Happy 375th birthday Madras

 The first city of modern India, Chennai, will celebrate its 375th birthday (August 22). The southern city will celebrate Madras Week (August 17 – August 24) by dedicating seven days to the history, culture and traditions of the city.

Chennai, then Madras was founded on 22 August, 1639. It commemorates the founding of the city by establishing Fort St George on a small piece of land acquired from the last King of Chandragiri in 1639 by the British East India Company.

Rechristened Chennai in 1996, the capital of Tamil Nadu is now home to more than 4 million people. The idea of Madras Day was born when a group of Madras lovers got together a few years ago to celebrate the city, its history, traditions and culture. 

Though called the Madras Week, the event, which started off as a half-a-day Madras Day celebration 11 years ago, has grown into a 'Madras month' with festivities and events planned through August and a bit of September.

Madras Week festivities will include heritage walks, photo exhibitions, lectures and quizes to commemorate 375 years of Madras. One of the many unique activities being organised are heritage cycle rides by Chennai-based group Cycling Yogis. A DNA report notes that this group has in the past, charted out heritage rides to places that have Chola, Pallava or colonial histories in and around Chennai in areas such as Royapuram, Anna Salai (Mount Road), Chepauk, Triplicane, Mylapore, Pulicat, Mahabalipuram etc during special occasions like Republic Day, World Heritage Day and the Madras Day. The Madras Day celebrations and all the bash culminates each year with the Madras Quiz, separately in Tamil and English. This is facilitated by the Mylapore Times.

What do people living in Madras love about the city? For some, it's the beach and the sunset. As Baradwaj Rangan writes in this The Hindu piece, "Madras, to me, is the beaches of my childhood, the mornings filled with huffing walkers and the distant tang of fish being hauled in and, above it all, a sun that rises as it does nowhere else." For some, it's the kanjivaram sarees, the idlis and the filter coffee.

Madras is one one of the oldest cities.  Kolkata is 50 years younger than Madras and Bombay is about 35 years younger. Chennai Corporation, the oldest municipal body in India, was established in 1688.

A historian, S Muthiah, told CNN-IBN, "...for the first 150 years, Madras was the chief settlement and it was here that almost virtually everything in modern India - the first municipality, the first technical school, the first western style of Education - began. After that they grew elsewhere but the beginnings were in this city."

Actor Kamal's Message to Chennai

“I think the city of Chennai was chosen by East India Company because it was vantage in position close to the sea and it had two rivers on either side of it and the waterways helped a great deal in transport. They moved troops from almost Chennai all the way till Pondicherry which was an older settlement than Chennai. Over the years, it (Chennai) became even senior to Calcutta. If things had gone right and (Siraj-ud) Daullah had not fallen, we would have been the apex city in India. Who knows, the capital would have shifted southward and that would have been the last white frontier in the country. But things changed. What we have learnt from the British is dumping garbage into the rivers and we learnt the bad habits from them, but never learnt the good ones. They cleaned up the Thames, we did’nt. We ended up having two gutters circumnavigating almost Chennai. The only clean areas were the sea, but otherwise Madras is surrounded by two gutters and no hospital is more than a kilometre from a running a kilometre away from a running gutter, huge, or at least a brook of waste water will be running from any hospital. I might be wrong by half-a-kilometre, but that is where we have come. I think we will be remembered in history as people who let it go this way. Likewise, we will be remembered for our lack of civic sense. We can change this still, we can strive for the change, instead of blaming the politicians. I consider them not as leaders, but as those who run the State for us. So they should be the equivalent of a CEO…

 There is a proverb in Tamil: ‘a man without slipper gets comfort from a man without legs. We could do that and call Bombay dirtier than Chennai, but I think Chennai is fast catching up with the city plan. For example let me tell you, this house where I am sitting, had four steps to climb up to the house. Now the house is sinking and I am trying to keep it as long as I can. Now what is happening is the house is going down and the road is (going up). They say ‘Kon uyara kudi uyarum,’ but what has happened is ‘road uyara, kudi thaazhnthudichu’ (as the road has increased, the house has gone down). So that is what is happening now. Over the 40 years that I have been here, every year they kept adding 6 inches to the road. But no one made a noise. We should think about it and think seriously about it, our refuse…we refuse to look at our refuse. If we go to Pallikaranai and other places, there is standing proof of what we are doing. We are filling up our lakes with garbage. I am not an ecologist, but I can see that its wrong. Water, they say finds its level, when it does, it will be bad. That’s what happened in Bombay.

 Many years ago, they said I predicted tsunami in a film. I did’nt. It is logical that it should happen when tectonic plates move. But when they asked me if I could predict if Bombay go down with the tsunami, I said Bombay doesn’t need a tsunami to drown, its garbage will drown Bombay and that’s what happened. Its common sense. Everybody knows. I as a child heard political parties proclaim they will clean Cooum and run boats like in Venice. I have seen vegetables being brought in the Buckingham Canal and being sold to Brahmins in Mylapore. I have bought vegetables there along with my mother. Vegetables and firewood were brought by barges to ease the traffic to come right through the city. People have lost those facilities. I know I am shouting down at Chennai, but somebody has to because Chennai is an inanimate terra firma, that’s all, and we, the animated persons who should do something. There is a civic conscience that is coming up and I am sure that there are very many busy people who are willing to give the same voice but I think including me we are all very lazy in putting it forward. I think we should do it. The garbage from your home or your neighbour’s home is still your garbage.”