Padur Lake, Marina Beach: Is the Community in?

If you travel down Rajiv Gandhi Salai, still known as OMR or Old Mahabalipuram Road you will come across a few scenic places.

Places which have survived the development of IT parks and gated community projects.

One such place is in Padur, once a sleepy village. Padur's biggest natural asset is a lake.

A decade ago, people had bought two or three ground plots on land fronting this lake for as little as 20 thousand rupees.

Those who were prospecting for land here would have to get off the OMR, drive through the small village and land up at the open grounds, once fields. A college had just begun to come up. That was it.

Today, the village is all but gone and on the waterfront are large houses you can see from as far as the East Coast Road side.

Padur Lake has been facing a slow death. Encroachers have come in. People answer nature's calls. It is a dumpyard for locally generated garbage and a washing space for hired lorries.

Of late, I have been reading a bit about the lake at a blog that my friend G V Krishnan publishes. It is titled 'OMR Resident',

Krishnan, who last worked for the Times of India is spending his retired years furiously blogging on local news and issues of his neighbourhood - the far end of OMR.

Of late, Krishnan and his neighbours have been walking on the lakeside and have appreciated its value for a growing neighbourhood. They have also realised that this water body is getting polluted because it now serves as an open air toilet for a huge number of migrant workers. These people work on the massive buildings on the OMR and they do not have proper civic facilities.

Addressing such issues much before romaticising about a wonderful lake is now on the minds of Krishnan and the OMR Greens, as the group is called.

One small step that they intend to take is to sensitise the community in apartments to the existence of the lake and the need to conserve it. For, the lake belongs to all.

Who does the Marina Beach belong to?

Touted the second longest beach in the world, it seems to be everybody's beach and nobody's too!

It needed a man to go to the High Court here to get the Chennai Corporation, the city's civic body to address the issue of rampant hawkerisation of this beach.

Thousands of hawkers eke their living on this beach. They sell ice cream and fried fish, chips and corn, bajjis and sundal. Hawkers are an essential part of an open space like the Marina.

But it is shocking to see that neither the state nor the civic body addresses the issue of orderly hawking.

Retiling the pavements and planting hghmast lamps is easy. Maintaining the sands and the waterfront is tough. Would getting the beachgoers involved help?

The walkers and volleyball players, the fisherfolk and hawkers and the legions of beach cricket players. Can each be given a stake in the Marina's life?

This is the time to get the community involved. If the hawker zones come up, can we keep the waste and the plastic just there? Can we fine those who dump bottles in the sand and throw plastic sachets in the water?

 (G V Krishnan's blog is at - www.omrresident.blogspot.in)

Listen to the audio post here

Building local histories

My scrapbook of notes and pictures got a little bigger last week after a trip to Egmore.
A couple of friends, all schoolmates were catching up at our hangout - Charms Dress Makers, It sits in a narrow nook in a rundown building off the Adithanar statue roundabout near Hotel Ashoka.
The Charms family studied at St. Anthony’s Anglo Indian High School here. So the space outside this famous dress maker who has dressed up four generations of people, mostly Anglo-Indians has been a convenient place for many old boys and girls to meet up.
But that won’t happen anymore. For, the old building which had a nice façade at this roundabout is to be demolished to make way for a new project.
On the evening of our recent meeting, I walked around, looked up and closely at it, and at the shops and the people they held and took some pictures.
The school’s neighbourhood which is called Pudupet was also a part of our growing up days.
If Charms was a hangout, there was also Kamala Stores where we bought stationery and small gifts, there was a pharmacy we turned too if we nursed a cold or faked a fever.
And then there was Pantheon Café. We were regulars at the café and all we could afford then were idlis soaked in great sambhar provided by this hotelier from Palakkad.
For the cricket crazy in our lot, the game was played fiercely on a ground behind this building, at the rear of Munawar’s palatial bungalow which had a history of its own.
Living here was a well-known Muslim family of the Madras of old.
Personal histories and records of colonies are as important as histories of cities and nations, of movements and great people.
Sadly, we do not have a facility that can trigger and sustain such record keeping.
It can be easily done locally.
All we need is a bunch of volunteers interested in their place and the community, simple accessories like cameras and recording devices besides pen and pads and seniors who can sift through materials and keep them in some order.
A school, a library, a children’s centre, a temple office . . . can easily be spaces for local histories.
Recently, young Kartik who started Sri Chakra Library in West Mambalam shared his story about his enterprise, his passion and the hiccups that he was facing.
I suggested the local histories idea to him. Mambalam and its western extension is one of the older neighbourhoods of this city.
Imagine the pictures we can collect - pictures of wedding processions, temple fests, social meets and the like. Pictures we can cull from photo albums and dusty cupboards.
Imagine the stories we can record - audio recordings of seniors who built a house in the 1960s and have lived here since.
Writer Ashokamitran can share lots of West Mambalam stories I guess. So could any West Mambalam senior.
If you make a start in your own area, I would like to hear from you.

Listen to the audio of this post here.

Create School History Museums on Campus

A fortnight ago, I bid goodbye to the lady who was my first English teacher.

Her end came quietly and after she had completed her assignment here.

Attending the funeral Mass at St. Luke's in Anna Nagar even as the busy neighbourhood opened its doors to work and business around the Tower Park was my way of saying thank you to a guru who had a bit to do with what I am today.

Ms. Devotta hailed from the southern coastal town of Tuticorin and was among the early residents of Anna Nagar, settling down before the neighbourhood was populated with houses and bungalows.

In the classroom, she gave life to Shakespeare's plays and helped us sharpen our essay-writing skills.

Her tips and encouraging remarks helped me gain confidence in my writing. Much later, at a school alumni meet she was glad to know more about my publishing ventures.

How do our schools and colleges remember the contributions that teachers make?

I guess we realise the value of their work much later in our lives. School managers would certainly value it much earlier. How then do managements and alumni respect the memory of their teachers?

While reporting alumni meetings for our neighbourhood newspapers, we do find that many alumni groups make it a point to invite their 'old' teachers, honour them at the event and even share a purse if the person is in need of it.

I often wonder if our celebrated schools with long histories behind them cannot develop a campus history space.

A room or a corner in the lobby which showcases school uniforms and badges, report cards and trophies. A Hall of Fame of outstanding students and a Roll of Honour of all teachers and school principals.

This is the space which can make the current generation well informed and proud. And help a school showcase its history.

Last week, when an 'old boy' of St. Bede's came by to give an obituary note of his mom and we got to know that he also served in the school's Old Bedeans Association (OBA) I used the occasion to encourage him to launch the social history space.

Many schools  like  P. S. and St Bede's, St Raphael's and Vidya Mandir have great histories and these may well be showcased on campus.

     Listen to the audio version of this blog post here ...