My Observations in Chennai

These are my observations while I visited Chennai.  They are not criticism.  Just observations.

 

Girls/women are well dressed than before a few years ago.  Pleasantly surprised that they dine  alone in restaurants for breakfast/lunch/dinner.  I mean alone without any friends or relatives (male or female).   Kudos to them. This will not happen in USA.  Here they think if they dine alone, the society will look down upon them.  Either they will order “to go” or if they are staying in a hotel order “room service”.  My personal feeling is there is nothing wrong with a girl/woman dining alone in a restaurant.

 

I have written before that a few auto drivers ask “how much we are willing to pay him” when we tell him we want to go to a certain place (instead 0f telling us how much he will charge us).  It is changed now.  Instead of a few auto drivers, now most of the auto drivers ask the same question to us.  I always give my standard answer.  I am willing to pay you one rupee.  Now you tell me how much you want to charge.

 

We went to a movie.  Lot of young couple came to the movie after the movie began and left before the movie ended.  My wife is naïve.  She asked me why a lot of couple come late and leave early.  I had to explain her the reason about their wish to spend some quiet quality time in the dark.

 

In order to give security to the Chief Minister, they have daily deployed police in every main street in Chennai.  Thousands of them, one at every 50 feet.  I am told they are bringing police even from outside of Chennai for this.  Many of them  are women police.  The average woman police is about 5’3” and weighs 110 lbs.  They stand the whole day in the scorching sun.  They look like they are about to faint.  I felt sorry for them.

 

My question is this.  The Chief Minister is already having the highest security available in the land.  If there is a real threat for her, what can this 5’3” 110 lbs. girl can do to save the CM?  She does not even have a stick (lathi).

 

Gold price skyrocketed.  But gold jewellery shops are so crowded with buyers.  Everyone complains restaurants have become very costly.  All restaurants are very crowded.  The more Karunanidhi talks about his belief in atheism, temples are more crowded than movie theaters.  (Karunanidhi’s atheism applies only to Hindus.)

 

They now have call taxi.  This is very convenient for people.  We can even book a call taxi online.   They start the meter only after you sit inside the car.  But there is one major problem.  Most of the drivers are new to Chennai.  As soon as we sit in the taxi and when we tell the driver our destination, most of them ask “do you know how to go there”.  This is very inconvenient for the visitors.  Not all visitors know how to go from Point A to Point B in Chennai.  At least, these are honest drivers.  A few drivers just roam the city for ever asking for directions from a lot of people in the street.  The poor passengers will be paying extra rupees because of the driver roaming the city.

 

I am not an expert.  May be a car GPS with mapping software would solve this problem.

 

Funny thing is once I booked a call taxi to go from T.Nagar to Mylapore.  The taxi driver told me he has never heard of Mylapore.  I asked him how long he has been in Chennai.  He said 2 days.  I was LMAO.  What will you do if a Mumbai tax driver says he never heard of Nariman Point. Or, if a Delhi taxi driver says he never heard of India Gate.