What's Hot in Chennai?

The weather.

Greetings, comrades. I used to tip my hat; henceforth I shall fold my veshti.

Mumbai was getting to me. So I shifted to Chennai. I was yearning for the South. Bangalore was ruled out: I had no intention of parting with my mobile every time some punk in a 'No Fear' t-shirt screeched at my feet on a drun-drun bike and pointed a screwdriver at my adam's apple. So. Chennai.

While landing, I got a stunning glimpse of the endless surf-kissed coastline and a fleet of tiny, lungi-coloured boats, parrot-green, fanta-orange and rin-blue boats, some in lines and some staggered, like children from three different schools, blocking the way at a museum's gate. Heart-warming sight. Never take a night-flight to Chennai from above the Vindhyas. And always take a window seat on the right, in the 'F' series.

The land of B-to-the-A-to-the-B-to-the-A! The first billboard I see tells me about, of all things, a discount on chequered towels at Co-optex Nungambaakam. Generations have wiped themselves, and their babies' bottoms too, with Co-optex towels. The rasam surges in my veins, gurgling like the Cooum.

South is South. In the warm breeze that enveloped me, I felt like a beginning.

My driver drove like yenithing, nothing less than Rajnikant's first cousin in Schumacher's car. To put it simply, we slapped a bus in a crowd of yellow autos. Just like heroes and heroines dashing hips on meadows, with yellow-coloured extras scurrying behind. I lived to tell this tale, although I would have liked a manly trickle of blood on the temple for extra effect. A hurl of Tamil abuse followed from my driver, my baptism in his tongue. I only caught a "votta" here and a "yo!" there . I wanted to chip in with an 'ay! rascal..!" but I remembered that that's in Telegu films, not Tam. So we carried on, and the Ambassador, when I disembarked, was grining ear to ear.

While we drove, earlier, I tried my hand at Tamil. I had already implemented, with irrefutable success, a "T.Nagar pono" to the driver and a "venda venda vendaaaa" to his flunkey who would have given anything to lift my suitcase. Then halfway through the drive I tried my tour de force. We were driving through some area with thronged with Tam on the walls, and fluorescent film stars on golden posters, and hot air, and more hot air, and still more hot air. So I said, 'Ee area yevlo?'. Which area is this?

Now- apparently- that actually means, 'How much does this area cost?' (Much later I remembered my mum saying, 'yevlo wor kilo?' to the banana seller near our house in Bombay. But too late. I have an elephant's memory with the recall of an earthworm's bottom.) So when I delivered my tour de force, the driver turned in slow motion, ignored me and continued. I repeated my tour de force. He repeated his that's-what-I-think-of-your-tour-de-whatever. Then I pointed my fingers in all directions as we stopped at a signal: 'Yide, yide, yide, ee full area yevlo'? This, this, this, this full area, how much?

He stared me up and down, as if I were some diamond merchant. He turned back in slow motion, shaken by his experience. He reverently handed my suitcase to me when we arrived, and fled away in his battered and grinning Ambassador, with its exhaust between its tyres. With a grey home-reject suitcase and a shiny leather bag flicked from his dad, the diamond merchant arrived.

I like this quaint city. Two rupees for a kilo of rice. Temples. Houses. Houses! Ask someone from Mumbai why that's special, ask a fellow who points up in the air when you ask him where he lives. Tamil on the walls: the squiggly letters have a life of their own, poising towards one another like dancing, coiling serpents. After being surrounded by Agarwals at IIMB and in Mumbai, I'm delighted to be lost in a sea of Thirukumarans, Muthukumarans and Senthilkumarans. They hang from green buses dripping sweat and spewing smoke, and they know all about J2EE and Oracle 9i.

In a land where once we carved fine men and women on temple rock, and wrote of lovers wreathed in jasmine and marigold, with nectar spilling on the streets and bees sweeping through the lattices of houses, company buses now ply in hundreds, bearing a entire generation of software developers to work. And how could so much erotic poetry be written in a land so hot and sweaty? If Venus herself came with me on a date in Chennai, I'd ignore her, or just keep saying "ya, ya, that's right" to anything she said, wiping my forehead, wiping my face, fanning myself with the menu card. Some paintings of Madras from the 18th century, by freeriders from the East India Company, show parched mud streets, bored doggies at temple gates, and just two colours for the people: black for the skinny body, white for the veshti. Monsoon, monsoon, I (wipes face) want monsoon...By the time it comes, I'd have settled, hopefully, and I'll know my Nungambakkams and Thoraipakkams. If anyone knows a small, petite flat in Thiruvanmayur, near the beach, surrounded by neem and mango trees, please to let me know.

Au revoir. A change is as good as a feast.