Comedian Praveen Kumar recollects his childhood days in Kancheepuram
I spent my entire childhood in a town near Chennai called Kancheepuram which is really close to my heart. This temple town has seen a radical change over the past few years and the growth was as quick as a Complan kid.
One of the areas that has seen a radical change over the years is the way people dress up. They used to wear such bright shirts which would further blind the blind men and would have led stray dogs to commit suicide. The colours ranged from cotton candy colour, bright magenta to some ugly cross between indigo and orange. Because of this, we never had street lights in our town. Even the colour TVs in our town used to come in bright pink. There was a tremendous growth in the retail industry in Kancheepuram. When I was young, there wasn’t any concept of a super market. Basically, if we get onions and tomatoes in the same place, it was called a supermarket. The only ‘maal’ we knew was the reference to a beautiful girl.
Nobody spoke English there including my English teacher in school. If that was the case with English then you can imagine the condition of Hindi. Hindi was considered to be our third language in school when we had just two languages.Thanks to our leaders, Hindi was treated like how your boss will treat you while doing performance appraisals. Just a handful of people in my town could spot the difference between Hindi and English. One of my friends told me that the last English movie he saw was Rangeela.
But then things changed over the past few years and we all have branded garments and supermarkets. Ek Tha Tiger released recently. Even though there are changes seen in all coordinates, people remained good-natured and are willing to help anytime of the day. There are certain things which cannot be accomplished in a city and this is one of them.