The Hindu Business Line : Chennai's front office on the sands of time

Cramped for space, the Tamil Nadu Government wants to shift to the Marina. With economic reforms, the State bureaucracy usually shrinks except in India. That news hurt.

SEVEN days to go for Vishu and the Tamil New Year's Day, and the three Indian Laburnum (Golden Shower) trees on my morning walks are on schedule with clusters of yellow flowers. In the mood, one stops and takes in the contrast of green leaves and drooping light yellow sprays. On Vishu day, most Tamil and Malayali homes will place the flowers at the feet of the gods. Others, like the bare silk cotton tree with red offerings, tulip, parijat, copper pod, temple tree and the Indian coral tree, have donned spring colours till one day in June the rains wash them away.

For the second year running, some 300 or more large cuckoo shrikes have landed atop the tall tamarind, mango and rain trees near L.I.C. colony. A buzz in the air alerts the walker to their arrival and if one cares to stand and look at them, they take off in a wide circle with a whirr only to land at the same place.

With the onset of Vishu, one would be completing about nine years of getting up at 5 in the morning to walk the roads alone for about two hours. It is not that one walks every day and every month of the year; working on a bit of statistics it would come to about 250-300 days of walking in a year.

One got into the habit in 1994 while staying for a couple of months in Chennai. For no particular reason, one would get up by 5 in the morning without the help of an alarm clock, walk down Radhakrishnan Salai and hit the sands of the Marina Beach.

Even today, despite the samadhis, statues, housing colonies and dirt, no city in India can boast of a more tastefully done front office. Surf, wind, oneself to oneself... some of the best hours of my life have been spent on the Marina sands and that too, at various times of the day from early morning to late night. Queen Mary's College, the University and the entire line of ancient, low ceiling, mainly red brick structures along the Beach Road have for long lived with the air and water of the Bay of Bengal.

After failing to demolish the police headquarters near the Marina, the Tamil Nadu Government has decided to knock down Queen Mary's College to put in place the Government apparatus. Cramped for space, the State Government wants to shift to the Marina. With economic reforms, the State bureaucracy usually shrinks except in India. That news hurt.

Over the week, one has been talking to a few Chennai citizens, now living in Mumbai, and they are more than upset. "Have you ever gone into Queen Mary's College? Boss, it is the best place to be in when the wind and rains come scurrying over the Bay of Bengal," said my friend Go-go. One has never gone into any of the buildings opposite Marina Beach and yet one could understand the emotion of Go-go.

One gathered some history from the book on Dr S. Chandrasekhar styled Chandra written by Kameshwar C. Wali. The wife of the famous scientist, Lalitha, had an aunt, Subbalakshmi, who turned a widow at 12 and this lady played an important role in setting up Queen Mary's College.

Subbalakshmi and an Irish woman, Christina Lynch, worked hard to provide educational opportunities for Indian women and girls. Wali writes: "To begin with, Subbalakshmi's house became a Widows' Home. As more and more unfortunate ones came to the door, they moved to larger and larger places, till they settled in the so-called Ice House, a palatial site across from the Marina Beach in Madras. They then pressured the Government into building a new school (Lady Willingdon's School and Teacher's Training College) adjacent to the Ice House and a new college for women (Queen Mary's College)."

In my walks, one sometimes met up with an old, lonely man who regularly practiced yoga on the sands of the Marina. Walking back together, we chatted over cups of coffee at a stall on Radhakrishnan Salai. He told me of times when he spent nights sleeping on the sands under the stars in the sky looking like full stops and wake up in the morning to the sound of sea waves.

"That was magic. Marina was a stretch of sand, sea and quiet," he told me.

On a night in October 1929, Dr Chandrasekhar, as a young boy, discussed physics with Werner Heisenberg as they drove along the Marina. By the next Vishu, contractors will string up a tall, glass and cement designer office as unworthy as the common lantana on forestland. The Marina will become a car parking space for Government vehicles, and then one day there will be no Marina.

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