Red Buildings

The countdown clock is ticking, and topping my list are more Chennai urban adventures. (Click on the photo or click here to go directly to the 22 pictures). Today was a hopscotch across older parts of the city, starting with a stroll along the usually bustling Burma Bazaar--several blocks of tiny stalls, about a meter wide and two meters deep, located conspicuously close to the harbor--I'm sure all those (pirated?) DVDs just fell off the boat. On a Sunday morning before 9 a.m., I was more interested in the ice delivery, cut to size on the spot. On the other side of the street, just north of Parry's Corner, are some great examples of Chennai's architectural history, still colored the bright red characteristic of British India's buildings (kind of like Midwestern barns, schoolhouses, and fire stations were uniformly red for a period of U.S. history). The State Bank of India, the post office, and several companies' offices were build in the late 1800s/early 1900s along this port-side road.

I dropped into the grounds of the Government Museum, not to visit (today anyway), but to get some photos of the well-restored Museum Theatre (again, in official red), where I've enjoyed several performances during my time in Chennai. I also tried peeking in the windows of the Old Building of the Connemara Public Library, but it was locked up.

My final visit along the (odorous) Cooum River and College Road was less about the architecture (though the campus has some well-restored buildings--painted red) and more about the linguistic history of the place. After months of travel on a ship to Madras, British public servants were put through two years of language and job training at this site, previously the College of Fort St. George, established in 1812. The college was responsible for developing grammar guides and dictionaries of the four South Indian languages (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu). The College was closed in 1854, but the campus now houses a number of institutions, including the Director of Public Instruction, a Microsoft technical training center, the Textbook Society, and the Madras Literary Society (under renovation in the photos)*. Today, it was also the site of about 40-50 young men playing cricket, apparently against the rules, since when I saw them, they were bolting in all directions away from the cop car with the blaring siren.

*Paraphrased from S. Muthiah's "Madras That is Chennai." Where else did you think I was getting all these ideas for historical adventures?