Multiple sports

One of the landing approaches to the airport at Meenambakkam takes the aircraft over Guindy. Once upon a long time ago, Guindy used to be thickly forested. It still boasts of one of the smallest national parks in the world (and also one of the few completely contained within a city). Institutions nearby - the IIT Madras and the Raj Bhavan (the governor's residence) retain enough of tree cover for the air passenger to look out and see a green carpet.

Which is suddenly broken by this stretch of grassland. Forming a rough, round-cornered triangle, it has long patches of green and brown. Well, that is one of Chennai city's three golf clubs; this one is run by the Madras Gymkhana, which started off their golf links on Island Grounds before moving to this location sometime around 1887. Even though they have moved inland from their original location, the course is still styled as links. 

It is a 6690 yard, par 72 course. Though it was only a 9 hole course when it started off, it graduated through 14 and 16 holes before becoming a full fledged 18-hole course. Given the nature of the terrain - with its scrub jungle pedigree - it was a course where players played off the browns for nearly a century. It was only in the 1980s that the transformation to greens began; as you can see, the browns are not giving up so easily. Despite being small and treeless, it is supposedly a tough course to play on, thanks to the narrow fairways, challenging roughs and swirling winds. If that is not enough, you will also be distracted by horses running around - this is probably the only golf club in the world that is fully ensconced within a horse race track!

A close look

At first, I didn't quite get it when my friend told me about the new hazard that has come up on the 14th hole at the TNGF-Cosmo Golf course. He told me it was a 'crow hazard' and my first thought was that he was having a dig at my new found ornithology mania. Almost immediately I knew he wasn't pulling my leg, that this was slightly more serious. I remembered Kapil Dev killing a seagull that wasn't quick enough to get out the way of a ferocious drive, in Adelaide, if I'm right. That had to be it, maybe there's a murder of crows out there, with murder being both a collective noun and a verb.

It wasn't as bad as that, I'm assured. It is merely that the crows on the 14th and 15th holes have been particularly hungry or something and have been flying down to pick up the ball before the player walks to the fairway from the teeing area. Apparently it is more common than I first thought - googling for crow golf ball will give you a lot of stories about this happening all over the world.

Maybe you need to keep a really close eye on the ball!

Spot the difference

There are quite a few places in Chennai where houses have been built quite close to water bodies. Chennai has earned a reputation of being drought-prone and that has probably encouraged folks to get real close to the rivers that run through the city. That's always a problem when the rivers flood, but there seem to be enough and more people who don't mind that risk, or the trouble caused by flooding, if they can have a house for the other days of the year.

This picture is of a house on the banks of the River Adayar, as it curves behind the TNGF-Cosmo golf links. It is a rather unusual sight for Chennai; such greenery, right to the water's edge, is normally something one finds in Kerala. The profusion of coconut trees adds to the illusion that this is set in Kerala. There is one significant difference, though. In Kerala, the water-bodies, be they backwaters or rivers, are very rarely still; there is some movement, caused either by the running water itself or by the boatmen who use the waterways.

The Adayar is completely still, almost to the point of appearing stagnant!

Lucky greens

While waiting to tee off at the 14th hole of the TNGF-Cosmopolitan Club golf course last week, I noticed that the tops of the walls had a new glint to them. Okay, I haven't been on the course for a while, but the wall-tops aren't that old, anyway. This 'architechtural' feature used to be very widespread, but seems to have dropped out of favour, at least in some of the larger residential /commercial building complexes.

As kids playing cricket, the rule around such glass-topped walls was simple: if the batsman hit the ball over it, not only would he have to run a long way around to bring the ball back, but he would also be out. Superstition was that taking a hard look at the jagged shards (and maybe some muttered incantations) before bowling would induce the batsman to hit the ball over them - and fetch a wicket for the bowler.

Some vague memory of that came back and not only did I take a long, hard look, but also pulled out my camera and took this photo. (If you know your Chennai, that's Panagal Buildings in the background, right behind the green neck). Sure enough, some luck came my way - made par (4) on the 14th and, for the first time in 9 months of playing golf, made a birdie on the par-5 16th - yay!