Evening scene

Close to six o'clock on a Saturday evening and the traffic around Panagal Park is just building up. Surprisingly, even though the day had been hot, the air was not dusty at all - and given the volume of traffic, the quantity of exhaust fumes was - dare I say it? - negligible.

Most likely that it had nothing to do with the vehicles - the trees providing so much of greenery are probably acting as buffers for the dust and the smoke, too!

Centrepiece

The next time you go shopping around Panagal Park (preferably in the daytime), take out a few minutes to go into the Park itself. It may be a leap of faith for many of you, but you can take my word that Chennai's parks are much better maintained these days than they were a few years ago, so going into one is not really the test of courage (or foolishness) that it used to be.

If you walk inside a bit, you will see a clearing where stands a statue, rather reddish in colour, looking unkempt. The birds have had a free run on his turban and the detailing on his sherwani has been rubbed down, but his eyes look out with regal mien, disdainful of you standing under him, peering at the slab on the pedestal and trying to make out the letters on them. Not understanding the Telugu script - or not being able to read it because of the dirt of the ages, you surmise, quite reasonably, that it is the statue of the Raja of Panagal, after who the park is named.

But look closer. Then take a look at this other statue. With the Star of India at his side clearing all doubts, you will recognize this is Sir Pitty Theagaraya Chetty. In the locality that he has lent his name to, of which Panagal Park is but a part, the man's statue could have done with some more care!

Silk shop

These days, it is easy to forget that Madras came into being because of cloth and weaving. A strong argument that Francis Day made for setting up a 'factory' at (what was to become) Fort St George was "excellent long Cloath and better cheape by 20 per cent than anywhere else" could be had from close by; and among the earliest settlements (if not actually the first one) that were made by the founders was a colony of weavers, out to the west of Fort St George. That colony, originally called chinna thari pettai (the place of small looms) is what is called Chindadripet today.

These days, it is not the long 'cloath' that visitors to Chennai want to take back with them, but something much less coarse and more elegant. Being just 70-odd kilometers away, the silk weavers of Kanchipuram had long ago hitched their star to Madras, at least for selling their products. In 1911/12, when King George V visited Madras, the weavers of Kanchipuram chose a certain Nalli Chinnasami Chetty to present the king a specially woven Kanchipuram Silk Saree. Chinnasami Chetty crafted a special border for this saree, naming it the 'Durbar Pet' (Coronation Border), because the King was visiting India for that reason. It is likely that Chinnasami Chetty was a trend-setter among the Kanchi weavers, for he was also one of the early adopters of chemical dyes manufactured by Geigy.

Keeping with that spirit of experimentation, Chinnasami was one of the first weavers to set up a sales outlet in Madras, eighty years ago. This store at Panagal Park came up much later, in 1951. But when a visitor to Chennai wants to go silk saree shopping, this is the place that he (yes, even 'he') or she thinks of. Nalli is no longer the only weaver to have an outlet in Madras; but with everyone else setting up their stores within shouting distance of this one, Nalli's pre-eminence in the silk saree business is pretty obvious!

Low cost high rise

It went against the grain when Saravana Stores revealed their seven storied building a couple of years ago. The store had a reputation for being the lowest-cost-sellers of any product, from clothes to kitchenware and samosas to diamond jewellery. With that kind of a background, their new building was not expected to be anything more than a block of concrete maximising the number of people who could be contained within. Their older store, on Ranganathan Street was inspired by such a design philosophy and is always packed. Always.

And then they went ahead and pulled the curtains off this structure. Not much to look at in the daytime, the curved diagonals on its frontage are still a departure from the pack-them-in school of store building. At night, with the recessed lighting along the diagonals, it is a reasonably pretty sight when one drives down Pondy Bazaar to Usman Road. With this kind of a jazzed up departure from tradition, one expected the store to move out of the 'leading low cost seller' slot.

The building may be new, but the business model remains pretty much the same. Keep costs low, in whatever way possible, undercut on pricing, advertise on the Tamizh channels. And the customers respond in the best way possible: the crowds keep flowing in!

Gathering crowds

It's about 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon. Kids are just getting back from school. Mothers are rushing them through their tea and tiffin, changing them into street clothes, having them all ready by the time father comes home, slightly earlier than usual. Father will have a quick wash and then all of them will troop out, by car or two-wheeler or an auto or the bus, trying to beat a few hundred other families with similar motivations.

In a couple of hours, streets like this one (Prakasam Street, bordering Panagal Park) would have become parking lots for all the families trying to get to the shopping hotspots nearby. The Pondy Bazaar-Panagal Park-South Usman Road belt had already started filling up at 4.30. Over the next two days, the throng of people will be unimaginable, even though the wisdom is that pre-Diwali sales will be down by upto 40% over last year. It is easy to believe that figure when you think of all the doom and gloom around, but the crowds around the shops make you wonder how in the world did last year's shoppers get a toe-hold in there.

Much of this year's festival shopping may be over, but during the last weekend before Deepavali, there is bound to be a rush that waited for the rush to get over!

Who goes over?

When this flyover was being built, I'd hazarded the premise that the traffic around Panagal Park on Usman Road has thinned out. A couple of days ago, I was walking down that road to take a look at the completed flyover, which was inaugurated on August 14. I noticed a decent-sized traffic jam, the very thing that the flyover was expected to minimize. The reason? Many vehicles were skirting the flyover and several of them were pausing to let people off in front of the GRT showroom. Those that weren't interested in GRT's jewellery were possibly looking at going to the shops just beyond, and on Prakasam Road; there were others making a U-turn under the flyover to get at some other shops. I guess the story was very much the same at the other end of the flyover, for there was little traffic coming down it, too.

I am sure there will be several explanations for the flyover not being used. Maybe people didn't know that the flyover is open for traffic; maybe they thought it was operating only one-way. Possibly, the weekend traffic does not need to use the flyover. Once the pavement shops are relocated, people will not need to crowd under the flyover. Whatever explanations are offered, I hope that none of them tries to claim it was unnecessary to have a flyover there!

Crawl-under

While there are flyovers coming up at several places, the construction activity at those places has made regular traffic much more difficult than it was earlier. That's only to be expected; but to me it seems that the Panagal Park area is a little less congested than it used to be. I'm basing this on shaky ground - 2 trips through the area last week and neither of them during the peak hours.

For those who would have data to refute my anecdotalism, the good thing is that it looks like this flyover should open up in about 6 weeks. There are still a couple of more flyovers that are under construction, but all that activity would be completed by the end of the year. And then the next round of digging will begin, for the Chennai Metro - a city builder's work is never done!