Making faces - and other things, too

It was a common sight on the way to school. Along one side of Kodambakkam High Road would be the production units, potters using long sticks to spin their wheels and then coaxing the clay into shapes of every kind. The clay stock itself would be shoulder high, seeming to be solid walls - but as we return from school, we could see that stock depleted and the day's work baking either in the sun or in little kilns that were given space besides the huts of the "Potters' Colony". All those pots and decorative pieces would move to the footpath on the other side of the road, where the sales team would line them up and tempt the passer-by into picking up one or a dozen.

Pavements are great places for bargains in Chennai; had written about the seasonal fruitshop earlier; terracotta has seasons, too. A couple of days ago, there were hardly any pots on the pavement. They had given way to all these faces - including a large-ish Durga in typically Bengali style, sandwiched between the demons all set to ward off evil eyes. If you look closely, you can spot the blue Krishna dolls, probably left over from a golu batch. In a week or so, all these would have cleared out to make way for various kinds of decorative lamps, ready to meet the Diwali demand. And then, after the festival season is done, it will be back to decorative pieces and flower pots.

With the kilns having been banned in this area, the potters are all gone. At least, the production has moved somewhere out of the city; the old-timers still live here. Like in many traditional crafts, fewer youth take to pottery for their livelihood. The number of these shops on the footpath has reduced - very soon, such pieces may only be found in some airconditioned showroom. Before that day comes, go out, grab as many of these as you can!

Line up for the blessings

Though it originally began as a day to worship weapons, Ayudha Puja has long ago moved on to be a day to worship the tools and implements of one's trade. Yesterday was the day of the Ayudha Puja and across the city, all kinds of 'tools', from CNC machines to computers, were cleaned and decked up for the puja. Almost every vehicle had a garland of flowers in front of it. Offices had had their signboards washed and sprayed with sandal-paste & kunkumam.

On Harrington Road last evening, these autorickshaws were lined up to participate in a puja being conducted by their welfare association. They looked all nice and neat, washed, polished and with smears of sandalwood paste. Though they all look the same anyway, the effect was even better with small banana stems on either side of the vehicle, all of equal size - and then the standardized garlands making them almost indistingushable.

It was a nice sight alright, but that didn't stop one from wishing these folks would swear to turn over a new leaf in their treatment of passengers!

They followed us there

Last week, we had taken off to Kerala for a vacation. The early part of the week was at Thiruvananthapuram, almost as far away from Chennai as we could get in Kerala. On September 28, we heard that the 'Army Mela' in the city was closing that day with a grand show of the army 'capturing' Shanghumughom beach. We were a bit late in getting there; by the time we arrived, the drill was done and the beach had been 'liberated' by the army - we only got to read the reports in The Hindu the next day.

Some vehicles, field guns and tanks, however, remained on the beach, for the public to look at, clamber over and generally have fun with. I will bet that any romantic notions of travelling inside an army tank will evaporate very quickly if you sit inside one - even looking inside made me claustrophobic. Many jostled to get inside, sit down and look through the periscope, even for a fleeting second, before having to make way for others. It was fun, still, to get to see such equipment up close.

So what does this have to do with Chennai? Well, the mock capture was staged by soldiers of the Madras Regiment!

Not NPR yet, but will get there

I must admit that I'm not a great FM radio person; for one thing, my commutes are too short to bother with finding the right station and settling down to listen to it. For another, most of the channels seem to do pretty much the same thing - Tamizh movie songs - so it is hard to figure out which channel I'm listening to at any time. But a lot of that changed with a phone call on Sunday evening - was most surprised that I was being invited as a guest on a live talk/phone-in show. So surprised in fact, that I didn't even properly register the name of the channel that had invited me!

When I got around to finding out, I learnt that 'Chennai Live 104.8 FM' was trying to break new ground. Launched in July 2008, the channel belongs to the Muthoot Group and has been billed as 'India's first Talk Radio FM station'. I'm not sure about that, but inviting me as a guest is definitely proof of their desire to target the "evolved, intelligent Chennaite" . Therefore one didn't have to think too hard before accepting - I do like the sound of my voice and chances of being kicked out of the studio within the 30 minutes I had been given seemed slim. So there I was at 9.30 on Monday morning, sitting across the table and talking to a couple of very high-enthu people who looked like they'd be bouncing around if not for all the equipment that kept them tethered to the table.

Except for the headphones and having to break the conversation for some ads / filler songs, it was no different from, say, a conference call. Krishna and Bhavana kept the flow going, questioning without being combative and making sure that things didn't get too serious - the talk was about 'New Age Managers' and given the gloom all around, we could have easily become mournful - but the two RJs didn't let that happen. Great work, guys; you can be sure that I'll be tuning into 104.8 more often, now!

One more of those

There was a time when traffic on GN Chetty Road was a nightmare, but ever since they began building this flyover on it, traffic seems to have thinned out a lot. Maybe that could also be because Thirumalai Pillai Road was made a one-way street, emptying out from GN Chetty Road, about the same time. So was it all that was needed to be done to relieve the traffic congestion?

This photograph was taken a couple of months ago and it looks like it will take at least two more months before this flyover is opened to traffic. Will this flyover also go the way of the one on Usman Road? One hopes not; GN Chetty Road used to have a fair amount of tree cover at this spot. Almost all of it has been stripped away to make space for the flyover and the carriageways on its sides. At that time, there was some consolation in believing that the flyover would help make life better. It would be worse than criminal if it turns out that the solution to the traffic problem lay elsewhere.

And if that does happen, I wonder what the old man in this story (? Fact??) would feel. Or has he been devastated enough, already?

There was one, once

Continuing a bit on the theme of street names, I have to strike closer home. Cenotaph Road, near my apartment, is a short road connecting Mount Road to Kotturpuram. It is very likely that not too many people know what 'cenotaph' means - it is one of those exact words that is used very rarely. I don't think I've heard of it anywhere but with reference to the road in Chennai and in P.B.Shelley's poem 'The Cloud'. Unlike Shelley's Cloud, Lord Cornwallis must be silently fuming at what has become of his Cenotaph in Madras.

When it was first set up, the Cenotaph marked a significant limit of Mount Road, if not its far end altogether. The Cenotaph was a cupola housing a 14-foot high statue of Lord Cornwallis and it was set in the centre of an oval garden. This marked the outer limit of an evening's ride or drive out from Fort St George. For the residents of the Fort, it was a good way to pretend they were in London and the Cenotaph Park was Hyde Park, where they could spend the evening and get back to the Fort before it became really dark. In the 1800s, Cenotaph Road was merely one of the spurs from this park, going down to the Adayar river. Over a couple of centuries, Cenotaph Road became well known, but the Cenotaph itself has been scattered around. The statue of Cornwallis is now in the Fort Museum and it's last cupola, in the photograph, is at the entrance to Fort St George.

Of the cupola that was the centrepiece of the Cenotaph Park, there is no trace. Separated from its shelter, Cornwallis' statue is hidden away inside the Museum. And Cenotaph Road carries on, with just a faint memory of an empty tomb that once stood there!

To please the powers

Naming streets is probably the best way to keep memories of public figures - or events - fresh in the minds of a city's residents. All too often, however, the street name is all that remains in the public eye and the history behind the naming is forgotten (see Eric's comment here!). On top of that, the government at some time in the '70s decided that in the name of secularism, all caste references on street names should be done away with. And so we had some queer situations - Dr.Nair Road officially became Doctor Road, clubbing the co-founder of the Justice Party (from which both the DMK and the AIADMK are descended) with several others; Rangachari Road, Ranga Pillai Road and Ranga Chetty Road all became Ranga Road. Of course, many of those name changes were unable to take hold and several quietly went back to the names they were originally known by.

The politics - and sycophancy - of naming streets is not new to Chennai, though. It has been around ever since the city was born. If you don't believe me, check out the name of streets inside Fort St George; while names like York Street or Charles & James Street honoured the history of the throne of England, special care was taken to ensure a nod to the then reigning house. The House of Hanover already had the fashionable Hanover Square (and Hanover Street) in London named after it; the expatriates in the new city of Madrasapatnam went a step further - they combined both to name this street, ensuring subservience and fashion rolled into one, perhaps!

Seeing is believing

It is rather ironical that if you come here on account of the raison d'être of this institution, you may not be inclined to gaze upon its wonderful heritage buildings. However, you can take consolation in the fact that, given its record, this institution will enable you to do so when you leave its grounds after completing your course of treatment. That's kind of reflected in the motto of the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology and Government Ophthalmic Hospital: "To make the unseen - seen".

While Chennai is justifiably proud of its modern eyecare facilities, the RIOGOH can take especial pride in being the fount of them all. When it was established in 1819, the Madras Eye Infirmary was the second specialized ophthalmic hospital in the world, the first being Moorfields in London, which was opened in 1805. The Madras Eye Infirmary grew, and after being housed out of a couple of temporary facilities moved into these buildings on Marshalls Road in 1884. The first time I went in there was in 1981, when a friend had an accident that badly damaged his eye and the next time was a couple of weeks ago, to take some photographs for the blog.

On my first visit, I was too young - and in too much of a panic mode - to appreciate the heritage of this insititution. I will be back here very soon, for the Elliot's Museum of Ophthalmology seems to be something worth visiting!

Do you know?

Do you know what is special about today? I am sure there cannot be anyone reading this who does not know that today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's 139th birth anniversary. Thanks to a slightly wacky film a couple of years ago, the Mahatma made a rather unforeseen return to the public - especially the younger public - eye. For those born a couple of generations after the Mahatma's passing away, Gandhi Jayanthi meant a national holiday, one on which the liquor stores remained closed and even the five star hotels wouldn't serve you alcohol unless you were a non-Indian with an all-India liquor permit or something of the sort.

Today is also the day on which a national ban on smoking in public places comes into effect. As is usual with so many pieces of legislation, implementation can be tricky - and some state governments have already let the Union Health Ministry know that they will not be able to implement this ban. While it is a good thing overall, the ban notification has some slightly wonky ideas (like empowering a boss to fine a subordinate violating the ban!); one hopes that the zeal to implement it in Chennai lasts for a really long, long while.

Alright, so you knew what was special about the day. Now, do you know what is special about this picture? Okay, I'm away from Chennai and 'making do' with the few photos that I have.... yet, this road has a very close connect with Mahatma Gandhi.... can you guess what that is?

Tailoring to your lines

Sometime ago, a writer in 'The Guardian' wrote that "Syed Bawkher.... must be the best tailor in Asia". That is debatable, surely; I can think of far worse all-expenses-paid assignments than hopping around Asia looking for the perfect suit. In fact, there was a time when it was the general opinion that the best tailors in the world were in Hong Kong. This was due to a large expatriate population there, who claimed they could get better suits in the colony than what came out of Saville Row. True or not, it generated enough word-of-mouth for Hong Kong to be seriously considered a tailoring hot-spot of the world. Soon enough, there was a profusion of 'Hong Kong' tailors in Chennai, including many who had no option but to add the words to their names to survive.

Survival became tougher as off-the-shelf trousers and shirts came to be more freely available; many tailors turned to jobbing for the readymade brands. Some sought out niches - movie costumes, school uniforms, only churidars - and managed to remain afloat. But largely, the whole business of trousers, shirts and suits moved to the readymade segment and custom - rather, 'bespoke' - tailoring began to carry with it a tag of exclusivity and extravagance. But the worry that a bad tailor would spoil the wonderful material has always been a hurdle to experimenting.

While that worry can be put to rest, Syed Bawkher will certainly be expensive; I remember a friend telling me that he paid the price of a decent branded suit just for the tailoring at Syed Bawkher's - the whole affair cost him nearly five times the price of an off-the-shelf suit. He became a convert (in spirit), for now he yearns to have an excuse to get another suit from Syed Bawkhers. In that, he joins me - getting one from them has been a desire for a long time and will probably remain just a desire longer still.

You probably know the deal - the first of each month is 'Theme Day' for the City Daily Photo bloggers. To see how the 164 blogs interpret the theme for October, please visit the CDP Portal.

PS: De-registered from the Theme Day for October, because I wasn't sure if I'd have an appropriate picture archived... guess I should have stayed on!

Sports meet

For a huge majority of Chennai residents, the only connection with a stadium would have been the Rajarathnam Stadium, on Rukmini Lakshmipathy Road (Marshalls Road). Its location makes it a very convenient venue to host a variety of events, including many that have only a tenuous connection to any kind of sport. Selection drills for the Fire Services, award of best performance in Anti-Tobacco program, distribution of vehicles to local government bodies - Rajarathnam Stadium has hosted all such events without batting an eyelid.

Having said all that, nobody from Chennai with any pretentions of being an athlete can ignore this stadium. With most schools not having enough space to conduct a full-fledged sports meet, this stadium has for long been first choice for such activities. It is almost the default venue for any inter-school, inter-college or inter-university track-and-field competition being held in Chennai. Indeed, for a very long while, it was the only one available for such pursuits. On a rare day when there was no event being held in the stadium, it would be filled with several marginal sportspersons - all those who got into various government and quasi-government institutions on the 'sports quota', needing to put in those hours of practice needed to maintain their 'sports quota' presence.

The red-clay track at this stadium has seen some really serious rivalries over the years, between various schools and colleges in the city. These days, one doesn't get to hear about them - either their 'news value' of such events has lessened or the events themselves have; and I do hope it is only the former!

320 years and counting

In the late 17th century accounting and audits were most likely based on subjective assessments of how much money should have been collected (and how it should have been shared). It is not surprising therefore that there were several disagreements among the field officers of the British East India Company and those sitting at headquarters. In fact, the second governor of Madras, Elihu Yale, was constantly harrassed by his London bosses. Streynsham Master, Yale's predecessor, had introduced taxes but after Yale took over, there was a considerable amount of friction over money matters, to the extent that the head office turned to outside help to rein Yale in. (There was quite a bit of ground fo their suspicions; when he returned to England, Yale is reported to have paid £24,000 - in 1699 - as duty for the goods he brought with him).

In 1687, Sir Josiah Child, the Chairman of the Company, succeeded in persuading King James II to issue a Royal Charter creating the Corporation of Madras to administer this new city. Persuasion must have been necessary for, until then, such an institution had not been created anywhere outside Britain and the King would have been reluctant to associate with an experiment happening so far away. But Sir Josiah did succeed and the Charter was issued on December 30, 1687. Yet, it took 9 more months before it could be implemented - the bulk of that period must have been taken up with Elihu Yale negotiating to keep many of his powers. And so, on September 29, 1688, the Corporation of Madras was inaugurated with the Mayor, 12 Aldermen and 29 Burgesses - a considerably mutiracial group they were, comprising Company officers, French, Portugese & Hebrew, as well as 'Gentu' merchants.

The 'experiment' has obviously been successful: the Corporation of Madras became the blueprint for setting up similar institutions in India and elsewhere - another instance of how Madras has been a torchbearer for the world!

Boating on the river

Close to its source, it is associated with godliness; two temples to Lord Shiva, going back to the 10th century CE, were built to take advantage of the clear waters of this river. From there the river travels about 65 km in its search for the sea and has had the ill-luck of choosing a path that takes it through the city of Chennai. Entering the city close to Koyambedu, the Cooum which until then followed a reasonably straight course, twists and bends, almost trying to go out of the city; the city goes with it, though - Arumbakkam, Anna Nagar, Aminjikarai, Nungambakkam, Chetpet, Egmore, Chindadripet, Park Town - all of them coming up along the Cooum's course for various reasons.

Until about 25-30 years ago, Cooum was pleasant; the tourism department maintained boat houses at various points along the river and they were actually used. Even then, some warning noises were being made. A study in 1975 showed that the number of fish species in the river had dropped to less than half, from 49 in the early fifties, to 21. But nobody cared and the city of Madras continued to pour its filth, sewage and industrial effluents into the Cooum, believing she'd be able to bear all of it and more. Over the past decades, she has given up and is today a stagnant cesspool, an embarrassing reminder of the Chennai-ite's unconcern and a potential health-hazard to anyone who ventures too close to it.

There is hope, however. If you want your voice to be heard in support of reviving the Cooum, please speak up at 'Cooum Subbasin Restoration & Management'; this website is expected to provide updates on the progress of the latest World Bank funded 'IAMWARM' project, specific to the revival of the Cooum. I hope that we will once again see the boat house in this photo filled with people, very soon!

Place to stay

Mansion: 2 a (1): manor house (2): a large imposing residence b: a separate apartment or lodging in a large structure. I didn't know about the 'b' meaning, but thanks to Merriam-Webster, I do now. Had always thought of mansion as a huge house with large gardens, occupied by a single family.

Nadar: A caste / community in Tamil Nadu, believed to be able to trace their lineage to the ancient Pandya kings. The word itself means 'ruler of the land' and possibly refers to the title given to those who were vassal chieftains of the Pandya rulers.

Virudhunagar: A town in southern Tamil Nadu that is the headquarters of the district with the same name. Just south of Madurai, this region was one of the earliest strongholds of the Nadar community. Given the community's traditional strengths, it is also a trading hub for both agricultural goods as well as products like matches, cement or textiles.

So where does a Nadar from Virudhunagar stay when he has to come to the state capital to trade? This mansion near the Chennai Central railway station may have been built with that facility in mind, but the trader Nadars of today are likely too well off to be using such accommodation. Being close to the station, it is not a favoured haunt for those who have some kind of permanence in the city - mansions in T.Nagar or Triplicane are more ideal. Here, the space is taken up by some of the hundreds of people who come to Madras every day, in the hope of making their mark.

Cool back

They say that about 25,000 people visit it every day. With that kind of 'footfall', a shopping mall can surely hope for fairly large daily sales turnover figures. One thing to keep in mind about shopping malls in many parts of India is that it would be difficult to correlate visitors to sales, except during the festival season. There are many reasons to visit a shopping mall, but shopping would possibly come at the bottom of the list. Escaping the heat would likely lead all the rest.

All the more so in Chennai, where the heat continues to remain at fairly high levels even in September. So, even though the festive season is at hand, Spencer's Plaza is still seeing a lot of traffic that comes in just to stay cool and hang around, rather than to tick off any shopping list. The airconditioning at the mall must be overworked with all that crowd; this view from across Binny Road shows many individual airconditioning units working to supplement the mall's cooling tower!

Sprucing up

With the festival season coming up, even the small 'temples' are getting a facelift. Here's one in Alwarpet, getting the primer done. In a week, it should be ready to join the festivities in multicoloured glory!

Am going to be away for a few days; hopefully, I'll have access to the Internet and will be able to continue the 'daily' bit of this blog....

Near miss

I'm fairly sure that quite a few incidents like this one happen every day on the roads of Chennai. Traffic being what it is, it is a rare vehicle that does not have the marks of Chennai road-life. As for close shaves, there is no point even thinking about them, because they are too numerous to count. The 2-wheelers snake across the road, even making right-angled turns to get to that patch of tarmac on the lane across, so as to get ahead by those couple of millimetres. The autos believe if their front wheel can get into a space, the rest of vehicle can, too. The buses are by and large immune to prosecution and often throw their considerable weight behind flouting the rules. And then those vehicles ferrying BPO employees, with the threat of penalties for latecoming hanging over their heads, trying to save time all the time.

But you'd expect the off-peak hours traffic to be saner. And it is, usually. But the lighter traffic also lets the regular drivers relax - and that's what seemed to have happened to this bus driver, too. He was moving too slowly to be real and the van thought it a good idea to cut ahead - it was lucky that the bus driver woke up in time - the 'Hhwooornunk' of his brakes got everyone to turn around - including the two bikes in front, who then demonstrated their interpretation of Brownian motion before speeding away!

Hole in the wall

It really looks like it, doesn't it? A tiny shop, marginally broader than its door, with the big signboard at the entrance almost completely faded, it is strangely out of place at the entrance to Thyagaraya Road, one of Chennai's shopping hotspots. If you stop to think about it for a minute, however, you will find that there is nothing incongruous about it at all, this is the way it has to be, with the shops catering to the day-to-day essentials of a household being placed right up front and the other, once-in-a-while items pushed further inside. Problem is, times have changed. This shop would have done roaring business (literally) in the days when powdered spices did not come in handy packets, when everything from pepper to chillies had to be bought whole and then brought in smaller quantities to these shops where they would be ground into fine powders, the ones that make Indian cuisine what it is.

And in those days, you wouldn't dare step away from the shop to watch life go by, because you needed to be sure that your chillies were being done just the way you wanted and that they did not mix with others. Today, even if the shop seems anachronistic, it is good to see it there, offering proof that there are still some really old-fashioned folks in the city!

No bottle cleaning needed

It is surprising how something remains un-noticed for a long, long time and then, all on a sudden, you start seeing it almost everywhere you look. This flower was also one such. I don't remember having ever noticed it until a few weeks ago, while on a walk to the Nanmangalam forest. It looked very nice and it seemed to be an ideal plant that could be grown along boundary walls of houses. Since then, I've spotted it in a couple of other places and for the life of me I can't figure out how I could have missed this flower.

Yet, the flower had some more mystery for me. It was pointed out to me as a bottle-brush flower and so I googled for bottle brush flowers. Of course there were a lot of results, but none of them matched the flower I had seen. They were close, but not an exact match and that was gnawing away at me. It was only over this weekend that, thanks to Dr. Bhanumathi of the MNS that I learnt that I was way off: the bottle-brush flower belongs to a completely different genus altogether and this one was closer to the touch-me-nots rather than bottle-brushes. In fact, it is sometimes called the sickle-bush and is considered a pest, because it is very hardy and its seeds can lie dormant for up to a year. In some parts of the world, unchecked growth of this plant has caused large tracts of agricultural land to become unfit for cultivation.

After getting to know all that, I guess it is good thing that I haven't seen it too often - I will now be happy for us to enjoy the beauty of this flower in small doses!

Open air movie

Chennai has only one drive-in theatre, Prarthana, on the East Coast Road. As I passed that way close to showtime last weekend, I was convinced that I have to either arrive at Prarthana an hour before the show starts or just leave my car somewhere else and walk to the theatre. The rush of vehicles trying to get into the theatre was unimaginable. And with vehicles trying to jump the queue tempers seemed to be on the boil all around. I don't recall it being this bad when I last watched a movie there, about 3 years ago.

The other option for watching a movie in the open, is to head out to one of the Clubs in the city. Almost all of them have a weekend movie show for members and it is usually a recent film that's screened. For a reluctant movie goer like me, it is a good option to go to the Madras Race Club and catch up on a recent Tamil, Hindi or English movie over a couple of drinks. The movies are shown old style, with at least a couple of changes of the film reels on the projector, when the screen goes blank, and folks use that time to refill their orders of drinks or snacks. When there are friends around, it is nice to continue sitting on the lawn after the movie over a slowish Saturday dinner. Yesterday, it was difficult to resist the temptation to go, for the movie was 'Jaane tu ya jaane na' - we arrived early enough to make sure we got good seats.

A movie here comes with a small drawback, though. The Club is right under one of the landing paths to the Chennai airport. As the aircraft comes from behind the screen, you might not get distracted with its light; but when it roars overhead, you can be sure that you'll miss a couple of words from the dialogue!