Nalla Madras to Chillax Chennai

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It’s officially Madras week till Sunday and so the licence to kill with nostalgia is still valid. The list of landmarks of our youth that have disappeared is endless and we can delve into it freely.

Of course, there is no real argument against progress, so too against gentrification. GenNext can take heart from the fact that ‘Namma Madras’ has given way to ‘Chillax Chennai’ with its emerging landmarks that dwarf the LIC building in grandeur.

The place we miss the most may be the old Moore Market, which was quite the spot to laze around and look at old books.

Precious first editions were rare but at least you could lay your hands on some ancient books with notations on the opening page that lent the identity of the original owners certain mystique.

Moore Market, which gave way to the expansion of the Central station, was always the place to go for things for your pets, fish tanks, fish food, etc.

It was a one-stop shop for curios and quite curious things that you probably did not really need.

Old gramophones, telephones that had to be cranked before you could hear voices that seemed to come from mysteriously deep places and just about everything else to ignite the curiosity of the young were on display.

A visit to Devaraja Mudali Street in Town was to pick up imported goods, including salted almonds from USA, perfumes from France, etc.

Nowadays the whiff of perfumes invades your nostril even as you enter stores that sell you a lifestyle even more than goods.

Burma Bazaar was to take over as the ultimate smugglers’ haven, once a must visit place for ‘phoreen’ things like video tapes, cameras and ‘imported’ Scotch that was probably filled up in some nefarious local distillery.

There were restaurants that served liquor in ‘Eversilver’ tumblers in days of ‘Prohibition,’ the funny state policy that was on-off in the ’70s before governments realised that the business was otherwise going to bootleggers and ‘speakeasys’.

For the best of fresh toddy straight off the palm tree one had to ride the two-wheeler across the border to Tada and Sulurpet.

The Golden Bowl in Savera was an early Indian and European cuisine dining place that seemed luxurious in the olden days. A late night snack at the ice cream parlour in Dasaprakash was a must for night bird Madrasis.

The idly sambar tasted doubly delightful if eaten at 3.00 am. Sadly, the whole place has gone to a realtor although the change is good because the popular and Dasaprakash brothers, who sportingly owned horses like Rock Haven and Youg Turk that swept the classics for a year or two, get a breather. Their ‘AVM Dosa’ or ‘Dasavin dosa’ on Mount Rod served a nut cutlet to die for until that too had to shut down.

A ticket to the annual military tattoo on Island Grounds used to be precious. Army riders on Bullet motorcycles thundered past on an evening doing marvellous tricks of balance and taking off on an incline to pass bravely through rings of fire.

The acrobatic show was matched only by the daredevil motorcycle rider who would go on endless spirals in a rollercoaster cage in the circus tent pitched behind Moore Market.

The ground would also host crazy, zany events that were a precursor to today’s WWE on television. King Kong against Dara Singh would be the feature event on the wrestling card of long evenings when the show hit town.

As youngsters we took whatever happened on the mat inside the ring seriously with a sense of wonder although names of supporting cast like Chief Sitting Bull should have been a dead giveaway on how much of a fake all that could have been.

Road shows featuring marathon cyclists who rode for 18 hours a day with a supporting cast of gypsy acrobats on makeshift arenas in the inner ring were a common enough feature.

When the organisers came around with the collection ‘towel’ we would disappear since there was never more than a few annas that were reserved for ‘kamarkat’ (beastly black sweets) or the much more colourful rose candy.

Visits to George Town were not complete without a meal at Ramakrishna Lunch Home although I must confess the North Indian snacks like ‘bhel puri’ and ‘paani puri’ seemed more delicious, so too the ‘kulfi’ from the Mint Street vendor’s tricycle. ‘Sone papdi’ was a sweet to die for while tins of rasgoolas started reaching the shelves slowly from KC Das of Kolkata.

Madras was not complete without a visit to the ball our Anglo-Indian friends held in various halls in the western part of the city.

Ballroom dancing was great fun even as a spectator although you may hear the odd comment about “Indian fellows are dancing with our dames da” from the fun-loving, outgoing community whose younger generation all but seem to have disappeared from the city to settle mostly in Perth, Western Australia.

There is so much that we miss of Madras but then Chennai offers so much more to compensate. Maybe, it’s our good fortune that we grew up in one and lived long in the other too to enjoy the best of both wordls.

For the young, romance lies in city’s cool factor

Old timers may miss the draughty old red-brick colonial buildings of Madras, but for the young Chennaiite, the romance of the city lies in its jazzy new multiplexes, its glass-façade IT parks and shopping malls and the watering holes where the food comes in miniature versions — inch-long samosas and coin-sized crab cakes that may drill a hole in your pocket and may not satiate your hunger, but more than make up because of their ‘cool factor’.

Young Chennaiites have no qualms in paying Rs 1,500 to sample a shot of absinthe flown in from Amsterdam or spending Rs 6,000 on a haircut because the hairdresser is a gay Frenchman with impeccable taste and crafty fingers.

They prefer multicoloured Converse flipflops to the good old blue and white Bata chappals, would not be seen dead in generic sunglasses and would rather head to the nearest Barista for a mug of overpriced latte, than drink the free coffee from the humble dispenser in the office cafeteria.

Nobody really realised when the cautious, thrifty people of Chennai transitioned into this new breed that flaunts its branded merchandise and devil-may-care attitude.

Perhaps sometime around the point when ‘Bessy’ a.k.a Besant Nagar beach became a cooler hangout than Marina beach.

Or when Khader Nawaz Khan Road took over from Pondy Bazaar as the place where you can buy literally everything, including the kitchen sink.

Or the time when most of the top Indian brands in Spencers Plaza shut shop and moved to the sparkling hallways of Express Avenue, to give the FCUKs and Calvin Kleins there a run for their money.

This transformation is striking now — from a time just a few years ago when our mothers dragged us through crowded markets over beds of squashed vegetables to haggle with vendors hardly visible behind mounds of neatly arranged fruits and vegetables to now, when buying vegetables entails picking up barcoded cellophane packets of pre-cut veggies off the rack in an air-conditioned hypermarket.

Buying meat and fish is no different — you don’t have to endure the flies in a fish market or the squawking of the poor chicken about to be killed for your dinner table, when you can get neatly cut and cleaned portions of meat from the neighbourhood supermarket.

The way of life in Chennai is miles ahead of simple yesteryear Madras, and, crib as you may about the traffic and the pollution; GenNext would never trade in their luxurious lifestyle for a million dollars.