Beach food

Yesterday was the last day of the 'Enjoy Arusuvai Tiruvizha - EAT', a festival of street food. One part of the Besant Nagar beach was cordoned off for the food stalls - there were about 20 stalls, but the organizers were not letting anyone enter the venue before 5.30 pm. Besant Nagar beach is quite crowded every weekend, but yesterday seemed to be much more so. 

The turnout had been quite good on the first two days, apparently. The organizers had brought in 50 chefs from all over the country, so it must have been a pan-Indian street food experience. Good food, priced right - and then it was for a charitable cause. Of course Chennai would have turned up in droves.

I had gone hoping to have a street food dinner. Well, it seemed to me that I should have got here right after lunch!

Sea of humanity

Not really, it is more like a small pond.

On our way back from Mamallapuram on Sunday, we had stopped at the Elliots Beach in Besant Nagar. We tried to get off our vehicle close to the spot where I had taken a photograph of 6th Avenue a few weeks ago; but today, there was no place to park and so we drifted down a bit further towards the southern end of 6th Avenue. It didn't get any better, so we just went ahead and jumped on to the sands and walked the short distance to the waterline. As we got closer, I realized that the soft roar was not the sound of waves, but the chants of those getting their feet wet in the waves. It is not usual for people in Chennai to go swimming at these beaches; the bottom apparently drops abruptly after about half-a-kilometre, and the resulting undercurrents can be dangerous. So, there were only a few men who had ventured more than 10m into the water - and they were the ones most excited by the waves tumbling them over.

I saw this as a chance to build up the average number of people-per-photograph. It is also a nod to those like Kris, Ravindran, Ram, Magiceye and Sherry, who found their perceptions of Chennai being shattered by that earlier photograph - folks, there are still some crowds in Chennai!