Taking fresh guard

For me, it is Sunil Gavaskar who began the practice of asking the umpire for a fresh guard when he reached his century. That's probably factually incorrect; it is something that almost any batsman will do, every once in a while during an innings. But since Gavaskar scored more test centuries than any batsman before him, he had more opportunities to do it in the public eye. In a sense, today's post follows this habit; having reached a hundred, I looked for a fresh start - without having to do away with all the previous posts!

And that's where this milestone helps. Considering its significance, there should be some kind of monument around it. It stands quite forlorn, without anything to indicate it's significance. And it's location, almost at the apex of the railway overbridge on Muthuswamy Road is not a convenient one to build any kind of elaborate marker. Apparently, it is the norm for highway engineers to locate the 'zero point' of a road at a place where there is no possibility of overlapping roads; for them, the zero point of a road is just a technical indication. This milestone is considered the zero point for the three National Highways in Chennai; though only NH45 (to Trichi) is marked, NH4 and NH5 (to Bangalore and Kolkata respectively) also begin here.

From a historic perspective, the zero point of Madras was within the walls of Fort St George; and convention then was to measure distances from the gates of the Fort. I have not had an opportunity to go inside the Fort for a long time. Maybe the next time I do, I should look to see if there is any memory of the 'Zero Point', which was once the centre of Madras!