"Chennai" a Chennai (Madras) Travel Page by tayloretc

I've been told you either love India or hate it. I fall squarely into the "love it" category. Except when I hate it.

I came to Chennai for work in January, 2005, and that trip has extended indefinitely. I'm living in Adyar, which is a fairly well-off area in the southern part of the city, so my comments are bound to be skewed. I'm no longer a tourist, but I'm still absolutely foreign, and I think that would be true were I to live here the rest of my life. Update: I left in May, 2008, and will be updating this pages one of these days.)

The photo above is from the tallest building in Adyar (10 floors) looking south, but it could be just about anywhere except the city center. It's flat. It's jumbled. It's colorful. There's a surprising amount of greenery for an urban area this densely populated. Things are being built and ripped down everywhere - three months later, the vacant lot in the lower right corner is a 4-story building. Indian friends have told me it's hard for Chennai natives to find their way around because landmarks keep changing and “establishments” keep moving. Streets all look the same to me - gajillions of small shops you can't believe are shops, with contents difficult to determine until you enter. There's a lot of yellow.

Anyway.

Chennai is experiencing much of the same technology boom as Bangalore. It's the fourth largest city in India, and has grown very fast in the last 20-15-10 years, leading to the kinds of urban problems you'd expect when mass of people exceeds capabilities of the available infrastructure. I'll spare you the details, but consider services like water, electricity, roadway capacity and traffic flow, and garbage removal; and think hard about where you’d sleep if there was no available housing within your means in a place where “cold” means 70F, and “wet” is 20 days out of 365. (Hint: The answer is “wherever.”)

Apparently, ten years ago there was very little outside the city center besides rice paddies, scrub brush, and ([even then] fetid) rivers. Adyar used to be all low, single-family suburban-ish bungalows; it’s now almost all rebuilt as 4-5 story buildings of 16+ flats each. (And I’ve been told that my little 2-bedroom 1 1/2-bath flat would usually house a family of at least six, sometimes three generations.) One neighborhood just north of Adyar looks like it has been literally engulfed by the city - abutting the roads are thatch-roof village houses and shops, built onto, into, and I think through, by modern buildings. It's fascinating, often jolting, and not always pretty. The colors and patterns of the sheer quantities of stuff are amazing, though. It looks like you could peel away layers of stuff for years before hitting a solid neutral color. That weight of stuff makes everything seem normal, even when in another context it would be a surprise. Five people on a moped just doesn't seem strange.

This is not a city for tourists. It's a working city, and there are few "sights"; although there are plenty of things to do and experience, if you can find them, before heading off to the more tourist-oriented sites in southern India. It isn't easy to get things done, although English is spoken pretty well in places where more educated people are and in places where money is expected to be spent. Especially as a fair-skinned foreigner, you will get great service - phenomenal service. Unto stalking service. On the other hand you will be taken advantage of pretty much any time someone can get away with it. Learn current prices. Learn to argue for them, to the point of walking away to the next guy. Get used to crowds gathering as you argue, because everyone here likes sport, and note that if the seller’s eyes are bright and more than 10% of the crowd is grinning you’re still paying too much. Learn that anything worth doing takes time, and has to be done in public, and repeat walking away and arguing and crowd negotiation as needed.

Okay, that’s cynical, and not all of it is entirely true. I’m in a "hate it" moment. Give me a few minutes and that will change. (But learn the lesson, because you'll need it sooner or later.)

I haven't found Chennai to be photogenic. The areas that look interesting to me aren't places it's advised to hang out in alone let alone pull out a camera - they tend to be areas of economic deprivation. I've heard that close to 1/3 of the population of the city lives at or below the poverty line, which in India is mighty low. It's hard to find overview images, street scenes, that make sense - when taken as a whole a street scene is the incoherent chaos of too much-too many-too much. I think you have to make sense of Chennai from the millions and millions of details, although I'm still not sure what kind of sense you end up with.

On that note, and in response to repeated questions along the lines of “yes, but what’s it like,” I took a lot of random pictures of Chennai during auto rides and have posted them to another site. (If you come back here wondering where all the evidence of the high-tech boom and wealth are, it’s behind the walls topped with glass and barbed wire, or in enclaves sealed from the roads.) There are a few others here.

From the details I’ve seen, or those I have been forced to bear witness to (which I am not going to describe), I’ve ended up harder, harsher for being here. I haven’t yet decided whether this is a bad thing. Every once in a while, though, someone says hello or smiles without wanting anything in return, and I just don’t know anymore.

General

Chennai is not always an easy place to be. The day-to-day frustrations; the disparity of wealth and crushing poverty; the way people treat each other, animals, and the environment; and because the scope of the problems is overwhelming - they all take their toll. Physically, the heat is brutal, and the quantity of particulate matter in the air doesn't help. Try not to have asthma or wear contact lenses here. If you don’t like saunas, a lot, don’t be here between early March and late November.

Note, though: if you "just don't like" something (for me, coffee or coconut; maybe for you, saunas), try it here anyway. You will probably be surprised. Also note: if you speak Hindi, it doesn’t work here, it won't get you appreciation from the locals, but it might earn you an extra scam attempt.

Chennai will show you what culture shock is and what it means to have no clue what's going on. It will show you what it means to be really, truly foreign, even as it adopts things you think are quintessentially western. "Western" will always have a south Indian spin, an adjustment to taste. This is an up-and-coming global city with nothing quaint or precious about it, regardless of a very long history and a culture unlike anywhere else in the world. You will find no apologies here. You will also find no explanations: like why the water is cut off in the kitchen, but still works pakka one wall over in the bathroom. It's brilliant.

In my pre-living-here days I had envisioned India as information overload, and that has certainly proven to be true of Chennai. The colors, heat, noise, flavors, quantities of everything, are extreme. There's a richness of subtleties to it all, though, if you can attune yourself to them.

See? A few minutes later and I'm back in a "love it" moment. I think. What happened to the water in the kitchen again?

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A note on food, per the comment below: You’re right, the food is great. There’s a lot of food available. But there are also likely to be more food comments from me because eating out is a major part of social life, and there simply isn’t much else for single people in their 30s to do here. (Well, there is, but not for passers-through.) This is partly because most everyone is married by the age of 28, and usually have at least one kid by the age of 30. There’s also not a culture of the casual social contact you find in the US, for example. I’m not talking about sex (that’s easy enough) - I mean simply striking up a conversation with a stranger.

There aren’t a lot of venues for social contact, either. Contemporary arts aren’t supported much, so theater is almost all either traditional (focused during the Dec/Jan festival season), or amateur (which isn’t to say it’s not good, and often very good). Bands playing anything other than movie-type music can’t get places to play. There are some bars, but you don’t go to them alone. There are few museums, and if there are galleries I don’t know where they are. I’ll add those kinds of tips as I find them, though, try to balance out the food.