With over 33 crore (that's 330 million) Gods, Hinduism has by convention, carved them up either geographically or by function - or even by just convenience of the worshipper. 'Bodyguard Muniswaran' for example, mainly blesses new vehicles. The goddess Mumba, while not very well known in many parts of India, has given her name to the city that was earlier Bombay. And each family typically has its own deity - but that doesn't tie each member down to just that one. Well, you get the picture. There are 'Gods on every street corner'. The street corner Gods have a fairly local jurisdiction, drawing worshippers only from the nearby houses. Then there are temples like the one in this picture; neither deity in this Ayyappan - Guruvayoorappan temple at Mahalingapuram is 'original', but represent the major Gods of the neighbouring state of Kerala - Ayyappan and Guruvayoorappan. As the capital of the Presidency, Madras was a magnet for people from regions that are in Kerala or in Andhra Pradesh today. The people stayed on and contributed their native architectural styles to the city's landscape.In Chennai alone, Ayyappan has at least four large temples dedicated to him, while Guruvayoorappan has at least two. That's certainly a lot of devotees!
It has taken about 17 years to complete Chennai's Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) up to Velachery, its originally planned endpoint. The initial ideas were very grand; Chennai's MRTS would rival Singapore's similarly named system of urban transport; the system would be an integrated network with hubs where commuters could switch between rail and road; the rail coaches would be sleek - the dreams were many. Somewhere along the way though, the road diverged and MRTS became rail-alone. Still, one of the 'benefits' of the slow pace of work was that the design of each station could improve on that of the previous one.So, this station, where the MRTS begins to run parallel to the Old Mahabalipuram Road* (OMR) looks much sleeker than the ones built earlier. Thanks to the aluminium cladding, which complements the sleekness of the OMR and covers up for the fairly unaesthetic concrete blocks that were built first. The advertising panels at the station entrances also add to the with-it quotient. The station, following the norm, is named for the area in which it is located. And yet again there seems to have been a deviation from concept to commissioning. The area around it is Kasturba Nagar, named for Mahatma Gandhi's wife. But quite strangely, her name has been mangled and has come out differently in all three languages written here!
*I guess I should start referring to it by its new name of Rajiv Gandhi Salai - but I still call this city 'Madras' sometimes!
In some sense, India of the past worked on something like the 'open source' concept; there is no single person who can be credited with inventing chess, or the concept of the 'zero', both of which are generally accepted as having originated in this country. Intellectual Property (IP) was therefore one more of those quaint concepts that the British brought to India. The first legislation to protect such property was enacted as Act VI of 1856 and granted inventors some exclusivity for a 14-year period. In the nineteenth century itself, legislators brought out 4 different Acts, protecting inventions and designs and trying to ensure that inventors got some economic gains out of their work. During the twentieth century, the laws covering IP were periodically re-written, and were mostly ignored. Even the most significant legislation in this area, the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, probably lay gathering dust.The 1990s changed all that; the Copyright Act became the shield of choice for software companies as they sought to protect their work from being pirated. India's membership of the WTO in 1995 brought with it more seriousness about protecting IP - and also a lot of hue and cry about having to protect turmeric-based home remedies and basmati rice. With all of that, the CGPDTM - Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks - took on a more market-friendly brand of 'Intellectual Property India' and began to set up its exclusive offices in various cities. This building in Guindy houses the Chennai branches of the Patents Office and the Trade Marks Registry. It also has the only office of the Geographical Indications Registry in the country. Apart from all of this, Chennai and IP protection in India are very closely linked. The oldest firm of IP lawyers in India, DePenning & DePenning, is headquartered in Guindy, Chennai. It was born in 1856, soon after its founder, George Alfred DePenning, was awarded India Patent No.1 for his 'Efficient Punkah Pulling Machine'!
To Ilango Adigal goes the credit for Silappadhikaram (Story of the Anklet), a rare epic that is rooted in the life of a commoner, rather than that of kings or Gods. And while the key plot points may themselves be rather mundane (even for the 2nd century CE, a husband's extra-marital relationship was not a shocker by itself), Ilango Adigal's genius lay in the grandeur of the epic. The story traversed all three - Chola, Pandya and Chera - kingdoms that spread over what is modern day Tamil Nadu; the narration integrates some of the best examples of prose, poetry and drama in Tamil literature and the characters he created are even today regarded as personifications of specific virtues - or vices. The story itself is simple: Kovalan, a merchant in the Chola kingdom, repents at having ignored his wife Kannagi for Madhavi, a dancer. Kannagi forgives her husband and they move to Madurai, the capital of the Pandya kingdom, hoping to make a fresh start. When Kovalan tries to sell Kannagi's anklet to raise capital, the jeweller sees an opportunity to keep the queen's anklet given to him; so he tells the Pandya king that he has captured a thief who tried to steal it. Ignoring the due process of justice, the king orders Kovalan executed; and he is. With all this happening on the very day they reached Madurai, Kannagi is furious. She proves her husband's innocence and lambasts the king, who, mortified at his error, falls dead. Kannagi's unappeased wrath sets the whole of Madurai on fire; her anger cooled, she goes to the Chera kingdom, where, broken-spirited, she dies and is deified as the epitome of purity. This statue on the Marina brings out the poet in Ilango Adigal by the palm-leaf manuscript in his left hand. The discarded crown and the sword on his right are reminders of his royal lineage. His appearance shows him to be the Buddhist monk that he eventually became. Inspite of abdicating all claims to the throne, this man has left behind a legacy that would be the envy of many kings!
There were - and still are - very few professional theatre people in Chennai. For quite a few in the vernacular theatre circuit, it is a hobby; for others, it is a step to the screen, big or small. Tamil cinema has been fed by stage actors for about 60 of its 75 years - it is only over the past decade that its dependence on the stage has reduced. Also, very few of the actors, once they have a toehold in the movies, come back to the stage. With all that, the lure of the Tamil stage has been diminishing. As for English theatre, it was always seen as elitist; although the Madras Players, through more than 50 years of their existence have produced several Indian works (translated into English, of course), English theatre is restricted to a small group of fans. The Players, being mainly non-professional theatre folk, have had only a few shows of each of their 200-odd productions. Other groups - Masquerade, Boardwalkers, Little Theatre, Stagefright - have had short lives, or largely hibernating ones. About 5 years ago, a couple of graduates from MICA decided that Chennai offers the greatest market potential for high quality entertainment providers. Going off the beaten path of advertising / market-research jobs, they set up their event management company here. In the space of 5 years, their company, Evam Entertainment, has captured the imagination of the city with some remarkable marketing efforts. Some of the things Evam has done has brought theatre closer to the people: for example, a public announcement, like the one in the picture, for theatre workshop registrations was unheard of a few years ago. But now, it gives me a chance to go and try out my dramatic skills - and having done so, chances are that I'll go to watch Evam's productions for at least a couple of years, even if I'm booted out of the workshop!
In a fair world, people should feel the same about this photo as they would when shown a picture of a python or a boa constricting its prey. The snake, however, works within our definition of 'real-time'; the strike, the stangulation, the wide opening of jaws and the swallowing of the hapless prey can all happen before our eyes without us getting much older. This tree works on a similar principle, but it is in no particular hurry. It's life probably began when a seed fell on the canopy of the palmyra. Over the course of a few days, the seed germinated, feeding on the detritus on which it fell. As it grew older, it began growing larger roots, looking for more food than the palm could provide; in a few months, the roots touched the ground. With a source of nourishment found, the tree began to grow bigger: more roots, more branches. In a few years, the palmyra finds itself being wrapped inside a maze of roots. Without meaning to, this tree's roots will crush the palm in... maybe a decade from now. It will take some really time-lapsed photography to show it happening in 'real-time' - and then we would dismiss it as a B-grade movie.The strangler figs (this one is Ficus bengalensis, if I'm right), though, do not mean to kill. They don't seek out living things for their seeds to fall on. You've probably seen some of them growing in a tiny crack of a building - or the well known images of the temples in Indonesia and Cambodia being crushed. This one though is probably a few centuries away from any building, standing as it does in a rather wild patch of scrub jungle behind - way behind - the Chennai airport!
Yesterday, the traffic routing through Chamiers Road, Cenotaph Road and Mount Road was shuffled around a bit. This, they say, is the first step to building a flyover / grade separator (??!)at the entrance to Turnbulls Road. The flyover itself something that has been spoken about for a long time; initially planned on Chamiers Road, it has now been turned around 90-degrees and will take off from Cenotaph Road to land on Turnbulls Road.So, since last morning, both the 'C' Roads have been swarming with policemen. Basically, traffic is now one-way on both of them; The good thing - for me - is the opening of a right turn from Chamiers Road on to Cenotaph Road; while the latter is one-way towards Mount Road, the former runs in the other direction. Normally when a change like this is made, all of it is explained to each motorist, but there was a difference yesterday. Most of the policemen had these pink leaflets with them - despite the numerous mis-spellings, this is a good attempt by the Chennai City Traffic Police to document the changes it implements. I believe it is the first time that something like this is being done.The leaflet came in handy to convince a policeman that while I could not make a right turn from my street on to Cenotaph Road, there's nothing stopping me turning left into my street!
It is a few hours before the first screening of a new film at Baby Albert. There are policemen - and policewomen - in uniform and in mufti around the gates of the cinema hall. The OB vans of national news channels are parked inside. As I get out of my car, I'm offered tickets for the movie - at about 15 times the box office rate. I walk around taking some photos and an Assistant Commissioner of Police grins at me: he is a fan too, and I think he must have pulled some strings to be posted in charge of operations here on Aug 1.In about 2 hours from now, the fans would be out in full strength. Before the movie begins, many of them would clamber on top of the 70-foot cutout of the hero and pour litres of milk over it, garland it, light camphor around it and do everything they can to let the world know that they are looking forward to this movie being a success. That's a decade-old practice whenever The Superstar's movies are released. In recent days, they have also begun holding blood donation camps, distributing free food and suchlike things to balance the mania with some meaning. And all of that did happen yesterday for this movie, not just in Chennai, but in Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi, too. After all there's only one Superstar in India!
The first of every month is marked as 'Theme Day' by the City Daily Photo bloggers. The moment the theme for August 2008 was announced, I knew I was going to post about this store on Pondy Bazaar, one of the shopping hot-spots of Chennai.
Even though I have walked into this store several times, I am always amazed by the sheer variety of shapes and sizes of cooking - and storing - vessels that they have on display. You step off the pavement, right into the store and this is the sight that greets you, from floor to ceiling along three walls. In the middle, there are narrow aisles for walking through, and from the ceiling hang various kinds of vessels that have handles. Somewhere just overhead, there is just a small gap, where the stalactites and the stalagmites haven't met - yet. It seems to me that this is the way it must always have been, from the time Rathna Stores (Firm) opened for business more than 50 years ago. There would have been some change in the alloys: from the traditional cast iron and copper vessels through to aluminium - hindalium, especially - to the stainless steel and carbon steel vessels that are in vogue currently. The Firm has grown to provide you with everything that you would need for the house, including a whole lot of non-metal stuff. I can't believe that I missed registering for the 'Theme Day'! I knew the theme, I was sure what I was going to post about, but - I just didn't register to participate. That leaves me without the list of the 183 blogs that are participating, so you'll just have to click here to see their thumbnails - or you can just guess the theme for this month!
Security in Chennai has always been pretty low key. Most of the time, it involves documentating entry and exit of vehicles and people into office, commercial or residential spaces. Surveillance is by guards patrolling specific areas or by slowing down traffic to peer inside cars. Remote monitoring is unheard of, for the most part. Some traffic intersections have cameras, but the general belief is that they are incapable of taking pictures anymore. Radar guns - again, street wisdom is that one such gun is shared by all the police stations in the city. You get the idea here; security relies less on technology and more on personnel. (Or on low technology, like glass shards on walls).
It is therefore surprising to find a sign saying 'Electrified Fence', especially on the outskirts of Chennai - at the Livestock Research Centre in Kattupakkam. Upon asking around, one is told that the fence is basically meant to prevent animals from entering the area; the voltage is just enough to jolt the animals a little bit, there is no permanent damage. Over a period of time, the local animals have learnt to respect the fence and so the power is switched off for the most part; it is used only very rarely, when there are some obvious security threats across the city or when there is a high-profile visitor to the Centre. I remember that one of the software companies, being an early mover on the OMR had built a similar fence years ago, for the same reasons - keeping out animals!
Chennai, or even Madras, is not a city with a martial heritage. Defining battles have been fought close to Madras, but the city itself has never been overrun by invaders. Even during the tussle between the French and the British - the siege of Madras - the key objective seems to have been to take the Fort; not much of action beyond. Surprisingly though, Madras is the only Indian city to have been shelled in the First World War (will come back later with that story). The average Madrasi has been far removed from military invasions, Mughal to Japanese; even the present day 'incursions' affect him only peripherally.But Madras has its share of heroes through the ages. This circular marble structure, with a 'victory' pillar in the centre was built sometime after the First World War, to celebrate the defeat of the Central Powers. After World War II, the purpose was modified to honour those from the Madras Presidency who had fallen in action. The inscriptions in Tamil - வெà®±்à®±ி - reads 'Victory', with the dates of the First and Second World Wars, also in the same script. The practice continued after Independence; the 1962 Chinese Aggression and the 1965 Indo-Pak War also find mention on the monument. I couldn't spot any of the subsequent wars - but that could also have been because I was in a hurry to get back to my car, which was haphazardly parked near a gate of the Port of Chennai!
What with all the bomb blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad over the past few days, taking photographs in public seems to be a rather adventurous pastime. In Chennai too, police have been placed on the alert. Thankfully, that does not seem to have hampered the regular activities of the city; things seem to be going on just fine. Including the afternoon showers. A couple of sharp spells last afternoon cooled down the city without seriously inconveniencing anyone. The dark clouds put the raintrees to sleep earlier than usual, so when the sun came back at around 6 o'clock in the evening, it had a little more space to shine through on to a damp Eldams Road. Wish things could stay this way, without threats of bombings or retaliations!
Having posted a few pictures taken from the top of this building (the docks, Esplanade and the High Court), it is time that I revealed the building itself. So here is a shot of Dare House, the corporate headquarters of the Murugappa Group, one of India's oldest and most respected business houses. There was a time 250 years ago, when the French under Thomas Artur, comte de Lally, apparently camped at this site. That was during the siege of Madras in 1758, when the site was used as a base to mount cannon attacks on Fort St. George. But that's not the reason why the location is named 'Parry's Corner'. And it is not a corrupted spelling of the French capital city, either. The story of Thomas Parry and his businesses, most notably in partenership with John William Dare, and how those businesses came to the family of Dewan Bahadur AM Murugappa Chettiar is far too rich and fascinating to be contained in this post - so I'm not even going to try. While Thomas Parry's name lives on in the name of one of the companies of the Murugappa Group, his partner is remembered in this building. But all this history does not stop several people from referring to the junction of NSC Bose Road and Rajaji Salai as 'Paris Corner' - or sometimes even insisting that it is 'Paree Corner'!
Was walking down Lloyds Road - as a part of one of Nizhal's Tree Walks, more about them some other day - when I saw this frangipani tree, thick with flowers. And along with some childhood memories, unanswered questions came back. The memories are of two kinds: being lured to the plant by the sharp scent of its flowers, picking the fresh ones, punching a small hole in each petal to fold them back over the stem of the flower and ending up with a yellow-and-white ornament. Of course, as a kid rushing to make more signet-rings than the others, plucking the flowers was an essential part of the routine. But in the villages, there was always frustration at children playing with these flowers. A belief that the scent of these flowers attract the spirits - and snakes - during dusk meant that we were all frisked thoroughly for our ornaments before we were let back inside the house.The name of the plant was also intriguing; it sounded so very Indian with the 'pani' ending (that ending denotes 'bearer' in many Indian languages), but it also sounded delightfully foreign, when you twist your tongue over the 'frangi' bit... and knowing that it was an imported plant added to its charm. Of course it had its local names, too - so many of them, in fact, that I do not remember even one! But searching for a connect between the etymological roots of 'frangipani' and 'fragrant' has got me nowhere. I guess I should be happy to just walk under the plant, enjoy its fragrance and be thankful that it is there!
Chennai's suburban rail network has always been a watered down version of its Mumbai counterpart. The latter carries almost half of the city's population every day; even with Chennai's significantly lower population, less than a third of them use the suburban trains. For a long while, Bombay and Madras were the only 2 cities in the country that could boast of a vibrant suburban train system. Delhi's was largely unused and Calcutta clung on to its trams.Then Calcutta went for its Metro and Delhi bested it with a world-class system of their own. Chennai's trains continued to run; a new line was added, the older ones were upgraded - all incremental changes, nothing that was front-page stuff. The old lines: Central - Tiruttani, Central - Gummidipoondi/Sulurpet, Beach - Tambaram, were among the oldest tracks laid down in the country. While the first two run out to the northern suburbs, the Beach-Tambaram line goes through the city for the most part and connects up its southern reaches. Here's one of those trains coming up to Beach: it has just left the Park station and now has to turn left, to skirt the western edge of the Fort St. George complex, heading towards the Fort station, its last halt before the Beach terminus. The bit of water at the bottom left of the picture is a part of the Cooum river; looking at its shrivelled and polluted state today, it is hard to believe that this was once a natural moat for Fort St. George!
I don't know about others of my vintage, but the first time I read the Ramayanam and the Mahabharatam, it was in English. Maybe some of the charm of the epics was lost in the reading; but having had to listen to grandmothers reciting them in the vernacular, a verse a day (or so it seemed) one was impatient to find out What Happened, rather than listen to discourses on How To Behave. And Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) was the man who helped me in that quest. He translated both those great works into English, keeping the essence of each canto but going off on his own interpretation of how they defined / prescribed correct behaviour. But that was only to be expected from one who was Gandhiji's sammandhi*; this man, the only native Governer-General that India had. After India became a Republic, he was a minister in the Union Cabinet for a short while, but then came to Madras in 1952 to become the Chief Minister of the (then) Madras state. He was by all accounts a man with several bees in his bonnet. Prohibition, Kulathozhil kalvi (schooling for half-day and learning the family trade during the other half), Hindi as a compulsory language - all of these, imposed by him, were seen by the people of Tamil Nadu as an extension of Northern hegemony and repression of the lower classes. And so, his Chief Ministership was short-lived; he resigned in 1954 and went into a tailspin of sorts; the second half of his life was a story of petty rivalries and pot-shots; certainly not lived in a manner befitting one of the earliest recipients of the Bharat Ratna.This statue of Rajaji stands half-way along the long road that bears his name. But it is tucked away to a side, just like an old relative whose glory days are cherished by the family, but is today too embarassing to be included in a gathering of the clan!
*Rajaji's daughter was married to the Mahatma's son; that's a rather complicated way of saying they were sammandhis!
Somehow, I've never felt a need to take my car to someplace just to have it washed by a machine. And I haven't known anyone in Chennai who has actually done something like that. I am sure there would be folks who have; but unlike for the Loch Ness monster or the Sasquatch, we don't even have grainy photographs showing folks swerving their vehicles furtively into this MRF Tyredrome on Cathedral Road. And the more or less dry floor does not support the theory that Automatic Car Washes are Minting Money in Chennai. MRF can probably afford to run this along; it is rumoured that they charge Rs.200 a go; for that money, you have machines cleaning the inside and washing the outside while you get to wait in the lounge. And anyway, this is just a talking point for MRF, they're into other, bigger things. (Yes, they're the same guys who advertise on the outdoor thermometer of an earlier post).If they'd at least let people sit in the car while it is washed, it might have been interesting for kids to see it from the inside. But for the kind of money that they (are rumoured to) charge, I can have someone come in every day for a month to wash my vehicle - he might even agree to wash the undercarriage, something that urban legend says this MRF Tyredrome does not do!
Would love to hear if you - or anyone you know - has used this. Any stories?
My first thought on seeing so many people wearing black t-shirts with an 'X' marked on them was, "Oh, another protest march!". Blame it on the political climate in India over the past weekend when everyone seemed to be protesting against everything. But then I kicked myself for not remembering that the 'X' was Roman; it was the 10th year of the Chennai Citizens' Run. I just caught the vanguard of the Run; schoolchildren wearing the t-shirts over their school uniforms and still seeming cool. The celebrities were probably waiting for the sun to go down a bit further before beginning their Run - that makes sense; the early runners can wait in the cool evening to see their heroes, more non-runners will be on the beach and might contribute to the causes supported by the Run. Even though it has been a low key affair since it began in 1996, the Citizens' Run has helped garner support for over 40 Chennai NGOs. When one thinks about it, Chennai has quite a few runners, though not so many large scale events; apart from this Run, the Chennai Marathon is probably the only other well-publicised running event. However, there are those niche events by smaller groups like the Chennai Runners who had their ECR Run on Sunday (these folks need a daily dose of endorphins: they run at least 5 km every day except Mondays), or the Hash House Harriers - they have both Chennai and Madras versions (well, they do run, even if you think they are more focussed on what happens after the run).So the next time you see a bunch of people in t-shirts running towards you, don't panic. Move to a side, wave them along, and if you want to be extra careful, hide that bottle of beer!
For me, it is Sunil Gavaskar who began the practice of asking the umpire for a fresh guard when he reached his century. That's probably factually incorrect; it is something that almost any batsman will do, every once in a while during an innings. But since Gavaskar scored more test centuries than any batsman before him, he had more opportunities to do it in the public eye. In a sense, today's post follows this habit; having reached a hundred, I looked for a fresh start - without having to do away with all the previous posts!And that's where this milestone helps. Considering its significance, there should be some kind of monument around it. It stands quite forlorn, without anything to indicate it's significance. And it's location, almost at the apex of the railway overbridge on Muthuswamy Road is not a convenient one to build any kind of elaborate marker. Apparently, it is the norm for highway engineers to locate the 'zero point' of a road at a place where there is no possibility of overlapping roads; for them, the zero point of a road is just a technical indication. This milestone is considered the zero point for the three National Highways in Chennai; though only NH45 (to Trichi) is marked, NH4 and NH5 (to Bangalore and Kolkata respectively) also begin here.From a historic perspective, the zero point of Madras was within the walls of Fort St George; and convention then was to measure distances from the gates of the Fort. I have not had an opportunity to go inside the Fort for a long time. Maybe the next time I do, I should look to see if there is any memory of the 'Zero Point', which was once the centre of Madras!
It is not very easy to decide which photo should be posted for a milestone. The decision about the first photo of this blog was fairly easy, plus I had a decently long time to think about it. The decision about the 50th photo was taken out of my hands - it was June theme day and there was just one photo that could go up. Even then, I did not start thinking about the 100th photo; it is only during the past week that the thought that this has to be a significant photo kept nagging away....And so, this building. In some of my earlier posts, I have mentioned how a shot of this building was enough to establish that the hero had arrived in Madras - whether the movie was in Tamil, Malayalam or maybe even Telugu. It remains (I think) the tallest building in Chennai. The construction of this building was begun in 1953 - the design inspired by the United Nations Headquarters in New York - by M.Ct.M.Chidambaram Chettiar, who dreamt of it showcasing United India Insurance, Indian Overseas Bank and Travancore Rayons, three of his big business ventures. Chidambaram Chettiar died in 1954; his dream for this building died a couple of years later, when the property, belonging to United India Insurance, was taken over by the government when insurance was nationalised in 1956. Having always seen this building from Mount Road, I did not think I could ever have a different view of it. What I did not realize was that the property has now been extended all the way back to General Patters Road; it is not easy, as you drive up GP Road to figure out how the 'Golden Jubilee Gateway' takes you to Mount Road - it is only when you go a little beyond that you get to see the building itself and then it becomes clear. When I got this view of the LIC Building, I knew that it would make the 100th post - the building where both my parents spent a significant part of their working lives!
