The first of the month is 'Theme Day', over at the City Daily Photo group and the theme for today is the title of this post. Found it a bit difficult to get a decent picture to reflect the theme. Sounds crazy that in a city of 4.7 million people (2011 census data; The Economist's factbook puts it at 11m), it should be easy to get people into the frame without even trying. But a majority of my pictures have no people in them.
So here is one. And if you click through the picture, you'll see that the red sign reads "York Street". Don't bother looking through your Chennai maps for this one, because York Street, along with St Thomas Street, Middle Gate Street, Charles Street, Choultry Street, Gloucester Street, James Street and Church Street were the names given to the paths between the buildings inside Fort St George.
In the middle of the 17th century, when it was set up, the Fort was the city for the British. And they did need to identify the means of access to places within the Fort. What better way to do it than to name the streets (mainly) after places back home!
Theme Day features several CDP bloggers from around the world interpreting the theme in their own cities in their own ways. Click here to see some of those!
Good theme day shot.
ReplyDeletehow funny about the street names!
ReplyDeleteYou’ve made a great Theme Day post. I'm glad you got to take this photo for today. Thanks for the informative text.
ReplyDeleteInteresting story about the fort! By the way, I couldn't resist looking at the Chennai map for those streets, and they are actually listed!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/13.08171/80.28452
I love the composition of this shot.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good one for theme day! The people appear to be listening to someone intently.
ReplyDeleteNice interpretation of Theme day. Like you, most of my photos don't have people in them but I live in a more rural area. (Incidentally, the bhiksus in my post were walking away because I wasn't able to pull out my camera fast enough to catch them facing me.)
ReplyDelete@Jim, @Lynette, @Randy: Thank you!
ReplyDelete@Tanya: Isn't it? But then, every city and town in India would have a street named after Gandhi... :o
@Mike: Yes, they are! You know, nobody refers to street names within the Fort any longer; and with the signs being so different from the 'regular' street signs, one ends up believing they are make believe!
@Lois: Yes, that day we were on a heritage walk - and I ended up standing next to the guide!
@Kay: But that was nice, too, showing them walking away!