Misty morning

It was not the earliest of mornings; much of the city was up and about already. But it is a Sunday, so there is that extra round of gossip when collecting the milk, catching up with the neighbour's newspaper, and suchlike things happening even as the clock was getting to 7am.

It is a great time to be in Chennai. Crisp mornings, not so hot days and early evenings. The rain staying away is not good, but it comes with the blessing of dry streets. 

View from Brindavan Street, towards the subway that takes you to the heart of Chennai's shopping.

Bank by the wayside

The Chennai office of the Reserve Bank of India has the Fort Glacis as its address. But it spurns the security of the fort's walls, preferring to sit just outside. Of course it was a much later creation than the fort; by the time the RBI was set up in 1935, the fort had for long been an administrative centre rather than a trading outpost. 

The building is quite impressive, if you can stop to look at it. The massive door has RBI's logo on it and even the latticework besides the door repeats the design. Most of the time, however, folks just whiz by - and because of the subway, even that view is fairly limited.

Just wondering - is there an underground passage from the bank into the fort?

Above the bunker

It was once the place to hang out, the round tana along the Mount Road. It was really a hub, from where one could change directions if one was so adventurous as to stray off the straight road from the Fort to the Mount. You could head off towards Chindadripet or choose to go to Triplicane - the latter, a settlement that goes back quite a few hundred years and the former a colony created by the early British settlers.

But in those early days of Madras, you didn't hang out at this junction. It was only after the round tana came - providing a little shelter and a drink of water for the footsore traveller - that people began to stop at this place. Later, after the round tana had been pulled down - to confuse the Japanese air raiders - a large parking circle was created in the centre (you can see it in this photo) and that was when the Madras round tana became the meeting spot for the hip crowd.

Today, it is a busy junction - and will become busier once the new secretariat complex is built at the north-eastern corner; maybe at that time, the first pedestrian subway of Madras (a former air-raid bunker), just under the road here, will see much more traffic than it does these days!

Bunker below ground

Once upon a time, there was a Round Tana at the junction of Wallajah Road and Mount Road. Or at least, the old timers say there was one; this photograph shows a domed structure which could well have been the round tana, because it is right at the same junction. You have to really be an old timer to remember seeing that structure, because it was pulled down sometime in the early 1940s. Though I am hard pressed to imagine what the connection was, the cause of its demolition was Japan entering World War II - maybe it was so distinctive that its absence would make target marking very difficult for the Japanese aircraft?

In a gesture that really seemed to cock a snook at the threat, the city built an air-raid shelter right under the spot where the round tana had been. In all likelihood it was never used, for the Japanese did not make any serious effort to attack Madras. After the war, the cavernous shelters were put to use as public conveniences for a while. It must have been really convenient for the public, too, for the Round Tana of those days was a favoured hangout - most cinemas were nearby and so was Jafar's, that famed ice-cream & soda shop of those days. Sometime in the 1960s, though, the crowds began to thin out, more cinemas opened further south on Mount Road and Jafar's faded away.

With so much of underground space available, the city put it to good use by clearing out the public conveniences and allowing their approaches to connect up with one another - and lo, the first pedestrian subway in the city was in place!