Security fencing

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!

Remember the fallen

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 - வெற்றி - 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!

Sparkling bright

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!

A bit of France?

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'!

Is fragrant frangipani?

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!

Here comes the train

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!

Two epics and a long life

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!