Construction in progress with A R Rahman billboard in background – July 2006

Partly operational - View from St Thomas Mount - July 2008

Fully Operational on Deepavali day October 27, 2008

Chennai’ites are awed with this grade separator. Of course with some confusion. With more road signs coming up the facility is a great boon to those who cross Kathipara

Traffic bottleneck in this crucial gateway is a thing of the past.

Now Chennai looks for the Padi Grade Separator to become operational soon.

Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan, of the popular blog Selective Amnesia the person who initiated Chennai Photo Walk, along with Mahesh and Seshu Badrinath are conducting The First Chennai Photoworkshop on October 8, 2008 at Chennai.

What is this workshop about ?

Chandrachoodan says

” Get three people who’ve never met in the physical world to jointly lead a workshop. To make things complicated, let the workshop be about photography. Heh! Still too easy. Let the workshop have three very distinct, rather unconnected sessions lead by these very different photographers. Each talking not with prepared notes and rehearsed-over-the-years efficiency but with just an hours very nervous grabbing at reeds preparation.”

If you are interested and would like to know more about this read about The First Chennai Photoworkshop at Selective Amnesia

I thought I would do a post on this subject of painted pumpkins and the like.

d4dpak and ravisha in their comments have explained it better. People use different variants to ward of the evil eye on something new and these fixtures can be seen in shops also. One such fixture commonly used is in the image above. Here the object is made of coconut tied with turmeric coated thread to which a large sized shell is tied up. Hung for display and sale in a shop at Bazaar Street, Mylapore. On closer examination i find an alum also forms part of this assembly.

Painted Pumpkins are tied in front of shops with the same belief. In Mumbai, 2 green chillies and one lemon fruit attached with a thread  will be sold at the traffic signals on Fridays (or is it on Tuesdays). The car owners / drivers buy and fix it in their front bumpers – I wish I had an image of this item.

In Temples, before the deity is taken on a procession, the pumpkin and  coconut  are taken by a person in a rotary motion, thrice in both clockwise and anticlockwise direction and breaks it on the ground. The lemon fruits are kept in front of the wheels and run over when the procession starts.

All these are performed with the belief that such practices will help ward off the evil eye.

The Photographic Society of Madras will commemorate its 150th anniversary with an exhibition of photographs to be held from September 17th to 21, 2008 at Lalit Kala Academy, Greames Road, Chennai.

This is a house in a residential colony at Velachery in Chennai. What is striking about the image is the paint – fluorescent paint – in ghastly colours. This is a recent trend observed in different parts of the city. These colours are not so pleasant to eyes. Yet there could be reasons why people go for such paints. In some apartments, only the frontage is painted with such colours. Some sources say it has got to do with Vaastu.

Vaastu is considered significant in India as it is an ancient science on the use and correctness of the space. A friend tells me that such fluorescent paints are sold as Vaastu paints by paint companies to dispose of their not so fast moving shades. The second image is that of a mansion at Triplicane ( bachelor’s quarters in Triplicane area are called mansions).

The third image is a shopping complex coming up at Taramani Road which houses Peter England showroom in the ground and first floor. The frontage painted with fluorescent shade paint.

A search in google with “Vaastu – Colours” throws some 55,800 entries. One such site www.http://www.sereneinteriors.com/colors-and-vastu.html  correlates colours with Zodiac signs as below :

Zodiac sign Colors suggested
Aries                            Coral red
Taurus                         Milky white
Gemini                         Green
Cancer                         Rose red, pearl white
Leo                              Ruby red, dim white
Virgo                           Emerald green
Libra                            Cement color, milky white
Scorpio                        Pink, coral red
Sagittarius                   Golden yellow
Capricorn                     Dim red
Aquarius                      Pink, blue
Pisces                          Yellow, pure white

The same site also bring out the colors compatible with the directions.

It is common belief in this part of the world that certain colours are lucky, brings good fortune and certain colours bring ill luck. The marriage invitations are still printed in yellow colour and obituaries are bordered in black.

But why this sudden craze for fluorescent shades ?

Could it be true that paint companies are selling their slow moving shades by calling them Vaastu Paints ?

Every year starting April 16^th, there is a ban on fishing in the Tamilnadu Coast from Thiruvallur to Kanyakumari Districts. Since scientists found fish breeding to be active in the eastern coastal belt during April and May, fishing by mechanised boats from Thiruvallur to Kanyakumari districts is prohibited between April 15 and May 29. The ban excludes fishing by country boats and catamarans.

The ban has come at a time when the heat was on the rise in Chennai. The sea food is an alternative to those who cannot consume meat during the Chennai heat. Because of the ban, the fish prices have gone through the roof. According to “The Hindu” retail plus of May 25,2008, seer fish is priced at Rs 300 to Rs 420 a kilo, Squids can range from Rs.80 to Rs.100 a kilo. Mackeral should be around Rs.100 a kilo while pomfret would range from Rs.200 to Rs.280 depending on size and colour. Crabs in season would cost Rs.160 per kilo but the price is dependent on the variety – like mud crabs, spotted ones,

If one is an early riser and visits the nearest beach, the day’s catch can be bought from the fisherman at a decent price. On this day, the fisherman was trying to sell the prawns  at Rs 8/- a piece. A morning walker in the beach was negotiating forRs 6/- a piece and settled for Rs 7/- a piece.

With the ban on fishing by mechanized boats ended on May 29, 2008 the supply of fish has increased and there are reports that the prices have started coming down.

(During a visit to Thiruvanmiyur beach on June 8, 2008, the visuals of the fishermen coming to the shore with their catch were shot and these images are posted here.)

In one of the posts of Vinod Subramanian “Zyng – been there yet ?”, there was a comment by Michelle Binkley  

Hi Vinod,

I am trying to find someone in Chennai to help me. I need someone to take a photo of a house there.My Mother and her family were born and raised in Madras (1935? – 1960ish?), and now they all live here in Vancouver, Canada. They have not been back to India for many decades, and I am hoping one day to visit my Mother’s home country.

I realize that this is not a direct comment to your blog, but it is diificult to find out info from around the globe. If you can offer any help, it would be appreciated.

Her family home was at 56 Pantheon road, the family name was Hussam. My Grandfather used to run a prosthetic business on Broadway in Madras. If you can send me a photo of the house, it would mean alot to my Mom and Uncles.

Michelle

I sent the photographs, sometime in March 2007, to Michelle, of the house in Pantheon Road and she confirmed that it was their ancestral house and sent few photographs of her family which you see in B & W here.Michelle’s  Mother, her two brothers, her parents and grandparents, (many generations) were all born and raised in India.Michelle’s Mother’s family stayed in Madras until 1954, then moved to England after all the changes in India during the early 1950s after Independence. Michelle’s  Mother left England as a young woman to come to Canada in the late 50′s.