New age space

Back in the day when Perungudi was way beyond Madras city, there was a factory here manufacturing paints. The Tata Group had acquired this through Forbes Gokak taking over the shareholding of the parent company Goodlass Nerolac sometime in the mid 1970s. By 1999, the Tatas had relinquished their entire holdings to Kansai Paints of Japan. This factory in Perungudi was not really high priority for Kansai and by 2013, manufacturing activities were shut down, and a voluntary retirement scheme had provided a reasonable severance package to those workers who remained. 

Within a couple of years, the land on which the factory stood, a little over 15 acres, had been acquired by the Brigade Group, which began developing that as a mixed use space: about 18 lakh sft of office space, conference / exhibition centres, hotel and residential towers. With this plan, it became a part of the WTCA and so the Brigade World Trade Center became one of the 37 WTCs in India (incidentally, India has 4 more WTCs than China, and the maximum number in Asia). 

Only the office space has been completed; the rest of the complex is still under construction. It is somehow fitting that the WTC will further enhance the status of OMR as the place to be for new-age / tech firms. In the days of Nerolac, this part of Chennai was seen as a place for industrial light-weights; big guns like Ashok Leyland, Enfield, Ennore Foundries were at the other end of the city. Now, north Chennai is not a go-to place for tech firms, but if a tech firm doesn't have offices on OMR, well, it runs the risk of being thought of as a non-serious player in the industry!

Foodwalk

Not for us the food courts; we need to walk around trying out different dishes from multiple cuisines. But most visits to the KC Food Street end up in shawarmas or kababs. 

The "KC" in the name is the abbreviation for Kandanchavadi, which is where this food street is!

 

Future Factory

It looks like something from a future world. A clutch of oddly-shaped buildings greet you as you reach the end of the road leading to the IT Park developed by SIPCOT at Siruseri. These buildings house the offices of TCS, India's largest software developer. According to TCS, this complex is the largest such in Asia, with over 5 million sft of built-up area. When it was opened in 2010, it had the capacity to house over 22,000 employees. In the years since, the facility has expanded a bit and there are now over 30,000 people working here. 

Spread over 70 acres, TCS' facility is the biggest in the SIPCOT IT Park, which is spread over 1,000 acres. Getting off the Rajiv Gandhi Salai (the Old Mahabalipuram Road), the stretch is kind of bare, because the space just off the OMR has not been developed yet. From the time you make the turn, TCS' buildings catch the eye. Unfortunately, the way in does not provide you the complete view of these buildings. 

The buildings were designed by the Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott and Associates, along with Carlos Ponce de León Architects. CRN Rao Architects provided the onsite support as well as structural and MNE services. In the view from the top, the buildings look like butterflies spreading their wings out. Six such buildings are arranged around a central spine, and the overall effect is something quite out of this world. TCS had, much earlier, had one of its buildings on the OMR designed by a San Jose (USA) based architect, but compared to this one, that facility is like a caterpillar to this butterfly!

Centre-spot

Here's another middle-of-the-road temple, just a few days after this one. There is one similarity: both were threatened by the road widening that became necessary and both survived it. But the differences are many, and stark.

For starters, the Madhya Kailas temple is of recent origin, maybe about 30 years or so old. The unique half-Ganesha and half-Anjaneya idol in this temple was installed after its founder had a dream of the Aadhi Amdhaprabhu, which is how that representation is termed. It is supposedly the only temple with this deity.

So why Kailas? Isn't that Siva's abode? So why isn't Siva the main deity here? Does Venkata Ananda Vinayakar stay at Kailas? There are so many questions, including what is so 'Madhya' (central) about this place. It is at the northern end of Rajiv Gandhi Salai (earlier known as Old Mahabalipuram Road). The only thing central about it is its positioning in the middle of the road, which is but a very recent occurrence!

Old and new trees

Looking out from the MRTS coach as it runs parallel to Rajiv Gandhi Salai (earlier called Old Mahabalipuram Road), it is nice to see the recently planted saplings all in a straight line, well trimmed and providing a green border to the road. The median, while needing a little more filling out in its shrubbery, adds to the green motif.

As far as I have been able to make out, the saplings and the shrubbery are all non-native plants, even if they have been around for a while. But what caught the eye was the lonely palm a little away from the margins of the road. It is obviously not part of the planned landscaping, but one that has been on this stretch for a long while. Maybe it was left standing out of respect for its status as the state tree of Tamil Nadu!

Roadside fire

Like many of the others on the Old Mahabalipuram Road (now called Rajiv Gandhi Salai), this installation too, does not have any description. This, however, is one of the easier ones to figure out; most of the descriptions - none official, though - call it 'The Flame'.

At the time of its installation, about 3 or 4 years ago, the roadside was rather barren; the white, orange and yellow of 'The Flame' kind of blended with the red-brown dirt of the roadside. But now, with the verge having become quite green, the colours of 'The Flame' sparkle against the green; with a couple of plants having grown tall enough to partially screen it, 'The Flame' plays peek-a-boo with its colours, allowing you to fully see them only from an angle on the road (of course, you can choose to park a bit of a way away and walk down to the patch around it).

Just goes to show that even a little roadside fire can grow on you!

Getting back

Was away overnight on a bird-watching camp organized by the Madras Naturalists Society and conducted by my namesake, Dr V.Santharam. The camp was just outside Chennai city - actually I guess the place we went to would fall within the boundaries of Greater Chennai. I had a great time getting to know the ABCs of bird watching - and then going out on to the field and spotting 27 species of birds (that's just the ones I saw; the more experienced birders had over 50 species on their lists).

Coming back into the city, we headed in on the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR); or, what was earlier called Old Mahabalipuram Road. It was renamed Rajiv Gandhi Salai sometime ago and the 20km stretch from Madhya Kailas to Siruseri was formally dedicated at the end of October 2008. The next phase of activity on this road, to complete the Siruseri - Mamallapuram stretch and some connecting roads between Rajiv Gandhi Salai and the East Coast Road is expected to take another year to complete. Though towns like Tiruporur, on the OMR, list themselves as being on the IT Highway, it will take a while before Rajiv Gandhi Salai begins to look like a highway at those points.

In a month or so, the toll plaza at Siruseri will be functional - today, just after we entered the IT Highway at this point in Siruseri, we casually breezed through the yet-to-be-functional toll booths. I believe that's how the villagers along this part - and several other parts too - of Rajiv Gandhi Salai will pass through, even after the toll collection is implemented!

Spelling challenge

It has taken about 17 years to complete Chennai's Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) up to Velachery, its originally planned endpoint. The initial ideas were very grand; Chennai's MRTS would rival Singapore's similarly named system of urban transport; the system would be an integrated network with hubs where commuters could switch between rail and road; the rail coaches would be sleek - the dreams were many. Somewhere along the way though, the road diverged and MRTS became rail-alone. Still, one of the 'benefits' of the slow pace of work was that the design of each station could improve on that of the previous one.

So, this station, where the MRTS begins to run parallel to the Old Mahabalipuram Road* (OMR) looks much sleeker than the ones built earlier. Thanks to the aluminium cladding, which complements the sleekness of the OMR and covers up for the fairly unaesthetic concrete blocks that were built first. The advertising panels at the station entrances also add to the with-it quotient.

The station, following the norm, is named for the area in which it is located. And yet again there seems to have been a deviation from concept to commissioning. The area around it is Kasturba Nagar, named for Mahatma Gandhi's wife. But quite strangely, her name has been mangled and has come out differently in all three languages written here!



*I guess I should start referring to it by its new name of Rajiv Gandhi Salai - but I still call this city 'Madras' sometimes!

Village women

That's what this statue (installation?) reminded me of the first time I saw it. One of the idiosyncrasies of the pieces of art along the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR) is that they seem to have absolutely no relation to each other. It is likely that one needs to walk down the road and see them close up before their secret bonds are revealed, but when you get on to the smoothest road in the city, you are always trying to see how quickly you can get through it to the next bottleneck!

Another curious thing about art on OMR is that many of them seem to be untitled (again, likely that one needs to get really close to them to read the small print) and also uncredited. That's good, because you can use your imagination to even label them differently at different times, if you so choose.

But somehow, this work seemed to be the most intriguing to me. Once 'village women' crept into my mind, I haven't been able to shake it off; I've been trying to conjure up connections between village women and the IT Corridor since. The closest I can get is to think that with many villages along the OMR having been displaced and the people re-settled, this work at the entrance of the OMR is tribute to the spirit of those home-makers.

Any other ideas?

Playful Park?

A couple of years ago, one of my friends from Delhi misunderstood where I was going to on a workday morning. He thought I was going down to a beach for the day, while I was trying to let him know I was going to be working out of the most high-tech office space in the city. For a while there was confusion, while we were trying to understand what each other was saying.

To me, that bit of conversation highlighted how much part of us the Tidel Park has become. No one in Chennai will think of anything other than IT or ITES if you say 'Tidel' to them. But I must admit, it does sound like a theme park by the Bay of Bengal, fed by the tides!

The building itself looks grand and it is quite a good start to the IT Corridor - and to think that, less than 10 years ago, it was the beginning and the end of the Corridor!

Crossing the corridor

Somehow, making an extra effort to ensure safety while crossing roads is something that very few Chennaiites like to do. In the days when the IT corridor was still Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR), people getting to the other side were a speed-breaker; but IT corridors should not stop for anything and road-crossers have now been given overhead walkways that thankfully do not look out of place on the road.

All these walkways are near the MRTS stations. Obviously. But, considering the platforms at these stations are elevated, wouldn't it have made more sense to also enter the walkway directly from the platform? Was that thought of at all? Here's a view of the Indira Nagar station, with the walkway in front of it. With most of the station buildings themselves not having been completed, it would have been far better to have made that platform-entry provision now, rather than break down walls a few years later.