The Madras within Chennai

A dilapidated 48cc moped stands by the side of the crowded street in Egmore where my parents live, drooping under the weight of a large box on the back. On the box, in inexpert lettering, is inscribed, “www.chennaimarkets.com; Bringing the Convenience of Shopping to You on the Internet”!  Nearby, a man has set up a footwear repair operation on the street, repairing for Rs.5 well-worn but well-preserved slippers of doubtful vintage and pedigree. A boy urinates on an old and graceful wall nearby, its crenellations evoking the Raj. A stylish woman in her Maruti Esteem honks impatiently at a shirtless old man, who is pushing along a contraption consisting of a cart, a bicycle, and several tins of vegetable oil. The stench of human waste wafts by, mingling with the smell of bondas from the new fast-food stall nearby. A heaving miasma of heat and smoke hangs over the city mid-morning, awaiting the relief of the afternoon sea breeze. Nearby, the ever-patient sea waits, as always, to bestow its mid-afternoon favors, immune to the passing of time, indifferent to the changing culture, and standing majestic guard beside the anthill that we call Chennai today, exactly as it did in the elegant bygone days of a colonial and post-colonial Madras.

My widely spaced visits to my home town over the past eighteen years have provided me with cameo snapshots of the dramatic changes wrought to Madras as it has changed from a sleepy and relatively uncrowded city, the last bastion of Southern conservatism, to a metropolis called Chennai, renamed and renewed,  seething with humanity and struggling with untrammeled growth. Yet I am able to see enough on these whirlwind trips to reassure myself that the old lives on within the new, providing glimpses of the way it used to be. The fondly remembered architectural, human, and behavioral relics of my old Madras are not dead. They nestle without self-conscious effort within the new Chennai like the betel nut within the betel leaf, awaiting rediscovery.

Homecoming

The first thing I notice when I get off the plane at Meenambakkam, on a week-long flying visit to Madras from the US, is that some changes are decidedly for the better. The Jet Airways flight is operated with a dream-like efficiency. It combines the best elements of old and new. Experiencing this object lesson in management efficiency clothed in an old-world courtesy and served up, as it were, with chutney and sambhar, I am thankful that in India, private carriers have not copied the bus-operator indifference of their western counterparts. Air travel here, particularly by private carrier, is still a privilege rather than a drudge.

I stroll off the new jet-way, taking in the uncrowded and modernized terminal on the way out, and there at last, at my feet, is the city I remember. It is a typically windless and sultry Madras morning, and outside, the parking lot is bare, brown and gray, with betel-juice-stained flecks of red. There are rows of vehicles that are quintessentially Madras, autorickshaws and bicycles, Ambassadors, Contessas and Marutis, surrounded by groups of drivers and various hangers-on, standing around and talking in little knots, waiting for some custom. Some suspend their conversations as they come over to offer me a taxi or auto(rickshaw), accepting my refusal good-naturedly. I climb happily, with my uncle who has come to meet me, into the rented Ambassador with its slightly dirty and impossibly over-decorated plastic interior, and a lurid seat cover apparently designed to both  protect and entertain. An image of Jesus hangs from the rearview mirror. The heavily tinted windows resist being rolled down. The car comes to life with a familiar roar and slips into gear with an alarming shudder. As the driver eases the ancient vehicle through the car park, past the welter of bicycles, auto rickshaws, trucks and pedestrians on to the main road, and accelerates to a scary 40 kilometers per hour, I realize I am home.

Living Dangerously in an Auto (rickshaw)

The car ride home from the airport cannot hold a candle to the much scarier auto rides I am obliged to take subsequently[1]. These yellow missiles ply with terrifying abandon amidst the cheerful chaos of two-wheelers, bicycles, pedestrians, trucks and cars that Madras traffic has become. Each journey is a feckless Darwinian orgy of narrow escapes. I am often obliged to close my eyes as we zoom towards what seems to me an inevitable collision, only to avoid it in a miracle of luck and brinkmanship, and then we are headed for the next near miss. There are over 40,000 autos in Chennai. Auto drivers do their dangerous and difficult jobs with great cheerfulness, accepting the risks as part of the game of life. Many are villagers who came to the city looking for a job. With all its hard work and danger, driving an auto offers a dependable and decent living.

For the growing middle class, autos are indispensable as a more expensive but still somewhat affordable alternative to the incredibly crowded Pallavan bus service. Many times the fare is decided by friendly haggling rather than based upon the meter. For a trip that I knew was Rs.15 to Rs. 20, I found drivers asking anything from Rs15 to Rs 40, with all sorts of interesting justifications for the higher rates. For example, on one occasion, the driver said “ Give me Rs. 25”. I said, “I have been traveling this route twice a day and it is always Rs. 15.” (I was not about to confess that I had paid Rs 20 on occasion). “No sir”, he says, “See this road? If we went down that way, it would be Rs.15, but it is one way the wrong way. If I get caught, they will slap a fine on me of Rs. 50. But I’ll take you for Rs 20.”

In the meantime, the auto driver’s friend joined him. The friend came to the driver’s defense. He said, “How come you are offering to take him for Rs. 20? You should ask for Rs 25.” I said, “Let’s just turn on the meter and see how much it is.” He replied, “The meter would come to Rs 40!” I knew he was exaggerating wildly, but they were wearing me down. I now had the choice of walking off and doing this all over again with the next fellow, who was a way down the street, with no guarantee of better results. So I said, “All right, Rs 20.”

The friend said to the driver, “Hey, annai (brother), I need to go that way, give me a ride down there too.” He hopped on at the front, sharing the narrow front seat with the driver, as we careened off on another adventure in near-suicide. And naturally, we headed down the wrong way on the so-called one-way street. I said, “ Didn’t you tell me this was one-way?” The two of them looked at each other and smiled. As we went, they asked me how long I was in town for. I had not realized it was that obvious I was from out-of-town; was it my rusty Tamil or my clothes that betrayed me? I told them I was home for a week. We chatted merrily on the way. At the end, I gave the driver the Rs. 20, and said, not very seriously, where is my concession for the one-way street? He did a double take, then realized in delight that I was pulling his leg. Sheepishly, he said, “Thank you, sir”. For me, the Madras I remember lives on in his impish grin.

Hospitals, Here and There, Then and Now

Unfortunately, I spent a good bit of my visit shuttling to a large private hospital in the city, where my father was recovering from a heart problem. The experience was in pleasant contrast both to the way things are in the US, which has the most technologically advanced healthcare in the world, and to the way things used to be in Madras. One aspect I found extraordinary was the precise and elaborate system of management that was obviously in place at the hospital. As the day wore on in the hospital room, there was a veritable procession of people coming in to perform their highly defined and carefully orchestrated functions. Toilet cleaner, sweeper, food delivery, room maintenance, ward secretary, nurse, doctor, each came in turn with their routines, their record notebooks, and their air of cheerful competence.

But even more than the organization, I was impressed by the pervasive service mentality, a systematic courtesy from which many shoddy businesses in the West could learn an object lesson. Hospitals in the US have the latest in technology and superb doctors, but their approach to patients leaves much to be desired. Many, though not all, treat the patient as a product to be processed, not as a customer to be served. This modern hospital in Chennai had good technology and good doctors as well. But it was the overriding mandate to serve that permeated to the lowest-level employee, overlaid with the pleasant manner and grace of the South Indian staff, that made for such a pleasant experience. On the street, the tensions and crowding of modern Indian urban life have tended to suppress the natural good manners and cheerful demeanor I associate with South Indians. Within the disciplined and well-ordered milieu of the hospital, however, the traditional hospitality and friendliness was on full display. I came away impressed. A bill that was one-twentieth of what it would have been in the US rounded out an experience that was as agreeable as the inherent nature of a hospital stay would allow.

One welcome encroachment of the western world is visible, however, in the dispensation of medical care. I noticed that the old feudal-style model of medical care we used to have in Madras, with a senior doctor at the pinnacle calling the shots, has been replaced in the past two decades by professional, organized operations with a broadly competent staff of doctors and nurses, working as part of a system. This new system, which exudes reliability without the trappings of individual personalities, is much closer to the western model than what prevailed before.  In the old Madras of the 1960s and 1970s, the upper middle class and rich turned to a small and elite group of brilliant and almost messianic doctors, often using connections or friends to gain an audience with these legendary men of medical practice. These senior doctors controlled hospitals or clinics that were truly one-man shows, presiding imperiously over their highly centralized fiefdoms, dispensing advice and medical treatment like god-men distributing prasadam to those lucky enough to enter their orbit and attract their attention.

In place of the living medical legends and messiahs, Chennai now has a young and professional cadre of well-trained and well-paid specialists, working within an egalitarian modern network of health-care providers. Although many of the doctors of the old guard were truly talented at their professions, there were only enough of them to serve a tiny elite within the city’s vast populace. They are a now a disappearing breed, erstwhile princes of a city that has outgrown its feudal legacy. The beneficiaries are the middle classes, who finally have access to competent and systematic health care. The challenge is to extend these advances to the destitute and poor, who cannot pay and are therefore relegated to competent but overcrowded government hospitals.

Charm Amid the Swarm

Madras used to be a graceful city of gardens, uncrowded boulevards, terraces and palm trees, and a beautiful beach, exuding colonial charm. This is not sentimental claptrap; it was true even within my lifetime, as I recollect the many happy summers spent here as a boy. As I make my way through Chennai in 1999, it is sometimes hard to even picture the Old Madras that it has replaced. Peaceful roads have turned into crowded, dirty, incredibly noisy and polluted thoroughfares. Crossing the road in front of my parent’s flat is now a hair-raising near-encounter with sticky death. Everywhere you look, rude utility has overwhelmed old-worldly charm. As an example, my grandparents’ graceful old house, with its open design, austere steel columns, cavernous rooms with traditional louvered windows, verandahs, and high sloped ceilings with old-fashioned ceiling fans, is long gone. The cowshed and the smaller satellite buildings that clustered around it are gone as well. The property has long been subdivided into utilitarian flats.

Yet occasionally, hiding behind the bustle of the street, nestled in-between the crude and hasty new structures, there is a colonial or post-colonial gem that testifies to times past. One of my favorite buildings in Madras is the Art Gallery in Egmore, a large and ornate Victorian building near the main museum on Pantheon Road. While the broad and leafy street that used to be Pantheon Road has turned into a maelstrom of dust and traffic, the Gallery retains an incongruously peaceful charm, its red façade resting complacently in largely empty grounds. This is only one of many old and beautiful icons, that seem to be from not just another time but another place altogether. But poor zoning and the press of humanity have turned it into an island in a storm.

So rapid has the city’s development been that even houses built less than 30 years ago seem out of place in it. Anna Nagar, for example, once a sleepy enclave that was considered a remote suburb, has been totally overrun by the city crowds. On the street where my uncle built a beautiful bungalow about 27 years ago, the bucolic calm was once broken only by an occasional bicyclist, and the wind rustled through the sleepy gardens in a silence that was unusual even in the Madras of those days. There were few shops, and I remember the complaints about the lack of infrastructure.

Today, 20 yards from his bungalow’s gate, teashops, convenience stores and small and untidy commercial operations of all kinds thrive, while his quiet residential lane is transformed into an unkempt and dirty street that blares with incessant noise and traffic. I love the people of this city, but I can’t help thinking, by God, there are too many of them! They crowd the roads, strain the infrastructure, and their vehicles pollute the air. They come in search of a living. The residents hang on, uneasy in the shadow of the locust swarm that has overwhelmed their space, or retreat to newer colonies far out of town. Neighborhoods are losing their charm and distinction. I fear that a characterless sprawl will be all that remains in the end. Much the same has already occurred in New Delhi.

Phoenix

Yet I know that these negative instincts reflect a sentimentality that deserves scrutiny. I remind myself that in the end, it is not the physical city that is important, but what it stands for. Above all, is the city not a monument to its people, not to the people that lived here in the past, but to those that inhabit it now?  If the untidiness and the rudeness of Chennai today is overwhelming, is it not because India in 1999 is in the midst of an awakening, a spurt of development and growth that is as welcome as it may be difficult to manage? Is it not the same people and the same economic activities that strain the resources of the city that are the agents of that revival?

For only out of development can come economic wealth, and out of the newfound prosperity the self-confidence and excess economic capacity that is the sine qua non for cultural renaissance in a society. And only out of cultural renewal can the voice of a new society be heard, the new that the old is perpetually in the act of becoming. Out of this urban mess and ungainly sprawl can come the burgeoning of a civilization asserting itself anew as it has through the ages, rising phoenix-like from each cultural and social invasion, reborn and ready for the next assault. It is not the preserving of the old that is critical to Chennai and to India, but the process of transformation itself. I just hope that this time we can get there before the whole place bursts at the seams.

I prepare to leave with joy and regret. Even this verbose report cannot do justice to all that I have seen and heard, smelled and felt. I leave in peace, and with some satisfaction, until my next visit, to return to the suburban streets of New Jersey and bustling New York, where I have made my new home. My dad is better. The city is different, yet the same, and whether I am far or near, I will keep a fond eye on it. Each time I come it teaches me something new, and I hope I will always be receptive to its lessons.

(Written August 7, 1999)

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