EDITORIAL: NOTES FROM A MADRAS AFICIONADO

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MADRAS is a city that drowns me in ecstasy, time and time again. Due to the infinite attraction that I have towards words and names, at the very first instance of being introduced to the name ‘Madras’, I became an entity inseparable from Madras. As a child who was born at a coastal village, Manavalakurichi, located at Kanyakumari, the southern tip of Tamil Nadu and brought up at Dindigul, a central location in the state, the descriptions about the city that I received were more than enough for me to build the image of “my” Madras.

At the age of 18, when I saw Madras for the very first time, the one thought that crossed my mind was, “How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?” And thus, was born the impossible longing to live in the 80s Madras. After 20 years of renaming ‘Madras’ as Chennai, still, I do not wish to come out of Madras!

Apart from all the ecstasy and romanticisation, there is this ‘reality’, the only possible place where we can live. The rapid urbanization insists people shift towards cities, and each day the number of people migrating to Madras, in search of livelihood, is on a constant rise. One of the difficulties that Madras has been facing in the recent past is the swelling population. Since time immemorial, people from all parts of Tamil Nadu and India have been migrating to Chennai. And because of this, difficulties are faced at various levels ranging from the very basic necessities such as water usage, housing facilities to the uncontrollable increase in vehicles and traffic. These problems have multiple dimensions, one of which is socio-economic crisis. Also, we should analyze the question, “Are we ready to face a disaster and do we have the adequate facilities to revive from the same in a short span of time?” All the research reports keep insisting that climate change, the rise of greenhouse gases, global warming and the alarming rate at which our sea levels are on the rise, will definitely affect Madras. Is increasing the city limit instead of improving the infrastructure of the city, a solution to such an inescapable crisis is our sole concern.

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I consider ‘the Madras Magazine’ as part of an elaborate and much-needed analysis regarding the changes with which Madras is undergoing the transitional phase from the recent past to the near future, i.e., from the 20th century to the 21st century. ‘The Madras Magazine’ has been crafted by several personalities active at various levels associated with Madras, joining hands through social media that plays a vital role in contemporary journalism. In the forthcoming pages, each and every article that you are about to experience is unique. One of the most prominent historians of Madras, Nivedita Louis, introduces us to a new dimension of the city’s history. Azeefa has translated the work of Poo.Ko. Saravanan, a former student of CEG and is an IRS officer at present, in which he speaks about the historical ‘College of Engineering, Guindy.’ The article regarding the ecology of Madras by S Theodore Baskaran, one of the most important environmentalists of India, published fourteen years ago is presented to you again, emphasizing its importance. The nostalgic memories of Kannan Swamy, who watched several films in the theatres that filled the entire Mount Road during the 1980s, will definitely make you long for a time machine. An article by Sukumaar Thangaraj, a research scholar at the University of Madras who studies North Chennai’s sports field – particularly football – in relation to the Cultural Communication, presents to you the colourful image of football culture in North Madras, the place which we have been seeing only through a monochrome lens. The background of the emerging genre of music, independent aka indie music in Chennai and the path ahead of it, has been reviewed by Srinivasan R., which I believe will spark a debate. A write-up during the demise of Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi, posted on Facebook by Santanu Sengupta about M. Karunanidhi and Chennai is a tribute to the leader. The two important aspects of Madras’s transportation are electric trains and MTC buses. Nanda Kumar’s photographs and Naresh Green’s words paint the history of electric trains as they travel via one of the four lanes, from the Beach station to Tambaram. Ragavijaya Govind interests you with the stories of bus travels through 27D. One can easily relate themselves with Gopalakrishnan Krishnasamy’s write-up if they have migrated to Chennai. A poem by Yuma Vasuki will accompany you through Pondy Bazaar; another one by Adhiran will croon the history of Madras. Last but not the least, ‘To Whom does Chennai belong?’, written by Mayilai Seeni. Venkatasami has been translated elegantly by Arun Ram Prasanth. The spectacular sketches of Ganapathy Subramaniam ornate the magazine. Another magnificent painting that combines the past and the present of one of the historical landmarks of Madras, ‘Central Railway Station’, by a promising young artist, Aakash Moorthi, is ready to adorn your walls.

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As a student of Journalism who is constantly watching the progress in the field, I would like to put forward an opinion. We, who are living at an era of ‘Breaking News’, are forced to analyze the direction in which our field journeys. Today, the time required to consider any news is just a few moments that lie between two sensational news, which comes one after the other. Thus, the innate importance of a news article is washed away by the flooding of information reaching out to us from each available space. The news agencies must be concerned in analyzing the depth and dimensions of a news, as much as they are attentive in ‘breaking’ a news to the public. We should have a constant eye on the international journalistic scenario. We have to adopt certain components of it and provide the news, based on its necessary rather than the readers’ likes, in the most efficient and possible way. I also suggest that we should experiment slow-journalism, the journalistic approach put forth by the London based magazine, Delayed Gratification, known to be the world’s first slow-journalism magazine. Leaving aside international journalism, comparing Tamil journalism at the Indian level, we have not even implemented the easier tasks. Some of the most important genres and forms of journalism such as profile writing, podcast, reportage, etc. has not yet been experimented or practiced widely in Tamil journalism. On a happy note, they are being implemented by several Indian English magazines. We have to create an ecosystem, where all the possibilities in journalism, based wholly on Tamil Nadu, are experimented via English and Tamil simultaneously.

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Whenever I come to Madras, going for a short ‘trip’ from Kathipara to Sir Thomas Munro statue, through the whole of Mount road is a ritual that I follow. In the same way, as the French author Georges Perec, sitting at the Saint-Sulpice Square recorded all the things that go unnoticed in his book, ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’, I wish to record Mount Road’s glory.

To the Mount Road, heavy with untold stories, I dedicate this work.

S Arun Prasath
Editor