Why I like Chennai

Three months ago I came to Chennai, much the same manner. I hadn’t planned to stay. Three weeks of internship at the New Indian Express and run to Delhi – run home.

But that didn’t happen. I got a job and well I liked Chennai too. For a person, who thought that she will not like any other city after Delhi, Chennai came as a surprise.

The foremost emotion I feel for Chennai is gratitude. It helped me get out of morosity. It gave me shelter when I was running away from my past. The second reason is that after Kottayam, Chennai actually seems like a city. Kottayam was Sleepy Hollow with no understanding whatsoever of 'city'. It was a town and a small one at that. After living for 10 months there, Chennai was a welcome respite.

You might want to ask me that I don't even know the language or the city, but still I like it - why? It gives me sea. I absolutely love the sea. And Chennai has that. That’s reason number three. Then this city gave me my job. How can I not like it? If you ask me if I will live here longer... maybe.. I don't know. I already am thinking of leaving. Three months , and that is that. I would be back in Delhi. Why?? I don't know. Seems like I feel suffocated if I am anywhere else other than saddi dilli.

I mean it is a metro but also there is something really soothing and sincere about it. The MTC buses remind me a lot of the DTCs up there in Delhi. The Central is still a lot of British.. For that matter the Anna Salai area is also old Victorian architecture, old buildings and fledgling modernity; seems like people here are in a dilemma - whether to step across the threshold of tradition and familiar, into the world of unpredictables.

The bus rides in the morning are enjoyable. Not much rush (at least in the ones that I take) and women with fresh "mullapoo" (mallipoo in Tamil) in their head - the smell of which is something soothing. Chennai is not fast paced - so unlike Delhi and from what I gathered from my friends’ description - Mumbai. But it is very much a metro. Not cosmopolitan metro but a laidback industrious metro.