22 August 1639 was the day the city of Madras was formed through a transaction between Day & Cogan and Beri Thimmappa. The Madras Week in August is a popular annual event today. Here’s a tribute to the city by V Ramnarayan.
A magnifi cent stretch of sand and bright blue sea is the most visible physical feature of Chennai. Among the longest beaches in the world, the Marina has for hundreds of years been the local residents’ refuge from the sweltering heat and humidity.
Many of the buildings on the promenade are impressive examples of architecture that blends western and Indian traditions, a legacy of the British empire, with the Madras University, Presidency College and Queen Mary’s College, prominent among them.
Within walking distance of the Marina is the Parthasarathi Swami temple, and just a long run away is the Kapaleeswara temple of Mylapore—but two of the city’s many temples, churches, mosques and other places of worship. Somewhere in between is the Santhome Church, while a sizable Muslim minority offer their prayers in the Triplicane mosque, again within easy reach of the beach— each of these a splendid tribute to the city’s multi-cultural ethos.
Triplicane was home to at least two great sons of pre-independence Madras: Subrahmanya Bharati, the fi ery poet and Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematical genius of world fame. In Mylapore was born a couple of centuries earlier, Tiruvalluvar, the saint-poet famous for his Tirukkural, a compendium of 1330 couplets.
While Tanjavur was once the cultural capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, today the centre of gravity has shifted to Chennai, whose December music and dance “season” is probably unparalleled for size and diversity of programming. The city is also a bustling film producer, with the second largest movie industry in India. The Tamil fi lm industry has also been a continuous supply line of politicians at the state level, including a few chief ministers down to the present one.
Fast emerging as India’s Detroit, with Ford and Hyundai setting up manufacturing bases here, Chennai is also an important centre of computer software, IT and IT enabled services, second only to Bangalore, and second for reasons not of talent, but of locational advantage, in which the Karnataka capital scores better, thanks mainly to its pleasant climate.Chennai is a sports-conscious city, with a large number of passionate enthusiasts of cricket, followed closely by a burgeoning chess community, led by Viswanathan Anand, one of the world’s best players.
The city has a great tradition in tennis as well, with the Krishnans – Ramanathan and Ramesh – the pride of India and the Davis Cup. Just the other day, the Indians led by the ageless pair Paes and Bhupathi put it past Brazil.The city has some of the best cricket grounds in India, most of them developed and maintained by corporate patrons of
Presidency College
the game on college campuses, a unique brand of industry-institution cooperation. Chennai also has excellent, world standard facilities for other ball games, track and fi eld and aquatic events, golf courses and even a top class motor racing track not far from the city. Tennis, squash, badminton, table tennis, fi eld hockey, soccer, athletics, beach volleyball, swimming and sailing are some of the popular sporting activities.
Tamil Nadu has a talented cricket team, which fi gures prominently in the national championship and the M A Chidambaram Stadium, the headquarters of cricket in the state, has been the venue, since the 1930s, of several international matches and the cricket World Cup.
Chennai is an important centre of school and higher education. The State government sponsored mid-day meal scheme has for decades been a model for third world countries to emulate in their attempts to spread literacy and ensure nutrition for the children of their poor.
In addition to conventional, state approved streams of schooling, the city has had the benefi t of the pioneering initiatives of some of the fi nest educationists of modern times. The great Italian, Maria Montessori, introduced her world- renowned method of education designed to exploit the potential of a child to the fullest extent, to students and teachers she trained here, thus laying the foundation for the Montessori movement in India.
Eminent thinker J Krishnamurti, who founded the Rishi Valley in nearby Andhra Pradesh, spent many productive years at Chennai; the school run by the Krishnamurti Foundation is another important landmark of Adyar. Not far from there is the Kalakshetra Foundation, an international institution founded in the 1930s by Rukmini Devi Arundale, dancer, dance teacher, choreographer and institution builder extraordinaire. The Guindy Engineering College, now part of Anna University, the colleges of Madras University, the Indian Institute of Technology, and autonomous institutions like Madras Christian College, Loyola College and Women’s Christian College are among the oldest and fi nest centres of graduate and post graduate education in India.
The Chennai Central Railway Station.
Amazingly,some of these are among the oldest modern institutions of learning in the world!
There are ever so many other things
that Chennai is famous for—from
its ubiquitous Udipi restaurants
specialising in idli-dosa-vada and
south Indian “degree” coffee, its
many silk sari shops and jewellers, a
great variety of entertainment options
covering dance, drama, music and
cinema, religious discourses, Gita
lectures, yoga, pranayama, reiki and
pranic healing, a bewildering array of
martial arts, alternative medicine and
healing systems, both indigenous and
exotic.The British Council, Alliance
Francaise, Max Mueller Bhavan
and the American Consulate, all of
them in the forefront of cultural
interchange between India and these
countries, have over the decades
succeeded in bringing some of the
leading artists, poets, authors and other men and women of eminence to perform for and interact with the
residents of Chennai.
The Chennai climate is healthy, by and large, and its standards of hygiene are of an acceptable standard. The Madras Medical College and the General Hospital are institutions with a rich history, and the city is today the home of some of the best medical talent in the country, and of a number of excellent diagnostic centres and hospitals. A whole new hospitality industry has grown in the last couple of decades around the thousands of patients (and their families) coming to Chennai from all parts of India for specialised treatment.
The illustrations here are by Manohar Devadoss, Chennai’s celebrity artist who suffers from severe visual impairment.