Adhavadhu(that is…),
humanity’s greatest achievement is not the great wall of china or moon landing or the moon landing tapes, but cities.
We weren’t meant to live in caves, or in forests or spend our lifetimes working with crops and pests and pesticides, notice how we came from all that into this density of human life, simply called the city.
(Density, city rhymes, +5 marks, self evaluation as they say in some industries)
But not everyone, mostly not those originally from a city seem to like life in one, they prefer rural silence to urban violence, the slow pace to a rat race. Also non-citizens (here meant to denote those not from a city) tend to think that there is some sort of moral loss that happens in a city and that this loss is communicable.
Mainly this idea has been spread by Tamil(also others?) cinema.
Innumerable movies talk about the helping tendencies of the rural-ites, their hardworking-ness and their ever helpful nature. Cities however are the polar opposite, if a village can be compared to the character of a hero, then a city is the serial rapist villain who has bald thug named ‘Peter’ who spits Pan Parag in railway ticket counter corners.
Nevermind.
Like all things in reality, cities are inescapable, for me they represent human life at its aggregated best; a place where differences blur because everyone is pushing against each other towards an unknown center.
Without cities, we would be even distant islands of self image and comfort. Without cities we would still be somebody. See, because one of the best things that a city offers you is anonymity!
Like rain water, sewage etc etc making it to the sea, we all make it to the city.
It doesn’t matter who we are and where we are from.
Maanagaram is what knowledgeable people call a hyperlink film in which multiple characters pursue their own stories but are united in the core theme of the film, which is ofcourse about the city.
But wait, this is not Ayutha Ezhuthu, this is better( hi to all Madras Talkies), with much likeable characters, pulsating music, open your mouth in amazing disbelief kind off opening titles, swear words and their social context, broken beer bottle into your neck kind off action and generally Chennai by night( which is the biggest plus)
Underneath all this is a thread of that of the kindness of strangers, how far will someone go for another man(or woman); invisibly connecting all the characters that inhabit this city, I mean film.
Maanagaram, one of the best films out there this year ( coughs and says Gaudam, “what does your instict say”) not only because of its extreme filmmaking and exciting characters but also because Maangaram gives the best that every big city offers: anonymity
Untill next time.
{Parking Lot notes initially appeared as a Facebook post somewhere}
An attempt to view Madras/Chennai through its songs
Who knows what type of day it would have been, but trust the Madras resident to come conclude that it would have been, like every day: a very hot one. The imaginative residents would have even got to the extent of picturing a sun burned and sweating exploring officer of the East India Company, pausing at this small and then insignificant sand bar on the Coramandel coast.
He could have gone further, but then he stopped.
The officer on duty was Francis Day, one of the neglected founding fathers of the city; the city they once called Madras and now we call Chennai. There are many tales as to why Day stopped here, it wasn’t even a natural harbor, so essential for the works of the company; the story of Madras is perhaps the most cinematic one; the one never told or explored by the dream spinners who now work in what widely circulated newspapers call Kollywood, a name which sounds so odd that you would like to say something nice after you mouth it.
But there has always been the beach, the coast that made the travelling Englishman stop has churned the memories of many a Tamil filmmaker. C.V. Sridhar often heralded as the first modern Tamil director shared Day’s enchantment and used to write all his scripts on the Marina and would shoot at least one scene there, his classic comedy Kadhalikka Neramillai (No time for love) was set entirely in the southern mountain retreat of Chinnamalai but that couldn’t prevent Sridhar from shooting this opening song on the sunny beach overlooking the Madras University, it is one of the most happiest openings in Tamil film and Sridhar’s sentiment with the Marina would continue all through, not far away a bridge named after a 19th century city Governor Francis Napier, the distinctly red lighthouse and the Indo-Saracenic architecture of the university buildings has also served countless location managers, the stretch of the Marina would be the most exploited, mostly for songs providing walking space for leading couples to ad lib while the composer’s music played out.
When the Marina is used, can Elliot’s be far behind; the city’s second favorite hangout has an added advantage of having a cenotaph to decorate the panoramic shots.
I do agree that there has been repetition in the Madras that appeared in songs; after all there can only be so many places of interest, so we can afford to forgive Mani Ratnam (who incidentally has a company called Madras talkies) for using the Chennai Museum complex for a dance recital and as a court-house. He famously used the college of Engineering for the same, but that is another matter.
Repetition too has some beauty, but that lies in the mind of the reciter, a song which begins with a sombrero wearing Manorama aptly titled Madrasa Sutti Paaka Poren (I am going to see Madras)is your quickest guide to the city, even makes fun of Lord Ripon after whom the Corporation headquarters is named; the same year (1994) also came Shankar’s Kadhalan (Lover)a song which quickened the pulse of a nation and also managed to capture Prabhu Deva taking over Madras from the top of distinctive green buses while people watch, mesmerized from the sides of the High Court and the LIC buildings, which I should take time to mention as Chennai’s Empire state, it is not much, but still it is ours.
Staying on the topic of LIC building as a symbol of the city, for years that umm…modest skyscraper and the Central Railways station has been used to the change in setting of any film, from the village to the big bad city; going to Pattinam(as Madras was called in the villages then) was considered an ill act.
Here in B&W Madras, the villager ponders over skyscrapers and how irresponsible the citizens are, the trend continues to this day; in a time where Tamil Cinema is moving southward to the raw rustic surroundings of Madurai and elsewhere; Chennai is often seen as a city of IT professionals who live fake lives and always speak English to the uneducated.
But the city silently bears all that, waiting for that rare moment where even the immigrants; these protectors of Tamil culture pause for a moment and realize what a ladder this city has been for them, on the other hand new blood from the city have not been silent as they had to deal with inter-zonal conflicts; eternally dividing the city into one of the haves and the have-nots; after all which city does not have boundaries.
But what many cities do not posses is a tongue of its own, rumored to have borrowed equally from English, Tamil, Sanskrit and Hindi, perhaps even German (who can say) is the Madras Baashai, no Tamil film attains completeness without a Zaam Bazzar Jaggu having his bichua knife ready to slice or singing songs on the banks of the foul-smelling holy Cooum: our ever unclean-able.
The clips in this document is far from complete, but have been assembled to give a fleeting glimpse of the city, many great songs and sites have been left behind and there are still many corners in the city to be explored and filmed, for who would have thought that the famous banyan tree in the Theosophical Society would have given ample shade to silent lovers or that a gully cricket match between the RA Puram Sharks and the Royapuram Rockers would mete out an amusing tale, if not for cinema. We will wait.
For mine is a laid back coastal city, till only recently sprouting signs of competing with the hustle of its colleagues; but somehow maintaining the warmth and air of welcome, I have never been anywhere else; but I have always been welcome at home. Maybe that is what made Francis Day stop, he probably felt home.
Whenever something shuts shop, the memories associated with that something swell out, that is only natural. Because memories need not be rational, this is some loss however.
One thing I realised that, we can continue to have the memories even if the source of those memories has shut down or changed course, because basically these are our memories and we can construct them however and whenever we wish to, immaterial of conditions. So basically this is not a nostalgia piece, but masquerading as one.
I do not know how my generation spent their birthdays; mine was always at Landmark Nungambakkam. Weekdays or weekend whenever it came, didn’t matter; it was the unspoken norm, lunch and dinner also didn’t matter. It wasn’t that we returned with a kart load of books, maybe just one or two.
Landmark Nungambakkam was my first idea of what a bookstore should be, a major introduction to the genres and authors I read now. An idea of a bookstore is important because my reading was and is still to a large part unguided. Earlier I was able to open myself to some authors without knowing anything about their stature. With age comes irritations and information, details which make me doubtful about picking a book rather than urge to pick one up now.
I have moved on, there were other bookstores, libraries and of course the internet and as years passed my visits to the subterranean bookstore decreased, and even if I did I was not as compulsive in buying anything. To tell the truth I was not much surprised when I walked into the store today which looked like a ransacked supermarket in time of a zombie-apocalypse.
Empty shelves.
A Nora Roberts here, a Wilbur Smith there, Chetan Bhagat everywhere.
But Landmark had become like this for many years now, the McDonalds of the bookstores, it may be true that Indian writing in English is the new boom, but this boom had made Landmark into a storehouse, but not of knowledge. Often one could see numerous copies of the same book occupying an entire genre shelf only adding to my existing irritations. There was a constant fear of bumping into the same book cover, like the horror when numerous stern looking Mani Ratnams looked down upon me from the cinema shelf; no he was on the science shelf too.
I think that was the moment it dawned upon me that this shop has to go, at least I would like to think that this was the moment I arrived at this thought. It is a selfish thought of course, to expect things to remain as they were. I never cared for the other stores in the city (City Center, Spencer’s) and I shouldn’t care about this one too.
As people trickled into the store on Monday evening, the unsettling sight of near empty store made them reach out to the nearest attendant. Yes the store was closing, the ‘bestsellers’ would be going to a storage facility in Pune, while the remaining would be put out on clearance in the coming weeks.
Maybe they too were thinking about an early morning many years ago when the store was filled with eager enthusiastic kids and yawning parents to get a copy of the latest Harry Potter. Now people just do some clicks online. Packet delivered.
To keep the bookstore atop a pedestal is in fact a very wrong thing to do, just like how the theatre in which we watch a movie is immaterial, where we buy a book too.
But then the memories?
I got my own Agatha Christie at Landmark, my first LOTR copy, a cassette of Crazy Thieves in Palavakkam and the DVD of Guide too; but my consuming of them would have been no different wherever I had purchased them.
So what are these memories then?
A good bookstore will enrich the informed reader and educate the novice, in these last years Landmark had, I felt never put a step in that direction. The reasons might be many, but it was not my bookstore anymore.
If it had not been landmark, then I can safely say that the same job would have been done by some other similar store. After all there is no point of wasting sympathy on a store which had just the same set of books everywhere, an uncaring enterprise.
Nostalgia should be guarded it is not a time wasting device, it represents the core of our thoughts, and it shouldn’t be spilt on a commercial venture which will anyway be present online. The closing of Landmark Nungambakkam in effect signifies nothing, people who read will always be reading. Maybe nostalgia is also like a bookstore, it should enrich the dreamer and educate the newcomer.
While I waited for my turn at the billing counter with a perfunctory book, the lady next to me was buying an iPhone Scratch Guard.
Dear road to the Mount
What have they done to you?
Did they seek permission to rip your anatomy
And tunnel through your bowels?
I see cranes reaching inside you
But cannot estimate the loss of normalcy
You have never been keeping well
Ever since they tied your legs into a clover
Your eye: a behemoth of Gothic horror
Didn’t your Mahavishnu raise any issue?
Or the usual agents from the tower,cower?
Mother of paths, they are your scraping your skin
And they tell me it is for the good
I am willing to believe them grudgingly because
For years you have carried us up and sewage below
Trains now will keep waste company.
Get well soon road to the mount,
million wheels wait without diversions.
The Lowly Laureate 