After coming back from Vedaranyam on the central coast of Tamil Nadu, we spent a couple of days in Chennai (aka Madras) before heading back to Delhi. It felt a bit strange, but we were so glad to be back in a large city after a week spent in a village! In fact, when our bus first rolled into Chennai, the first tall building seemed more like a space-ship to me than anything else! If this is my reaction after a week in a village, I can just imagine what the reaction of a villager would be when he saw a tall building for the first time in his life. The photo here shows a dog trying to survive the heat in Chennai - it was 30 degrees centigrade even in January.
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It happened to be Pongal during this weekend. Pongal (Lori or Makar Sankranti in the north) is a festival marking the beginning of the harvest season. One of the rituals surrounding Pongal is that women draw elaborate kolams or rangolis in front of their house to welcome the goddess of prosperity into their homes.
Nikil showed us around Chennai on the first day. Thanks to him for letting us crash at this place and also showing us around Chennai! We visited the Government museum which had a fantastic collection of Chola-era bronzes, in addition to stone statues. We also saw an exhibition on writing and inscriptions which displayed writings in Brahmi and Nagiri from over a thousand years ago and also showed the evolution of this writing in modern-day Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. Quite unexpectedly, the gallery of contemporary art also had a number of great paintings. There was also a museum of natural history which had several ancient skeletons and fossils - the museum itself seemed to be a fossil as well! There were huge crowds of people there as it was Pongal weekend.
We also visited various other touristy places, including Fort St. George (nothing much to see there), Marina beach (back to normal after the tsunami), the Parthasarathy Temple and the Sri Kapileshwarar temple. As it was Pongal time, the temple had various Pongal celebrations going on, including bedecked cows being paraded through it and people doing a circumnavigation of the temple, not by walking, but by continually prostrating themselves on the ground. The photos to the left are of the Parthasarathy temple in Chennai where we saw the mother of all chariots. Nonetheless, this is a small chariot compared to the chariot at the Jagannath temple in Puri (Orissa state) and the chariot carved out of stone at Ellora near Aurangabad (Maharashtra state). In addition to passing by the hallowed grounds of IIT Madras, we also saw churches everywhere - more than I've seen in any other part of India. We did not go down to Mahabalipuram (called Mamallapuram locally) as we did not have time - there was a Bharatnatyam festival going on there.
To pass the time, we also visited a few restaurants, including a Chettinad seafood restaurant, a Chinese restaurant on Mount Road (Spencer Plaza) and a couple of traditional south Indian restaurants. We also managed to see The Incredibles at Sathyam Cinema!
We were also introduced to another NGO that was helping out with the tsunami relief effort - Bhoomika Trust. Our friends Preeti, Faisal and Ava from AID India had all already left, so, we took an early morning flight back to Delhi and are now getting ready to move on to New Zealand!
- Dev & Smruti
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