Prelims over! Madras Day 2012.

In which year did Madras become Chennai?
One question in the prelims.
Looks easy for  most people.

The quizzing community is here. Among the lot is sneior quizzer V V Ramanan, from The Hindu. The Quiz Master says that it is because of people like Ramanan that quizzing has kept expanding in this city.
Ramanan gets a big round of applause.

Five questions,. from 16 to 20 are visual questions.

It is 2.20pm and the QM is running through all the questions again for a last check.

The prelims is over.

Quiz opens

2 pm. Hotel Ambassador Pallava. Egmore.
The huge banquet hall.
200 people in the hall. Quiz Master - Dr. Sumath Raman.
First question in the prelims rolls - How many wards are in Chennai Corporation?

Adyar of the 60s: in photos.

The banks of the Adyar was like a picture shot in rural Tamil Nadu. 

The bungalows built in Gandhi Nagar copied the art deco style and defined the lifestyle of residents here.

The members of the Gandhi Nagar (Ladies) Womens Club may have had only a thatched roof but they looked a happy community. As did the kids who studied at the founding avatar of Besant Theosophical High School.

And Kalakshetra Colony was just a sandy casuarina thope ( grove).

All this and more of Adyar of the 50s and 60s can be seen at a unique photo exhibition that is up at Spaces, at the far north end of Elliots Beach, Besant Nagar.  Titled 'Adyar Social History Project in Photos' it is part of the annual Madras Week celebrations on now.

All the photos, of which a select few are on display have been contributed by people and institutions.

Brothers Sukumar and Ravikumar of Gandhi Nagar have shared pictures of the area as has Dhanasekaran of the Mudaliar family. Businessman Srivatsan from Bhaktavatsalam Nagar who is also a professional photographer has shared some stunning black and white pictures from his collection while Theosophical Society Publications shared pictures taken on the TS campus.

There are pictures copied from the Natchiappan Collection while Kamakshi Subramaniam's contribution gives us an idea of how Sardar Patel Road-Kasturba Nagar area looked like when the first houses were built here. Sekar Raghavan also made contributions.

There is a rare picture of the public clock tower which stands at the mouth of East Coast Road, near the Valmiki Temple ( it still stands here today) and one picture taken from considerable height from the area opposite what was once Satya Studios shows a wide view of Adyar river, the old bridge and areas off Besant Avenue.

The show has been put together by photographer C. P. Dhanasekar while Sadanand Menon at Spaces provided the venue.

It is open throughout Sunday, August 26.

Adyarites who wish to contribute pictures of life, places, people and sites of the area to the project can call 9444642491.

Highs and lows of Walking inside Fort St George

Heritage Walks receive great attention in this city, more so at Madras Week time when most are specially designed for this occasion.

V Sriram makes it a point not to repeat his Walks and is into his 70-plus Walk this season. The one in Alwarpet will be interesting.

I choose to focus on the Fort. Fort St George.
This place is a delight especially when you walk around it on Sundays. More so if you do this before 9 am.

The security at the main gate can put you off. Till last weekend I had not found out the simplest method to get a formal OK for Walks early in the mornings. The police secure the State Assembly and CM's office and may not be too keen what we do elsewhere. When Dr. Karunanidhi was the CM he used to drop in even on Sundays and so, the police had to be alert always.

They still are and so, last Sunday when 28 people had assembled for the Walk, I was still negotiating with an Inspector beneath the massive flagstaff at the Fort.

Thankfully, all the buzz and media coverage of Madras Week has created a great deal of awareness of this celebration and the Public Dept. of the State Govt. warmly okayed the Walk this Sunday  (Aug.26).

Yet, with over 35 people mailing us to say they will be joining me, I have had to close the sign-ins.
More so when a group of 40 Architecture students mailed us this week, asking to join us.

I hope to run another Fort Walk soon.
This the place that we want to be recognised as a Word Heritage Site.

Old Houses of our city; schools present great projects!

The annual Multimedia Project on Heritage for Schools is here to stay and we want to keep at it.
Because many students seem to take a deep interest in it.

The past years, we have been focussing on less known landmarks of the city as the contest's theme.
This year we chose to focus on Old Houses.

Though less schools registered, all of them - from St Kevins in Royapuram and St. Columbans in George Towne to PSBB in T Nagar and Bala Vidya Mandir in Adyar had very interesting presentations to make at the Srinivasa Sastri Hall, Luz.

We are pleased that SINA ( S India National Assn.) which manages the hall gives it rent-free to host this event ( Aug.21 this year).

This is a cosy hall that needs some maintenance but it is just the setting for such a contest.
Madhana Ratnavel, urban planner who is also Chair at The Environment Group at CII's Young Indians station was one of the judges.

Having just completed a Green Houses project for schools here, she enjoyed sitting through the Madras Week event and we hope to join hands to take this beyond being just an event.

I particularly loved the effort taken by the Jawahar Vidyalaya team from Ashok Nagar which spent time to locate a simple street, tiled house in Ekkaduthangal and found the simple families here welcoming them.

I think the students had a great experience working on this project and there is more to be done.

The PSBB School at T P Road, T Nagar team of Niveditha Bharathy, Anvita Ramachandran and R Ram Mohan won the rolling trophy for standing first. Their project was a row house on an agraharam street in Chintadripet.

The 2nd place was bagged by Chettinad Vidyashram - S Eshwar, S. Vishwesh and Jayanth Deshmukh - who studied a magnificent house on Coral Merchant Street in George Towne, once the hub of millionaries.

Bala Vidya Mandir - K P Tejaswini, B Kavya and Taruna Sudhakar - won the third prize. They studied a palatial bungalow in T. Nagar.


L & T supported the event and the trophies.

Some pictures are now posted on the Madras Day FaceBook page.