The plight of Chennai baays with rgds to gerls

North Indians, and these days, even non-tamils accuse Chennai of being an ultra-conservative place which stubbornly refuses to give up its traditions and accept change. I could not agree more. It is the truth that they speak. There can be no doubt.

Wherein does this character, one of the many traits that sets this city apart, arise? I have spent long hours wondering why this city is so unique. It has to do with the social mindsets and the collective character of the people I suppose. While the rest of the country tries so hard (and so miserably fails) to make itself into one of those ever-so-common westernized megalopolises, Chennai dances to its own tune. People still wear shirts n lungis with the quintessential gold/silver dangling watch, they sing heavy-beats-ulla gaana songs, they have their own superstars and fanclubs, they have their own foodstuffs and most importantly, this is kind of all they want. No Chennaite would really want the city to change its character too much and become another one of those frantic also-wanna-be-important kind of cities. I always think that the single bond Chennai shares with the rest of India is the love for cricket. (So please, next time you curse the Indian cricketers, keep in mind that they are the single thin thread preventing India from falling into chaos and anarchy.) Of course, Chennai is willing to adopt changes. It took to the FM radio boom, the telecom boom etc.. like fish to water. But things like burgers, hairdyes and other such stuff make a quintessential Chennaite recoil with horror. There is a substantial class of west-influenced influential people emerging who like such things. But these people, for now at least, also make the quintessential Chennaite recoil with horror.

Though I am a die-hard Chennaite, I think it would be stupid to not recognize that the city does have its share of problems. The auto-kaara-thollai, water problem, waterways(!) problem, pathetic civic conditions in slums, the poor roads, the environmental degradation and kamal hasan’s ever increasing thoppai are social problems that are craving for attention. But being a valiban (youth) who is in the middle of his university life, one problem for me which completely out-prioritizes all of the above: THE COMPLETELY PATHETIC QUALITY OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN GERLS ANDU BAAYS. Phew! Now that we are done with the rather long intro, I can go on to address the issue at hand.

I studied in a Chennai brahmin school. It was a reasonable school at least when I was young. It gave a student a lot of things that he or she needed to succeed in the globalized world of today. In other words, it was adequate in most respects, with the single most important exception being the school toilets (refer previous post on school toilets). One thing the school did not arm us with is the ability to effectively communicate with members of the opposite sex. While all cool and arrogant when it comes to talking with boys, I come out a cropper when it comes to flirting with girls. This has proved a major source of embarrassment throughout my life. And for this I blame 2 things:- Chennai in general and my school in particular.

To give you a better picture let me take you through my years in school. In the really young days, it was all fine. There wasn’t too much of a gulf between boys and girls. The podees were said with the same nonchalance as podas. Hitting, biting, scratching, shouting at girls was considered no big a deal and was done on quite a regular basis. But things changed ominously when we entered the fourth standard. The girls in my class seemed to have developed a sudden sense of kinship and had started seeing themselves as one homogeneous group, at least in relation to boys. All of a sudden, the benches in the classroom were segregated. The girls were given the finer part of the class, thanks to teachers who being all women, loved this kind of thing and actively encouraged the girls in their efforts. The boys were relegated to the less strategic positions away from windows, away from exits and most crucially closer to the teachers. The boys of course resented this and responded with an equal feeling of group kinship against the girls. There was laid the beginnings of the dharma yudhdham (war for justice).

I have always thought about why the girls had all of a sudden become so clannish. I could find little constructive explanations. It was certainly not because they had come of age and knew something about life which boys didn’t. The only explanations I could come up with was they had been heavily influenced by their mothers who had probably ganged up and asked the girls to expel boys from their lives. The mothers, who were basically of the maami type, must have felt that there daughters were growing up fast and this was the age to cut off interactions with boys if they were to avoid “dangerous” problems such as boyfriends and relationship messes. Relationships were, and still are, a big taboo among the older generation of Chennai. (I know of many instances when parents of girls took drastic steps like moving out of their houses/ changing schools to stop their girls from being corrupted by negative influences such as relationships.) Of course, reading and watching all the feminist bullshit that dominates the media, especially in the afternoon slots when menfolk are not at home, could have been a catalyst in prompting the maami mothers to warn their girls. (In fact, I’d blame these afternoon talk shows/megathodars as the single most important reason for increasing divorce rates in India).

Whatever be the reason, there now developed a cold war like situation class with girls and boys unofficially forbidden to interact with each other. With this kind of group formation, girls and boys developed their own subcultures which became increasingly divergent with time. To elaborate, the girls became more interested in cooking foods, in comparing the taste of each other’s lunches and comparing their mom’s cooking abilities, in discussing the merits of maavudu pickle over lemon pickle, in tamil films featuring actors like Madhavan and in how their family members interact with each other (These i gleaned from nuggets of conversation I overheard due to the proximity of the group of girls to my bench). In short, they were practising and honing their skills in talking paatikadhais (aka kezhattukadhais) in which they were almost certainly going to indulge in the future. Boys’ conversations were on a wide variety of topics including things like the Pokhran blasts, the situation in Serbia and the splitting of Yugoslavia, the latest video games, capitalism and communism, latest sports feeds (mostly cricket), the effects of WW-II etc.. etc.. The point being, the 2 groups were talking about totally different things and effective communication between the 2 groups was not only undesirable, but now even impossible.

This kind of situation persisted over the next 7 years at least. It peaked at around 8th to 9th standards. This was the period when most of the girls became women. They knew something about life which us boys didn’t. Well, not all. There were these over-enthusiastic boys who had a really keen interest in biology, especially of the human kind. This effect was clearly noticed when these boys, who normally were at the bottom of the grades, somehow managed to top the class in certain tests in biology. I myself was somewhat exposed. I had a rough idea, with some rough experience, but I certainly did not know the nitty-gritties of the subject. The girls became immensely proud of the fact that they were now more mature and knew stuff which the average boy had no idea about. When one of these pad companies, (Whisper I think) organised a talk in school exclusively for girls, there would be an atmosphere of total secrecy. The girls would come back with flushed faces and a strange light shining in their face as if they had just attained nirvana. Us boys would be really curious and forgetting our ego would ask the girls what the talk was about. The girls would invariably give answers like it was about the latest jewelery fads or on how to keep your nails clean or something. Of course, each girl gave a different answer and if the girls were in a group, the answers were invariably followed with low giggles and impish looks on their faces.

I myself, being a different and original thinker and all made an attempt to break the shackles of this divide. I was, I regret to say, influenced by the very basic tenets of feminist thought (only the VERY basic I assure you). I tried to borrow some notes from a girl for start. Guess what, I was instantly paired up with this girl. And for a boy that age, there could be no bigger insult I tell you. And even more shockingly, the girl almost ended up proposing to me. Of all the ridiculous things. What on earth did she have in mind anyway. I mean, what could a quintessential Chennai payal like me have done with her anyway, even if I had accepted the proposal. That day was truly a nightmare. From that day, I decided to avoid that girl, nay all girls, at all costs. And to my slight regret, I was too good to this promise. And I still am reeling from the effects.

This cold war would subside only at around 10th to 11th standards when the hormones of girls as well as guys would start kicking in big time. Suddenly, you would find girls and guys who hated the guts of each other earlier, flirting with each other coyly and talking of the most irrelevant things (yech!!). It was double standards in its purest form and made me really question the meaning of life. However the damage was done already. Most of the boys, who did not have large extended families with lots of cousins of the opposite gender found they could no more talk to girls on a friendly basis. It was always a business like tone. The few attempts at flirting would sound so half-baked that most sensible boys never attempted it. The few who did have a lot of female company however took it upon themselves to compensate these non-flirting boys. The net result was, most guys and girls kept to themselves. There were these few guys and girls who would spend their entire final years in school life flirting their (and others) heads off. This became the omnipresent, omnipotent Peter gang. Although, it must be said a few of these non-flirter, attracted by the fast life, somehow managed to bridge the communication gap with great difficulty and join the Peter gang.

I myself remained one of those non-flirters who felt clueless when confronted with the task of making small talk to girls. It was a skill that I would have preferred to have had, but would have restrained myself in exercising. Unfortunately, I was never given the choice. You can imagine the extent of the problem when I say that I never spoke a single word to my cousin from Delhi who visited and stayed in my house for a couple of days. And when I left India, to a land where girls and boys consider themselves equal in every way (!) and talk freely to each other, I felt sorely disadvantaged. I could not socialize with anyone at all even if I wished to. And, worst of all, I am relegated to having to go for an arranged marriage without even being able to give love a chance. Who is to blame for all my problems?? Good old Chennai for being so shamelessly conservative, the school for encouraging this kind of mindset, the mother maamis for encouraging their girl children and the girls themselves for being dumb enough to take their mother maamis seriously.

At least, I am learning how to flirt in my college. What is worse is many of the city boys are being denied this opportunity even in their college. Many of the city’s dime a dozen ginger-watering (injineering) colleges have completely banned interaction between boys and girls. This is totally despicable. There are places where you must adapt to global views and places you mustn’t. This kind of repression probably did not exist even 100 years back in some of the city colleges. This kind of a patronizing attitude is simply unwelcome. If you can trust a student enough to let him drive on the road without killing fellow commuters, if you trust him enough to vote a government (of course, no guarantees here that the student isn’t killing someone), I do not see why you should not trust a student in not raping every girl he has the chance to meet and befriend. It is difficult to think of who to blame. Do we blame people like Jeppiar who come with such insane rules? Or, do we blame parents who send their children willingly to such places? Or do we blame the students themselves for being soft enough to let such things happen to them? It is this kind of aagatum-vidu (chod-do i think) attitude that is one of the primary causes of all discrimination that exists today. The inability to stand up to your beliefs makes you a mental slave. But i do not wish to get too philosophical. Since, no matter how stupid one is, no one likes being preached to.

I end this post with an appeal to readers. If you are a young attractive female, and you have tips on how boys should go on about making small talk to girls with relevant examples, please feel free to email me! Its kusumpee@gmail.com.

Indian names are going extinct..

This is a short post, compared to previous ones. It is more like an addition to the previous post, West is best, we are waste.

One among the very many things that I dislike about north indians is their names. 90% of male hindu names can be grouped under ‘Ram’, ‘Rahul’, ‘Varun’, ‘Akshay’, and ‘Akash’. The rest of the names (or nicknames) can be categorized as dog names like ‘Honey’, ‘Lucky’, ‘Jimmy’, ‘Rinky’ etc.. etc.. Such names have evolved due to a necessity to make the names sound more compatible with the “modern” western names that dominate the media. And this of course can be attributed to the unnaturally high regard that we have on westerners. This used to be an essentially cow-belt and northeast related problem. Sikhs (struck off due to discoveries made later), South Indians, Muslims etc.. largely avoided this trend.

But this is slowly changing, at least in Tamil Nadu. While TN is still not quite prepared to accept dog names, most upwardly mobile communities have started choosing sanskritic names like the above mentioned for their children, giving up on the tamil names that used to dominate nameplates even 50 years ago. We hardly find kids with names like ‘Meenakshisundaram’, ‘Anbazhagan’, ‘Pazhaniappan’ or even ‘Murugan’ these days. Names like ‘Akash’, ‘Pranav’, ‘Ashwin’, ‘Rahul’ etc.. are ruling the roost in report cards in schools. The only reason that could be attributed to this trend is the role of the media in portraying rich people as having names such as the above followed by a wealthy north indian family name. This can of course be originally attributed to our vellaikara (white) worshiping nature. South Indians too have caught on with this trend. After all, would parents want their children to be associated with the bumbling pattai+soda buddi wearing Meenakshi Sundaram, or the suave, debonair Rahul Singhania (I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the name of a famous real person, though I have not heard of anyone myself).

And nowadays, tamil movies are promoting their own version of ths trend. The first name should be sanskritic/suave while the second name should be a proper tamil sounding name. I am thinking of Santosh Subramaniam, Govind Ramasamy, Sanjay Ramasamy, and for that matter Surya Sivakumar. Of course tamil names have not entirely lost out, but if i suggest alternative names Muthukaruppan, Anbuchelvan, Sundaramoorthy etc.. I’m sure the person you had in mind would be different from the first lot. While the first lot may represent rich and succesful city bred youths, the 2nd set of names is more likely to conjure up images of middle class, middle age working people. This again boils down to branding. The same kind of branding that I have talked about in at least a couple of my earlier posts. To tell ourselves that Muthukaruppan can never grow up to be a suave, “successful” young man is like killing our ego and blindly following others without rhyme or reason. It suggests a lack of pride inside us and gives us away weak people no matter how much we try to cover it up.

West is best. We (Indians) are waste.

West is best. We are waste. This is one of the most important lessons that people around me have tried to convey to me throughout my life…

India is reeling under a wave of westernisation. The social impact of this wave is far greater than any tsunami can manage. It has made society simply unsociable. These are my experiences as a Chennai m-class boy watching the people around me change and change for worse due to the vellaikara (white man) worshiping nature of our folks.

In the past (pre 1990 era), westernisation existed primarily among the middle and upper class folks in the city. Even this group was not particularly westernised. They had studied semi-modern courses in semi-modern colleges. They spoke english with reasonable fluency. They wore western clothes. And adapted certain western eating habits such as eating with fork and spoon, watching the english movie casetttes and listening to english songs, reading books primarily by western authors etc.. etc.. But they certainly were more Indian than western. They watched Indian movies and listened to Indian songs, spoke primarily in Indian languages and preferred Indian food. I am sure you get my point. But our older generation was chiefly responsible for one thing:- for feeding themselves and the younger generations the idea that West is Best. If you cant beat them, be them they thought. This idea has persisted in the minds of most Indians. The word “foreign” mentioned even nonchalantly in any conversation on literally any subject will result in a gamut of feelings such as respect, wariness, wonder, envy etc.. inside most Indians. I am not totally anti-west and I do recognize merits in western life. I can understand the logic behind preferring Swiss watches to Titan watches and French wine to Indian. But when it comes to blind worship of everything western, I find it humorous and also ego-inducing.

Let me illustrate with examples. Knowing Italian/French/German is a hip and useful skill while learning languages like Japanese or mandarin never evokes any reaction. (I know this because I have relatives who speak these languages). Reading Shakespeare, Chaucer etc.. is considered the epitome of literary achievement while reading Kalidasa’s works or Tolkappiyam makes one an impractical ancient (although the relevance of learning archaic english or sanskrit/archaic tamil is about the same. Useless). Someone who asks “Excuse me. Will you please show me the way to the High Court?” is a learned gentleman while someone who asks “Yenga. High Court pogarthukku vazhi konjam sollamudiyuma” is a country mendicant (pattikadu payal). An Indian of worth, is worthy in the eyes of the people only if he wears a coat and suit with a necktie (in all the friggin heat) in public. Western clothes and languages make a man wealthy while Indian clothes and languages make him rich. One of the most irritating things I have observed is the use of westerners to legitimize your products as world class. How many ads in the newspapers and television feature westerners (especially women) advertising educational courses and depict them in 3-d models of apartments where their presence has no relevance at all. I hope I am communicating my ideas.

Liking western products because they are of a better quality is one thing. But liking western products/adapting western customs because westerners do them is quite another. It shows a very visible inferiority complex and a lack of pride. People with such an inferiority complex can best be described as sheep. They try to prove to the crowd that they are unique while conforming at all times to societal norms. They may try to prove to the world that they have a personality. The truth is they don’t. If you accuse them of being too lazy in their work, they will defend themselves showing how hard they work and how stressful their life is. On the other hand, if you say they spend too much time on their work and accuse them of not knowing how to enjoy their lives, they will point out that there is hardly any stress in work and go on to give a list of activities to prove they have been slacking. Hope you can follow my thoughts.

The pre-90s generation as I pointed out, can only be accused of west worshiping. The current generation is producing people who are more like westerners who have lived a few years in India. They are Indianised westerners in all but ethnicity. And the reason for this vast gulf is simple. The economic liberalization policy led to the international media invasion of India’s airwaves and correspondingly greater exposure to western lifestyle. And our Indian people, in their never ending quest to become the most happening person in town, coupled with their west-is-best convictions, have embraced with 2 arms and 2 legs everything that western media throws at them. I know this for a fact because I myself fell for the western media invasion. It started with WWF (now WWE), and then onto to shows like Doogie Howser, and then onto Friends and all the other shit that was shown on star world. Now obviously these programs had far greater entertainment value than anything on Indian channels. So naturally youngsters lap it all up. But the problem arises when they start to imitate the behaviour of the people they see on screen. I myself did not fall into this trap. This was because of 3 things mainly. While I completely enjoyed the humorous aspects of these shows, I always was a rather contented person and never tried to be like anybody else. (I have never had a single idol or even inspiration in my life.) Also, I like innovative stuff and that is the only thing that I like. So, I enjoyed watching these serials only until the jokes did not bore me. Once they got repetitive, I became disinterested. Finally, I started watching much earlier than any of my classmates or friends and stopped watching around the time they started en mass. So I conveniently missed the mass hysteria factor which made these shows so popular in the first place. While some of the body language did rub off on me, it was nowhere near the extent to which my friends in school were influenced. There used to be this big gang of english speaking peter uttufying (showing off) people in school and half their conversations used to consist of slapstick humor which you always thought you had heard sometime before in Friends. It was so totally irritating and unoriginal. There entire social interactions were modeled on the brand of friendship that was promoted in (u guessed it) Friends. I am an extremely sensitive person and my conversation with these people were kept to a bare minimum of a few words per month.

And now, when I hear my friends and peers talk, half the time it makes my blood boil. This blind acceptance of western ideas without any attempt to rationalize has left me bewildered at the stupidity of the people. All of a sudden, introducing words like “fuck”,”bastard”, “you-know-lyke” etc etc into every damn single conversation has become uber and is a sign that you are in with the times. All of a sudden teenage sex, live-in relationships, homosexual arrangements etc are being spoken of as an everyday occurrence and are treated with an unnerving nonchalance. Ask any young teenager who their fav actor or actress is and you’ll invariably hear answers like Jessica Alba, Elisha Cuthbert etc.. (don’t quite know about hot male actors myself).. Local actresses are mostly seen as cheap. Its amazing how they have been so completely sold the idea of beauty=blond+blue-eyes+flat-tummies+round-curves. (Of course you can come across the occasional delusional chap who professes his love for hindi actresses, but he is after all delusional and his opinions should be of no further account.) This while things such as arranged marriages and other “real” social problems are discarded as archaic and frivolous issues. I myself am not expressing my own feelings about any of these subjects, but I do recognize that these are issues of considerable importance. This kind of westernisation could lead (nay, they are leading) to a potentially drastic restructuring of society and social values. This could mean that the generation after us may not enjoy an upbringing which our own generation (mostly) so cherishes and remembers. Surely it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that western family values are pretty messed up? I have met at least 2 westerners who claimed they do not even interact with their parents. And here we look upon family as the single most important life-support-system. But with increasing individuality and hyped up expectations of these youngsters, it is difficult to imagine how future families will have the same kind of sanctity they we have now. I am thinking the day is not far when we shall see urban India turning into another clone of America.

Everytime I see my younger siblings when returning to India, I am filled with concern. They are turning slowly, but surely, into spoilt brats who do everything that one expects of an Indian teen. They speak long hours on the phone. They simply love foods like pizzas, burgers, pasta etc.. and they reject Indian food as boring. I have always wondered why Indian youngsters are so enamored with even cheap foods like burgers and fries. I myself have had them, do not mind them and occasionally do eat them. But news announcing the possibility of arrival of a McDonalds in Chennai never evoked in me the same rapture that it did in my schoolmates. Actually, I knew why they were so taken in. The food has been marketed and completely sold to them by the new media. But what I do not understand it is how they were gullible enough to be so completely taken in by foods that do not even offer significant nutritious benefits.

Since I have already conveyed most of what I wanted to convey and also because it is 7 am in the morning, I shall end with a brief conclusion. I am simply sick, when people label everything western as cool and everything else is treated as if its not worth their time. I hope people can understand that what counts is not the prestige value associated with things, but the concept of originality and innovation. Originality and innovation is what has taken us “forward” for so many millenia. And o&i can exist anywhere, even in a gaana song or in making an idli or in anything else you can think of. I hope people can recognize this and stop being gullible enough to buy everything they are sold. And we certainly should give up this attitude of having westerners endorse and tell us that “dabbawalahs are an extremely efficient organisation” or “tamil/sanskrit is a beautiful language” before we recognize these facts ourselves.

Toy(let) Story. Toilet travails of young student boy

I studied in a brahmin school in Chennai. It was an iyer (aka eyre) school. For people who know more about tamil brahmins, it was an iyengar school. Teaching all good only. But one problem, orey problem. The toilets sucked. Here I chronicle a valiba pallikooda payanin adrenaline pumping toilet pogum kadhai.

I shit in the school toilet only once in my whole life and this was among the most horrible experiences I ever had to endure in my life. First having to hold the matters in the middle of class until my mental self was writhing in agony and my physical self was about to give way. Having to endure images of chocolate icecreams, shaving foam, brown camel paint, snake vedi (a firecracker that does not crack) etc.. etc.. while in the middle of the class. Then there was this business of asking the teacher maami permission. “Maam, I think my tooth broke. It is bleeding. Please may I go to toilet to wash my mouth.”. Hearing the teacher maami’s reply. “Chee. Wokay wokay. You go.” Then there was this mad rush to find a suitable PET-style waterbottle from a friend accompanying with profuse apologies and promises of compensation. Then there was the mad sprint to the toilet. Then there was the realization that some uncouth bastard had already used it and like a good Chennai boy, had decided to save up on the water. Then bearing with the smell, there was the tearing down your pants before they were soiled part and concurrently finding a suitable place to put them. Then, finally, letting it all go in one big blast. Then discovering that the hole can only eject a certain quantum of shit at a time. Then realising how painful late realization can be. Then waiting for the pain to subside and proceeding to eject more carefully and with correspondingly greater agony the remaining matter. Then washing your bum area. (This was the only pleasant part). Then gingerly putting on your trousers and belt with only your right hand. Then discovering that there was no soap available to wash. Then finding the nearest newspaper to wipe your hands for temporary relief. Then brainstorming the most probable place where soap would be available. Then realising that the only place would be the canteen’s detergent powder. Then sneaking into the canteen’s washing area nonchalantly as if taking a stroll. Then waiting for the opportune moment when the canteen lady starts putting kadalai (flirting) with the watchman to swipe off some washing soap. Feeling its disgusting texture. Then, washing the already dry hand vigorously, all the while convinced that your hand is still smelling as if you had shit on your hand itself. Returning to class and facing awkward questions and giving equally awkward answers. Spending the rest of the day sulking and keeping your left hand as far away from the body as possible. The hellish experience only ends when you reach your home and take a hot bath. From that day on, I made a vow, which I steadfastly stuck to. Whenever I had to take a call from nature regarding the urgent matters, I would brush up my histrionic skills and go to the teacher and complain of a severe headache. Lying in this case was totally justified. After all, there was an ache. Only the description of the position was slightly skewed.

I end with a public interest appeal to principals of all Chennai schools. When you construct schools, please also spend some money on the toilets. When you construct toilets, try to understand that people don’t use it only for ‘one’ purpose. Please place a container with liquid soap at a wash basin. If you don’t have a wash basin, please build one. Alternatively, you could fleece us from this situation also by having a soap vending machine. Even more alternatively, you could have a roll of toilet paper. But please, if you install a roll of toilet paper, do put up instructions on how to use it, preferably a pictorial description. We are Chennai baays only. We no using toilet paper. Wonly hand. To be more specific, wonly left hand.

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The changing face of T.Nagar, Chennai

T.Nagar of yore was a good old bastion of middle and upper middle class folk that represented everything that was quintessentially Madras. Giving an address in T.Nagar meant that you would invariably spot a look of envy in fellow Chennaites. And for good reason.

The grand old tamil-style houses that were in their own way elegant, the shady avenues, wonderful public places like somasundaram ground and jeeva park, the interesting neighbours and the highly infective atmosphere of lazy luxury. Could there possibly be a more fairy-tale like setting for a family? In rural areas, maybe, but I don’t think it would have been possible in too many other places in cities. And needless to say, If life ever became too mundane, one only had to take a small walk to Ranganathan street and Pondy Bazaar and presto, you would have enough adrenaline pumping action (ofc i’m exaggerating) to last a week. The above places were crowded even in those early days I hear, though probably not as filled with toxic fumes as they are now.

My father grew up along with his seven siblings in a grand old house in R road with a huge garden and shady and climb-worthy sapotta and mango trees. There was a large space where the entire neighbourhood boys used to gather for a game of cricket in the evenings. Relatives, young and old, were swarming the place and it was simply unmatched fun just to be in the place. Atleast whatever I can remember of it.

When I was an 8 year old, my family decided to split the land between the male siblings and each build their own houses. For 2 years, we shifted to a flat in Rangarajapuram, which no self respecting T.Nagarite at that time would have done, but we had to do owing to our not so healthy economic condition. Life for the 2 years there was complete fun but considering this post is not about Rangarajapuram, i will refrain from talking about it.

When I was ten, we returned to T.Nagar, to live in our newly built house. My uncles had their houses built next to ours. All the houses were pretty nice, but much to my chagrin, all were painted a pale brown. It smacked of a lack of creativity on my family’s part. My own house was by far the best and was built with a lot of thought by my parents themselves (they are in the construction industry). We stayed for a year in the house. Unfortunately I can recall very little about my time in the house. Things were so idyllic that time passed unfathomably quickly. All i can remember was a single sapotta tree, which was the lone survivor of my grandparents’ house and a really pretty garden, in which I would spend entire days (primarily because I did not have any friends in the new house. T.Nagar was already changing) planting all sorts of fruits and vegetables. Nothing made me more satisfied than having my mother cook vegetables that I grew in the garden. It tasted as if the dishes were made of something more than just the ordinary vendakkai, murungakai or kathirikkai that I was so used to eating and so intensely disliked.

Although this is a personal experience, I would imagine that a lot of other old families in T.Nagar too had similar experiences. Most families settled in T.Nagar were quite wealthy and could afford to support quite a large family. Considering there were no such things as contraceptives back then and assuming that our old men had the same drive for sex as modern day Indians, it is only natural that families with an average of 7-8 kids would emerge. (My neighbours were 13 siblings.) It must have been such a show back then that other old geezers would have sniggered at someone if they stopped with anything less than four children (I have a vision of my grandpa sitting on the compound wall looking at his neighbour and saying stuff like “Dey Subramani. Go back to the Thar desert where you came from you infertile little prick!”). And when these sons and daughters of the old geezers grew up and eventually had sons and daughters of their own, they would obviously have demanded some space for themselves. (In today’s mega-thodars, we see how even single maamiyaars and marumagals are enough to kill all the menfolk and bring the house down. One can hardly imagine the situation with ten such marumagals and maamiyars. I suspect Napoleon would have been better prepared for Russia if he had spent a few days in such a home.) So, in the 80s and 90s, a lot of these grand old houses were pulled apart and gave way to smaller, more modern, but nevertheless pleasant houses. However, the loss of the gardens and large open spaces meant less frequent social get-togethers/majaa-with-friends-times depending on your gender. This I thought sad, but understandable.

Around this time, another big social restructuring was occurring in the good old place. This was the invasion of saettu people. Not the interesting kind of north Indian folk who were already a part of the landscape, but the moolah-power-ulla saettu folks who had come to Chennai (probably Sowcarpet) for business, done exceedingly well, and decided to settle down in the city for good in one of its more prestigious areas. They had maal, bought lands in large swathes displacing the locals to rubbish places like Adyar and Anna Nagar, and built massive homes which could have housed an army of elephants but only supported the old man, his sons and one elephant in the form of the saettu lady (just kidding). These perumpullis were completely engrossed in their own world and never interacted with the locals in any way. They probably only travelled in imported cars or jets and hobnobbed with vellaikara people and other snobbish north indians. Not that anyone missed the company of these saettu people, but i am just saying that they never added anything to the landscape except palatial houses and zeroes at the end of land prices. This is probably one of the biggest factors that contributed to the destruction of T.Nagar’s character.

Moving on, my parents soon decided that our current house was too good for us considering our economic condition. They decided to build a much more simpler dwelling in the first floor and rent out the ground floor. Land prices were already increasing and it turned out to be quite a good move. Our first floor house was simple and nice and the ground floor house fetched us much needed revenue. The only disappointing thing was that the garden could not survive the onslaught of cement and other construction materials that fell on it from the first floor and it was damaged beyond recogniction. From then on, we only had a set of hibiscus and a few small fruit and vegetable trees. Life, however went on, and with school increasingly occupying my time, I had less free time to waste anyway and had to spend more time on my books. I even had to make regrettable decisions such as stopping karate and swimming lessons. We also got a new dog. It was a mongrel and the only person who ever liked it was me. Everyone else in the family were neutral to it or disliked it. However it became an integral part of the ecosphere of the house for the next decade. (I did not look after it very well, and in the end it had a disease and lost its memory. It left the house when I was in the middle of my board exam frenzy and I did not have time to tend to it. I have no idea what happened to it after that. I really do regret the way I treated my dog, but I was not only to blame. There were other extraneous circumstances.) However, in the next 3 years, T.Nagar changed quite a lot. Land prices kept rising and increasingly old houses were torn down to make way for not only smaller houses, but also large apartments. One could see many more apartments dotting the landscape. This was again regrettable, but atleast the people in the flats added something to the social milieu of T.Nagar. Not like the snobbish saettu people I mean. The first few flats at least had a soothingly Indian flavour to them with the quintessential watchman mama who also doubled up as the odd jobs man, and also neat gardens on the sides of the walls which the residents themselves looked after. But the arrival of the appartment complexes meant that all the large shady trees and gardens were more or less gone and even the few that were there in the old houses were left untended.

Then came the next big thing to affect the somewhat premature equilibrium that had been established in our first floor house. As you may well have guessed, my parents decided to build a 2nd floor. (What else could possibly have happened?) They considered the fact that land prices were pretty much soaring, considering the city was just starting to witness the IT boom, and also said that it was lucky we got a plan approval to construct a 2nd floor which is quite rare for an individual house. What they did not take into consideration was the fact that we had very little free cash, certainly not enough to build a new house. So, if we ever were to reap the benefits of having a new house, it would have to be after many years of complete toil. The house, despite all the hiccups in finding funds, was completed extremely fast. Or at least it felt that way because I was having school and hardly spent much time at home. I think my parents took this into consideration before embarking on the project. Also, by this time, I had grown too old to fully enjoy the atmosphere of construction activity.

Considering that my father is a builder, I was on site for many of the houses he built, and let me tell you, there could be nothing more fun for a pre-teen boy. All the equipment lying around made for convenient weapons such as sabres (rods), bazookas (crowbars) and ak-47s (drilling machines) with which one could terrorize the maesthris and sithaals into submission. The greatest fun was of course playing on the sandpile. Getting sand onto your head and picking out the grains is a far better timepass than eating popcorn. I stopped this extremely fun activity only when my father warned me i would get sarangu punnu. I had no idea what it was (and still dont), but the name sounded quite ominous, and from then, I did not play in the sand with as much relish. But I am digressing..

As I was saying, the house was completed within 5 months. We were spared the trouble of finding to people to stay in it as the ground floor tenants decided to occupy the new house as they found it to suitable to their tastes and their increased recently paycheck which was the reason they had wanted to move out in the first place. The house was really well constructed and reasonably classy. The only problem was, my parents did not accommodate a lift, and considering that the only people who could afford to stay in such a place were gentiles who preferred to drive a car to even Pondy Bazaar, we were quite lucky this time. The lack of a lift proved quite a problem subsequently. The most negative aspect of the new house was it resulted in us having to cut down the sapotta tree (my father felt almost like he had killed a family member) and having to convert what was left of the garden into a new carpark and a water tank. There was a mango tree in our house which had just borne a single fruit before construction of the 2nd floor began. After the construction the tree never grew or bore a fruit again. It effectively had a tree-version of vasectomy. In effect, while the interiors had been spruced up, the entire ecosystem of our house had been reduced to rubble and cement. This was something I sorely resented.

The next 3 years were quite staid. Life had once again settled into an equilibrium. T.Nagar continued to witness a construction boom in which a lot more apartments came up. The newer ones were far more irritating. There was nothing quirky about them. The exteriors and interiors were irritatingly and unimaginatively perfect. A newer breed of watchmen began to emerge. The new ones were younger, sometimes of Nepali origin, a lot with big moustaches, all wearing a brown or blue color uniform with even a thoppi on their heads. These people worked for some random security agencies and had little attachment towards the neighbourhood or its people. They were not very indulgent towards outsiders entering the flats and were strictly business-like. This new breed of watchmen perfectly represented what was happening to T.Nagar. From being a friendly, laid-back place, it was turning into a concrete jungle with people who had little time to spare apart from their work. A place where once walkers used to walk either to socialize or to suppress the effects of diabetes, to a place where people walked accompanied by a discman wanting to burn off the days calorific intake. I too became too busy with my school life to spare time or thought on T.Nagar and its denizens.

From here, everything I loved about my home started to disappear. Some of my neighbours had sold their houses to developers and fancy and totally irritating flats came up in their place. We ourselves had to move to the 2nd floor house, which I disliked by because I preferred the irrationality and frugality of the first floor house. The first floor house was renovated and let out for quite a staggering sum (at that time of course). I was entering the crucial years of 10th, 11th and 12th and was completely busy with academics. No thought to spare on T.Nagar or its surroundings. The only non-academic place I frequented in T.Nagar was Amutha Paal Depot. Die hard T.Nagarites may know it well. The place had something about it that reminded me of everything that used to be Madras. Frugal decor, very simple menu, a quirky and philosophical owner who seemed a permanent part of the landscape, it all reminded me of the Madras I loved.

My last 2 years were like a gale in which I feel I am still stuck in while at Uni. Life was all about IIT classes and more IIT classes. The only distractions were Amudha Paal and school. The only significant event was my dog left the house right in the middle of my board exams. I was quite helpless. T.Nagar was changing too darn rapidly. The main roads had changed beyond recognition. New, characterless buildings were springing up wherever you looked. New hotels, IT parks, apartments and swanky new houses (yes, they had to be swanky. Anyone who did not want a obscenely rich house could not afford to build one anyway) and what not. Also growing was a rising dislike inside me for the place that I once used to love. It was becoming increasingly unfamiliar and alien.

Before I knew, my school life was over (I do really miss it) and I had to leave India to embark on my university life. Leaving India is a decision about which I have really mixed feelings. But one thing is for sure, everytime I go back, I go wtf. Life has so completely changed in T.Nagar, nay all of Chennai. My sisters are enjoying an affluence that I could have only dreamt of when I was their age. And I am not sure such a pampered life will do them any good. I see new hotels with globalised menus popping up all over the place. I see new, western style shopping marts (read Spencer’s Daily/Reliance Fresh) replacing the annachi kadais that used to dot the landscape. Every time I return to Madras for vacation, I see new unwelcome changes that make me really disgruntled. The very night I reach home, I never fail to make a pilgrimage to the Somasundaram ground and Amudha Paal. It might sound a bit ludicrous, but for me these two places are symbols of a great heritage, a heritage that is disappearing with the dynamics of time.

Bring on the dasavatharam i say!

Finally managed to catch up with the 2nd most talked about movie in the (recent?) history of tamil cinema. This is simply about my experience with the movie, about my expectations and the after-effects.

My overall experience given my expectations was pretty neutral. I cannot say i enjoyed the movie but at the same time I will not say I was blind to its merits. In fact, given this was meant to be a commercial movie, I thought kamal almost came out with a winner. Almost..

What prevented the movie from conquering the box office as thoroughly as the boss? The following reasons were what i could muster on a very cursory note:-

- The biggest demerit to the movie was I felt Asin. Malayali actresses should never be given the role of a traditional girl, and even if this mishap were to occur, at least for the sake of public well being, never the role of a traditional brahmin girl. Asin does a way better job in western clothes uttering a few insignificant manna-to-the-masses kind of dialog. Her role as Andal would have surely outdone Jyothika’s much talked about performance in Kushi. Wo mee gads, the terrible cacophony that she created whenever she opened her mouth resulted in me having to close my ears out of sheer pain, much to the displeasure of the more tolerant fellow movie goers around me. And she was ably assisted in operation perforate-eardrum by the paati and khalifullah (kamal). When i left the movie hall, all I could think of was an irritating girl with a pretty face who is shouting random b.s. in a hyper-exaggerated tambram tongue. Seriously which normal man, let alone a hero, would want a partner like that??

- This leads us to the 2nd let-down of the movie. The really mediocre dialog. I’ll admit it evoked a few laughs and made sense most of the time (I lost drift of the classical tamil bits thanks to my complete inability to understand any other variation of the beautiful language apart from the beautiful dialect spoken in namma madras. For this of course I do not blame kamal). For a script of which kamal (having written it himself) said great things were to be expected, it was a complete let-down. The sentimental rubbish and philosophical rambling was simply unbearable. Amean the Singh youth giving that supposedly inspiring dialog when confronted by the doctor with his life choices was so 80s that I could not believe Kamal had anything to do with it. Few jokes evoked mild laughter while many other jokes such as those involving George Bush were completely lost on the audience. What could possibly be more pathetic than jokes which do not evoke laughter?

- The third biggest let down was the mujik. It was quite simply an insult to the ears. There was absolutely nothing imaginative about it. It was just plain dumb synthesised music. I am sure people like Ilaiyaraja, Harris Jeyaraj or even Vidyasagar would have done an infinitely better job. The music served simply one purpose. I watched the movie in Singapore and i dunno about other places, but there was no interval here. The songs however saw to it that this was not a problem. So we used the mukundha song for going mootharam and o o sanam song for our bojanam. Imagine my horror when i discovered that the only acceptable tune from the movie, kallai mattum, was lifted from an old malayalam movie starring Vikram. (I know!! What are the odds!!) http://youtube.com/watch?v=Afmc6FeN-hM

- The hero Kamal. Kamal has got to come around to the fact that he cannot go around playing scientist-youth-falling-in-love roles any more simply because he is neither a youth nor the superstar. It would have been much better if kamal had let someone like Madhavan (I might have said Vijay but I am sure even Vijay will laugh at the thought of him as a scientist) be the hero and himself had played a more entertaining character such as the gult officer Balram Naidu. Balram’s role as the RAW officer with a gultised tamil accent was by far the most entertaining high-point of the movie. He reminded me of that other enjoyable movie called Panchatantiram. It felt like the gult thatha himself had done the dubbing for kamal in this movie.

- Other things that sucked in the movie were mallika sherawat’s tamil, the japanese girl’s tamil (thank heavens i didn’t have to hear too much of that. I would have passed away in my seat itself.) and the incredibly irritating political correctness of kamal’s hero avatar which is a reflection of kamal’s real ideologies, i imagine. For instance, when Asin asks him if he claims there is no God, Kamal suggests it would be nice if there was one. Kamal may have of course imagined that this non-confirmative answer sounded cool, but I (for some damn reason) find it pathetically irritating. In fact, for the entire dialog in that scene with Asin after the tsunami, I had to close my ears lest i hear some inane philosophical crap from Kamal. Actually, (this is an update), I have come to realize that the last dialog really irritated me because I felt I could read what had gone on in Kamal’s mind. He must have faced all these questions from both himself and people around him regarding his atheist beliefs. And for every damn question, he probably tried to come up with the most smart-alec, non-confirmative answer he could muster, which instead of giving any real answers, simply leads to further questions. This entire role of (his-own-alter-ego)+(people-around-him) was voiced out in that scene by Asin and Kamal played the smart-alec answers giving youth. Bah…

The merits in the movie?? To be fair there are quite a few. For instance, the make-up and the graphics were, although not top of the line or entirely convincing, quite impressive for an indian movie. The ten roles were rather seamlessly blended together and for the most part, you forgot that it was Kamal essaying the ten characters. The last fight scene between the chappani youth and the vellaikara youth was quite stunning. I do not understand how it could have been done without using doubles for the majority of the scene. If it was indeed so, then it is quite mind-blowing.

All in all, the movie is a mishmash of 3 or 4 different movies squeezed into one with the resultant mixture being non-homogeneously sweet and sour at various times. However, I would definitely consider this a hallmark movie coming from India and would say that it is a must watch. Simply because this movie is, and is likely to remain, one of a kind. There is going to be no one else like Kamal Hasan in the near future and Kamal himself is not going to be stupid enough to attempt a magnum opus of this nature.

Update: My views on the plot

I find I did not mention what I thought about the plot of the movie and its basic premise. I did not think much about the plot and since it was a commercial movie, I thought my opinion on the plot would be irrelevant, but subsequently had to revise my opinion based on the comments from readers (ok, ok, I am just coming up with excuses for my own stupidity and negligence). For me the plot was FLAWED from its inception. It made very little sense to me. The chaos theory, which I first read about admittedly only after I saw The Butterfly Effect (lest you mistake me for some Peter-uttufying payal), I find has no relation at all with Dasavatharam’s plot. The chaos theory is only applicable to events where even the slightest perturbation in the initial conditions has a exponential multiplier effect and affects the final result profoundly. Events that do not depend on the initial events significantly aren’t really affected by this theory. In other words, the event under discussion must be deterministically random (eg. instantaneous noise parameters). The very idea of a bio-virus being released into the atmosphere and a tsunami striking at that precise instant to nullify it does not fall under the purview of chaos theory at all. So chaos theory as an explanation has absolutely no meaning at all. If Kamal is right, then we could well explain other things including Simbu’s latest hairstyle, the birth of Sam Anderson (check him on youtube) etc.. to chaos theory. I personally will not stand for this kind of chaos theory abuse. So the best way to watch this movie would be to leave your brains back and also bring a high frequency filter for your ears (this is for drowning out Asin’s voice). Happy watching, if you already haven’t done it that is.

To elucidate further, I have added my response to the comment from vinoth:-

1. certain events like the WW-II, their outcome do not really depend on the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in india or something. they depend on lot more concrete factors such as the strength of each army, the mindset of people etc..
2. certain events however depend very significantly on the environmental variables. for example assume a ball is precariously balanced on a mound and even the slightest change in the environment can affect the outcome of the direction in which it rolls off, then that is kind of related to chaos theory. here, although physics can be used to explain the direction in which the ball rolls off, you cannot predict it because of the highly sensitive nature of the environmental variables. ie. deterministic chaos.
in effect, all events are correlated. but the degree to which they depend on each other may vary. If an event is (percentage-wise) highly dependent on even seemingly inconsequential events, then chaos theory can afford an explanation.
kamal’s plot falls in the first category and hence you cannot really write down the occurrence of the tsunami to chaos theory. kamal had this half-baked understanding of the theory and this made the plot quite poor.