Fresh meat

Weekend mornings normally see large queues in front of the highly fragmented meat shops like this one, where one can pick up as little as 100 g of meat, literally fresh off the block. There are obviously several hundreds of such shops in Chennai, some of them opening only on select days - and each of them manages to get by with its niche clientele. The weekends are busy days for obvious reasons; with almost no school allowing students to bring in non-vegetarian food, children can only enjoy that at home - and in many households, that means during lunch time.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has prescribed minimum standards for intake of food varieties based on the Recommended Daily Allowance for different minerals and essential nutirents. The debate on the correlation between consumption and the extent of RDA met rages on, but in the absence of any other standard measure, consumption figures are used for determining nutritional standards across the country.

The ICMR has recommended that per-capita consumption of meat should be 0.75 kg / month; no state in India is anywhere close to that figure. At 0.35 kg / month, however, the consumption of meat in urban areas of Tamil Nadu is the second highest in the country, behind Jammu & Kashmir (way behind - J&K comes in at 0.56 kg/m). The figure in rural areas is much less, and the ranking drops sharply: stretching that a little bit, it might be true that Chennai has the highest consumption of meat in any city in the country!

You get what you see

If this picture makes you drool, you are a true Madrasi. Even though it is nothing more than boiled peanuts and a few strips of semi-ripe mangoes, the memories that a Madrasi associates with the thenga-manga-pattani-sundal are far too numerous to mention.

Unlike the earlier jhal-mudi seller, this vendor is slightly more traditional. Only that he is at Eliots Beach and not at the Marina, the birthplace of the sundal. And no, you won't be successful at getting a true Madrasi to think that sundal could have been thought of anyplace else!

Collectors' item

The forecourt is on similar lines to that of the Casino, but this one pre-dates the Casino by quite a few years. Unlike the Casino, the 'Electric Theatre', built by Reginald Eyre and Warwick Major had a very short run; it screened its first silent film in 1913 and fell silent for the last time in 1915. It is said that its drapes were in blue and red, tricked out with silver stars. Major and Eyre did not pay too much attention to the social aspects of going to the movies; the foyer was very narrow, with almost the entire building being used up as the screening hall. It appears this plan left very little space for the patrons to mingle and critique the film.

That alone may not have been the cause for the 'Electric Theatre' to close shop. Maybe the name did not lend itself to a feeling of joy - and that must have been sharply accentuated when 'Gaiety' opened in 1914, just behind the Electric Theatre. Major and Eyre did try to make up - was it they who pioneered the concept of differential pricing, for they created 5 classes of seating, including one for women in the purdah, sheltered from the others. Well, the division could more likely have been to reflect the society's caste system at that time, so that might have been a gambit to recover from an early error of mingled seats. But you can't fault them for bringing in the best caterer in Madras at the time - that's right, the Hotel d'Angelis - to run an open air bar and cafe in the garden besides the building.

None of it seemed to help the partners keep the business going. In 1915, they sold the building to the Government, to be developed as the Mount Road Main Post Office. Luckily, the Post Office has retained the building in its original shape and style - and you can even go in to get a double dose of history, looking at the old postage stamps and then looking up to see if you can spot the place where the electric lamp used for projection, which gave the theatre its name, was placed!

Summer showers...

...are back!

Sharp, concentrated but thankfully very brief, these showers are a by-product of the South West monsoon. They bring down the temperature, hold up everyone on the streets; if you're wise you will not leave the strorefront you're holed up in. Chennai residents will know these showers last only a few minutes so it is worth waiting it out rather than get drenched and look foolish for the rest of the day.

There're still a couple of months to go before Chennai's monsoon sets in, but any Chennai resident will be glad to have showers of this kind every day - the heat is still ruling at fairly high levels!

Old fashioned

Early morning, by the side of a road just outside Chennai. Farmers here continue to use these tools - the hoe and the ploughshare - for their small landholdings. The oxen were taking a break from the ploughing, grazing nearby.

The city will catch up with them very soon. Too soon.

Quite amusing

New Delhi is often touted as having had the first amusement park - Appu Ghar - in the country, but Chennai can stake a reasonably valid claim to that fame, too. I shall keep the story of VGP's Golden Beach for another day, but it did give rise to many other such amusement parks in the city. Several of them have gone under, but there are still about three or four which continue to draw in the crowds.

Queen's Land (in whatever way it is spelt, they're themselves not sure of it) is a fairly recent entrant, having opened only in 2004. It has a great first mover advantage in location, being on the NH4 - most of the others are on the East Coast Road. One can see the cable cars from the road a short while before seeing the park's signboard; it is quite tempting to stop the vehicle and get on to a couple of rides - though I don't think too many people do that. Planned visits are more the norm than not.

I've never been to this park, but I have been rather amused by their website, which says "...it is a place really worth spending your valuable time with. Every one will accept the fact being the valuable money that is being spent by our valuable visitors had fetched more value."

Russian Century

For a bunch of kids who grew up in the Madras of the '70s and early '80s, New Century Book House was a place where one could get some excellent books. The only condition was that one should not be too choosy about the author or the characters, for almost all the books at NCBH were translations of Russian works. I should say 'Soviet' works, for those were the days when India's 'non-alignment' meant a special friendship with the USSR: the books from the Soviet lands must have been heavily subsidized, for none of them cost more than Rs.10. Even in those days, it was quite a bargain.

And so there was a huge collection built up. 'Tales from the North Sea', Tolstoy's 'Stories for Children', 'The Fire Bird' - these are some of the books that I can see on my shelf even today, as I write this. There were others, very many that are packed away in cartons because they have become dog-eared over several years of being read by different generations. Names such as Vanya, Kostya, Shurik, Lyka and Nyura became very familiar from all the stories they appeared in. But it was not all 'story-books'; Vygodsky's 'Mathematical Handbook' was a completely different perspective from what the schools taught us. Ya. Perelman's 'Mathematics can be Fun' is still captivating enough for my son to pore over.

USSR has been gone a long time now and the 'special friendship' has moved shores. The NCBH too does not stock those Soviet titles any more. I hope they are doing well, but they have moved across the road from where their rather roomy bookshop used to be, to a slightly hole-in-the-wall location - the only bright thing appears to be their signboard!