375 has a nice ring to it, no?
Gary Sobers plus ten? That’s what Madras has turned this month. 375 years. The
Madras week starts from morrow. The national broadsheets as well as the
neighborhood times will all go to town i.e Madras to sing its paeans. Like how
steeped Madras is in history. Like the soft spongy medhuvadai in milagurasam.
What an amazing amalgam or concoction or decoction of tradition and modernity
this Madras is! What good karma of our previous births has bestowed on us this
present birth in Madras.
Really? Aren’t we fooling ourselves? Peel off the
sentimental gibberish and look underneath. The underbelly will be very
uncomfortably visible. Madrasis singing
praise of Madras is any news? Why, for every Ethiopian worth his salt, Ethiopia
is the utopia of earth. So with Madras. I too have been, off and on, proclaiming
loudly to whoever would listen that Madras is the best. But deep inside, a few
dark images lurk, and now is about time they were dusted, polished, pulled out
and put up for public view. Here are a
few vignettes of colours the real Madras is made of:
Red:
The most visible hue of the
spectrum becomes almost invisible to the average Madras motorist if the color
emanates from a traffic signal. Seldom
would you find a motorist stopping at a red light here, unless the signal has,
a retinue of traffic cops as bodyguards.
Madras is probably the only metropolis (if only size qualifies it to be
called so) where every traffic light has to have a cop as an appendage. It
beats logic that to enforce a single rule you spend twice over – one on the
cops’ salary and the other on maintenance of lights. And if that cop too turns
the other way busy extorting that tenner from a lorry, the traffic junction
would be a free for all. It hardly matters if the light is green or amber or
red or bloody white. Who cares? The plain
fact is that traffic rules enforcement
is the poorest in Madras of all the big cities in India. Statistics don’t lie,
despite their notoriety. Road deaths are
the maximum in TN of all states.
Straw:
Has anyone noticed why most of
the walls of each and every lane and bye-lane in Madras is moist and wet? The
unstoppable bladder of the Madrasis, what else? Masons here have learnt the
trick of cementing the bricks of the walls and leaving it without watering and
curing. That public service would be
taken care of by the Madrasi urinating
all over the place. The shower-proferring
citizens can even teach a lesson or two to the stray mongrels roaming the
streets and looking for a lamp post. The
entire city is a lamp post for these shameless denizens of a ‘conservative’ and
‘cultured’ metropolis. In say, the much-maligned
Calcutta one would seldom witness anything rivaling the magnitude and ferocity of the relieving public
of Madras. The otherwise blissfully-urinating-all-over
‘cultured’ and ‘decent’ fellow would not forget to paint the Chandrasekara,
the Crescent and the Cross on his own house’s wall to prevent the shower-favour
being returned. The 3Cs would retain their chastity only for a few days. From
day 4, the walls will be back to their alluring and inviting best – wet all
over.
White:
You can be sure the State milk
distributor Aavin would double production the day a new movie of that mega-mass
star releases in Madras. We Madrasis are
cut out for the colossal stupidity of pouring gallons of milk on cut-outs of
our mass stars. If Surya is drenched with 100 litres, Vijay should have at
least 105. If Vijay has 105, Thala should have at least 110. One thing you can be sure of – we Madrasis
believe in keeping everything and everyone cool. If not the walls, then the cut outs. Some liquid or the other we
would keep unleashing on the
unsuspecting. Taken together with the hundreds of gallons of milk the deities of
our million temples consume, are not we Madrasis the torch-bearers of the white
revolution?
Black:
We have heard of the Corleone
family. And the Giuseppe, Catanic families. The dreaded mafias of Italy. Why, even Madras has had its own share of
colourful criminal characters like Auto Shankar, Maadu Sekar, Bokkai Ravi and Welding Kumar. But
three mafias of Madras, no power on earth could root out are the Pachaiyappas,
Nandanam Arts and the Presidency mafias.
The venerable inhabitants of these three colleges have managed to bring
parts of the city to a near state of bloodbath and mayhem very often by their
openly brandishing knives, swords, sickles and sundry other weaponry to attack
each other, break buses, strike at the public, smuggle arms inside colleges and
in general strike such a terror that the public have come to believe that the
police need to think of an alternative profession, casting aside their
uniforms. A few of our city colleges are
so infested with petty politicians, criminals & goondas ( don’t ask why I
am using 3 names for the same entity – it is for emphasis) that it is a mystery
that they still continue to be called colleges when crime-dens would be more
apt a name for them. And then there is
this abomination called bus-day celebrations in Madras when on multiple days
each section of each college would simply hijack a bus, empty it of passengers,
climb on the roof, bang it to pulp and create huge traffic jams in busy
thoroughfares on week days. Police?
Well, they will dutifully escort the processions. To prevent any ‘untoward’
incident or damage – to the marauding students that is.
Yellow:
Even the Ebola survivor of
Sierra-Leone is sure to fall prey to the yellow fever of Madras once he lands
in its airport or railway station. Gabbar
Singh type robbers rule only in the jungle.
Highway robbers loot only in desolate stretches of highways. Our yellow auto robbers do it all over the
city, throughout the day, 24X7,for decades together. Madras is the only city where per kilometer
fare by auto would even exceed the airfare. For those hapless, uninformed,
unfortunate ones landing at midnight or unearthly hours at railway stations or
airports, they would be better advised to carry title deeds of their property,
for they would be required to hand over the same as fare for say 5 kms or
beyond, when they run out of cash. Fare
meters, did you say? That is for ‘Dhrishti’, you know, the scarecrow they erect
on paddy fields to ward off evils. To
think that this day light robbery is continuing in Madras for nearly 3 decades
will be astonishing for outsiders but not for us. Police? Enforcement? Again, tell that to the
dogs. [that said, only recently some
semblance of order has been restored to the auto scene but that too only in
patches, too insignificant to be any newsworthy]
375, did you say? Isn’t that only
a number? Even a thousand years hence, fat chance Madras would
reform. Atleast in scrubbing off the decadent layers of the above 5 colours. Temples, music, maamis
and madisars, at best, are only the public façade of this monster of a city.
The above 5 colors of the spectrum are the reality. Deep inside its belly. You better believe me,
for I know this city like the back of one’s palm!
