The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : A documentary on Chennai and its changing ways of life

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 03, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

A documentary on Chennai and its changing ways of life

Staff Reporter

The effort is "unique, thought-provoking and poetic in nature"

CHENNAI: It is about the divide that comes with the development mantra. In Chennai, as two researchers found out over the last three years, corridors of development have sprung up pushing out the city's old ways of life to pockets.

The research, an effort in re-envisioning Chennai as a `global city', threw up a multi-layered visual report titled "Chennai: Museum Exhibition Backyard" and an absorbingly insightful documentary about "Chennai: The Split City."

According to researchers, the report and documentary would set Chennai residents thinking about their city and the changing ways of life.

They explained the first of the triad on which the report was based - the city emerging as an exhibit with its glass and chrome corridors. The lifestyles that are not assimilated into these areas were particularly evident in the narrow and congested roads of North Chennai, turning such places into museums. However, life goes on and the dispossessed and the marginalised thrive in the backyards that spring up all over the city despite demolitions and evictions, they said.

According to Madras Institute of Development Studies' chairman M. Anandakrishnan, who released the report recently, the effort was "unique, thought-provoking and almost poetic in nature," with the mapping of the city being done using text and unusual pictorial elements.

"It is a book without conclusions. It leaves you to draw your own interpretations," said Mr. Anandakrishnan.

He came up with his own conclusions and talked about the importance of maintaining order all over the city and not mindlessly go about turning it into an exhibit to attract global investors.

"It requires intervention. The question is who and how?" he mused.

The documentary, scripted and directed by Venkatesh Chakravarthy, also premiered on the occasion. It reiterated the need for intervention by bringing in all the conflicts, the north-south divide and the lopsided development by focussing on dispossession that started in 1980s from Marina.

It briskly covered the relocation of the wholesale fruit and vegetable market from Flower Bazaar to Koyambedu and the resultant loss of livelihood, touched upon the systematic destruction of Adyar Creek in the name of development, the promotion of the IT corridor that has led to demolitions and the unfinished rehabilitation and relocation of the tsunami-affected persons.

The report and the documentary were jointly produced by Indo Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development and Indian National Trust For Art and Cultural Heritage.

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