Life @chennai

Its been precisely a month since I ventured out of my home once again to a new place altogether to start things from scratch. Further retrospection tells me that in the last 10 years I have been to quite a few places like Jabalpur, Kottayam, Palakkad, Mumbai, Pune, Dubai, Singapore and now in Chennai and have stayed at these places for a period varying from 6 months to 4 years. Guess that’s some achievement of sorts ;-) .

Anyways this wasn’t supposed to be a self boosting blog. So coming to the point now I am put up at one of the oldest metro’s of southern India. The last time I came to Chennai was about 14 years back and that was just for couple of days. Since then I have never had any ecstatic feelings about this place, unfortunately then the memories that I took back home was that of long queues of vessels in front of the pump waiting for water to come, petty fights over water and the extremely crowded buses. Infact I used to feel pity for people who used to work in Chennai. Well what can I say what goes around comes around. So here I am in a altogether new place where everything we eat starts with some form of rice and coconut. People speak different languages like Tamil, Tamil and Tamil ;-). The best part are the autowalla’s, their’s nothing called a meter that the auto guys out here make use of. But I must say the auto drivers out here enjoy tremendous unity they are all united as far as stating a fare is concerned, you ask for a 2 km distance and they would add two zeros to that and state a bill of Rs.200 ( a bit exaggerated u see). But believe me this month I have dared to take an auto ( not the share auto) only once and that was the first trip that I took out here.

Having said all these not so good things I would say that my preconceived notions made me expect more bad things in Chennai than I actually did. Things in Chennai are certainly changing but there is a lot too be done on the infrastructure side. Though they have developed an IT park but this place is an panchayat which means although the government gains in terms of taxes and employment but then there is much that they can do, but since supposedly the budget of panchayats are not good enough to undertake major infrastructure projects. So many places along the way I see water clogging which seems to be a very big problem in this vicinity. Public transport is pretty decent infact its much much better than a city like Bangalore, but mostly its crowded.

So out and out I have got very mixed feelings for this city with a bit of an inclination towards the negative side. I believe there are some basic things which the government can do in here which would improve the life of the local people immensely. Well the worst test for me would be during the summers and the rainy season, so keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best