The first day in Chennai was a blend of positives and negatives, as it usually happens with everything else in this world. The first sight of Chennai was a lot of accumulated domestic waste outside the railway station. No offences to the Tamil people and the localites. The bigger the place, the dirtier are the suburbs. I don’t know why the metropolitan standards are maintained only in the diameter of a couple of kilometers. The second thing that I wanted to mention was the Penna river. I was reminded of Ganga and its appalling state. People are the same, we just look and talk different. But when it comes to destroying nature, we forget all the racial differences and unite against it. How pretty cool would it be if we applied the same attitude where we really ought to.
Anyway, coming back to Chennai. It was a journey of 28 hours in the train. Needless to say, we were totally exhausted. As we came out of the station, a lot of autowalas were already at our heels. Owing to the fact that we’d been told by all our acquaintances in Chennai of North-Indians being looted by autowalas, we were being extra careful while dealing with them. After negotiating with one of them, we finally succeeded in bringing him down from 500 INR to 100 INR! We immediately left for our guest house that was a good two kilometers from the station. It was 6:00 in the evening, and I was terribly hungry. While we were on our way, anything that looked familiar helped me relax a bit more. And every time I heard people talking in Tamil, my spirits sank down. The autowala kept saying “po, po, po” on the way. After a while I made out that it means “go”! Believe me, I felt like a genius! Chennai was totally a foreign land to me and anything that I could understand or do on my own boosted my confidence like anything! We were told that our guest house was located somewhere near “Paris” bus stand, which turned out to be “Parry’s” as we later found out on reaching there! After I threw my bags in, we left to stroll out a bit, find something to eat. The most prominently sold item on the streets were flowers, those white ones. Then there were bananas, coconuts, vegetables. Each of the passers-by had a stern, cold look on their faces. They looked like people deprived of fun, or being threatened to death if caught having fun(no offences)! Finally a lady smiled at me, I asked her which the nearest restaurant was. She couldn’t understand English. True as hell, language is a big problem here. The other thing that I would like to mention about the roads is the pictures of Jayalalitha and Mr. M. Karunanidhi, there were thousands of them! And in a way they seemed different from the pictures of political leaders in MP and the North. After an hour of useless strolling around, we ultimately found a restaurant. Here they put a banana leaf in your plate that they serve in. I liked that uttapam. I hope I am going to continue to like it as long as I stay here!
The next two days were spent entirely in going through the joining procedure i.e. document verification, various HR sessions, salary bank accounts(the most awaited part!), the Pre-Assessment Test, etc. which means we could call it a day only at 9:00 PM! It also means that we have had no time to explore the city yet. The only time we had a view of the Marina beach was through the taxi! The only few names that I know are Karapakkam, Velachery, Perangudi, Thoraipakkam, Adyar, Siruseri and Sholinganallur.
The people here are good, in many ways better than the North-Indians. For example, rapes are not regularly in the news. In the two days that I’ve stayed, never have I come across eve-teasers. Which is a big relief, of course. People might seem to be a little unfriendly or uncooperative at first, that is probably because we are as much alien to them as they are to us.
All in all, Chennai although very foreign, still seems to be a place I could live in. And I am looking forward to a wonderful phase of my life.
