data to refute my anecdotalism, the good thing is that it looks like this flyover should open up in about 6 weeks. There are still a couple of more flyovers that are under construction, but all that activity would be completed by the end of the year. And then the next round of digging will begin, for the Chennai Metro - a city builder's work is never done!