Chennai as cool...

ON SOME evenings, my adolescent daughter plays what I call the Madrasi Masochist (MM) game. When Star News is on, she waits patiently for the Weather Report, aired at the end of every segment. Then, as Anuradha, or one of her anorexically attractive colleagues, reels off the numbers for the four Metros, she begins to complain. "It's not fair. We're always last." And so on.

As always, BCD (Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi) have won again. Chennai - at the top of the Celsius scale - is at the bottom of the weather charts. Even on those few days in summer when temperatures in the Capital race ahead, Anuradha and her anorexic clones, resort to Delhi Deceit (DD). They introduce a sweat factor, re-crunch the numbers and voila....by a meteorological sleight of hand, Chennai is relegated to the bottom of the metropolitan pack.

At school, I remember playing a non-electronic version of the MM game. The school atlas, which I would pore despondently over, was a source of great despair. Bombay had more blue lines (airplane routes), Calcutta had more green lines (shipping routes) and Delhi had more red blocks (industries). Any which way you looked at the maps, Chennai clocked in last.

People of my generation grew up with a Chennai Complex (CC). (Since it was called Madras in those days, perhaps this should read Madras Malady or MM.) We were smaller and felt un-lovelier in every possible way. We were less cosmopolitan, less urbane, less suave - in short, much less sexy. Bombay had more money and glamour. Delhi had more power and magnetism. Even poor old Calcutta seemed to have more fun. Worst of all, BCD seemed to have much more of one precious asset: Girls.

Chennai was simply not a happening city. In fact, it was about as happening as a non-event. Friends or relatives in the other metros rarely failed to rub this in. For the better part of my childhood, my cousins from Bombay made me feel like a peasant from the province - a bucolic bumpkin.

Was it true that boys and girls used the cover of the British Council library to meet up? Well...yes, many did. You mean, you can't buy a decent pair of Beatle Boots (BBs) in Madras? No... you can't. What, no discotheques?! Errr...actually no once again.

Visits to Bombay only seemed to corroborate my provincial, unsophisticated background. I recall my cousin taking me to his college where we met up with a young tutor in the hostel. He was carefully dishevelled, with a hint of a beard and swathed in a deliberately frayed jeans and T-shirt ensemble. At my cousin's request, he fetched his guitar and sang us a couple of songs - Arlo Guthrie, if I remember correctly.

It was an eye-opener. I wouldn't have dreamt of speaking to my lecturers at the Madras Christian College with such an easy familiarity. Most of them would have probably assumed that Woodstock was a pile of timber anyway!

Leaving for Delhi to do a post-graduate degree seemed like an act of characteristic migration - from Moffusil to Metropolis (M to M). The student community seemed focussed and there were wannabes of every kind - IAS hopefuls, multinational candidates, academic aspirants and politicians-in-the-making.

The Shakespeare Society (Shake Soc or SS) productions at St. Stephens appeared streets ahead of the English theatre scene in Chennai (and arguably was). Seminars, cinema clubs, debating societies, coffee houses, "addas" - you could take your pick. Even the cuisine seemed more varied. Fed up of Chinese? You could hop on to the bus to eat politically incorrect Tibetan at the refugee settlement on the banks of the Yamuna.

Now, I look on with some amusement to see the clock has turned full circle. The steamy weather of course hasn't changed a bit, but that seems just about the only thing about Chennai which isn't cool.

From making tasteless idli-dosa jokes and wearing big-city airs, friends in Delhi and Bombay now seem to ask about Chennai with almost reverential tones. Is the software industry in Chennai booming? Is the city attracting more investment? Is the infrastructure relatively less over-burdened? Are the bookshops as wonderful as people say they are? Does privatised garbage collection work? Aren't people more polite? Less aggressive? More orderly?

The answers are easy and uniform: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Chennai seems to have used its conservative strengths to mature in the new environment. The metropolitan equations have altered. Bombay, once a symbol of cosmopolitan forbearance, has fallen prey to bigotry and parochialism. Bloated with misplaced self- esteem, blighted by pollution and buckling under its own disorderly growth, Delhi is hardly as attractive as it once was. And Calcutta? Well...how long can you go on romanticising squalor and deprivation?

Unlike the past, Chennai no longer lives under the shadow of the BCDs. It seems comfortable with itself. And the people seem comfortable with it.

My daughter is anyway. When I asked her the other day whether she would like to go to college in Delhi just as I did, she looked bewildered. "Why?" she wondered. "Why not some college round the corner?"

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