Chennai's water crisis once again exposes the city's climate vulnerability

With Chennai facing a severe drought this summer, it once again emphasises the importance of the waterbodies in the city. MORE ... 

Did Chennai learn anything from the 2015 flood?

The people of Chennai responded admirably to the climate crisis unleashed by the unprecedented rains of November-December 2015, but the city is yet to build upon the lessons it learnt. MORE ... 

The Pallikaranai Marsh is a natural sponge that has been clogged with garbage and encroached upon.

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The narrow streets of Mylapore in Chennai were less affected during the 2015 floods but took relatively more time to recover.

Since Velachery, a newly developed area in Chennai, is constructed over a wetland, there’s water-logging even with mild rains.

Encroached wetlands, cut trees increase climate risks in Chennai

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[Maps courtesy Prem Vijayan of Care Earth Trust]

Rivers, waterfront and public spaces

Waal is a mighty river. It gets its water all the way from Switzerland, through the industrial heartland of Germany. As the river Rhine crosses from Germany to the Netherlands, it breaks into two. The bigger and broader one is called Waal, as it passes Nijmegen, the city in the Dutch side of the border and more than 100 km later joins the North Sea.

River Waal takes a turn at Nijmegen. It also faces a constriction. Mighty rivers do not like bottlenecks. Thus at the point the river used to flood frequently. The Dutch Government and the city of Nijmegen decided to make more room for the room for the river. They dug a parallel channel on the inner side of the curve.

The new channel parallel to River Waal has public spaces built along its banks.

This was not easy though. The difficulty was not a technical one for the Dutch who had otherwise mastered the art of flood control and built a network of dykes, but to get social acceptability for the project. Andrea Voskens, who was the stakeholder manager for the project since its inception, says that with different people having different interests it took six years for the project to materialise from the drawing board.

Swimming in River Waal.

Interestingly, the people of Nijmegen also found uses for the river front system that the project had not planned for. They use the bridge for diving into the river, avoiding the lounge chairs that were specially designed for them to soak the sun.

Closer home in Chennai, the story of a river flooding because of its sides being hemmed in is not a new one. When from November 8 to December 4, 2015, rains came in five heavy bouts, the Adayar river could take no more. It flooded deep into the city. However, what had constricted the Adayar was unplanned development and not a natural cause.

Unlike in the case with Waal, the Adayar flood had happened because the people of Chennai had systematically turned their back to the river, rather than face it and live with it. How the water of a river or lake, and the waterfront is built into public spaces is an important first step in its conservation. When people of a city look at the river and spend time on its banks, they build links to it. When they turn their back to it, the river becomes a drain.

This statement is more or less true, but not universally so. Ganga is deeply ingrained in the Indian consciousness and lives, but still remains polluted. But the point here is that there have at least been Ganga action plans (though in the recent case it has been more on rhetoric and less on action). 

Yamuna, interestingly, though equally mentioned in social history, did not evoke much interaction. As a result, Delhi had turned Yamuna into a drain long ago. In Chennai, there have been many plans in the past to clean the Adayar and Cooum rivers. They have mostly been engineering exercises that had a minimum impact.

Not very far away from Chennai city, the Palar river goes deeper into people’s consciousness. It is even so today, when Palar is dry most parts of the year, and carries water only when it rains. Possibly, one time in history, Palar had a far more copious flow than it has today, and people’s lives were intertwined with its water. The Pallava empire, which flourished between the Sixth and the Ninth Century AD, would have drawn its sustenance from its copious flow. Otherwise Kancheepuram would not have grown into a city of such historical importance that there was no visitor, in the halcyon days of the empire, who did not pass the region without visiting the city.

Chennai, on the other hand, grew along the sea. The British part of the present-day city started in 1639 as a trading and military-administrative enclave. The colonial inhabitation was in and around Fort St. George. The Indian villages were in different parts, but with no special preference for the rivers. They were happy with their proximity to the local lakes, and also the sea.

This preference is seen even today – the only two important public spaces relating to water are the Marina and Elliots beaches. In fact, these two beaches are among the only public spaces that the city has today. The scarcity and people’s yearning for public spaces is so severe in Chennai that when the government-owned Aavin started a few ice cream parlours with small parks around, the local residents rush to these spots in the evening to catch the breeze.

Lakes and the other enclosed water bodies, however, disappeared from the public consciousness, and gradually got built over. Thus the end-2015 flood was as much along the non-existent lakes as along the rivers.

The rivers also were not perennial, coming from drier hills and supported by small catchments. After the reservoirs were built upstream to tap the river water for supply to the city, they dried even before they entered the city. When the ungrateful city turned their backs to the Adayar and Cooum, they became drains.

Chennai has to turn its face to the Adayar and Cooum rivers, for them to come back to life. It is not enough to have technological solutions to deal with their pollution. Yes, those interventions are necessary. But they by themselves cannot give sustainability to river restoration. Just as how the residents of Surat realised the importance of keeping their city clean after the Plague epidemic, Adayar and Cooum will come back to life only when Chennai residents find resonance with them.

It is here that the importance of public spaces comes in. When public spaces are designed and built along the rivers, people will interact with them. Art installations, museums, parks, street food and recreation bring people to the waterfront. They slow down and appreciate the sights, sounds, smells and the breeze on the face. They will have a stake in keeping the river clean.

In Hamburg there is a museum that commemorates the history of the city’s water supply and waste disposal systems. Set under an old water tower, it tells the story of how lives of the people in the second biggest German city changed when water started coming into people’s households. A well-curated museum can change people’s understanding; also perspective.

A river can soothe the jackboot rhythm. Militarism can also disturb a river. Thus, during the Cold War years, Spree flowing through Berlin did not have people turning their face to it. It was too close to the Berlin Wall, and the emotion it evoked was of trauma and fear. It is said that before World War II, this very river had many public swimming pools on its banks.

River Spree flowing through Berlin.

As an aspiring, young and impatient India grows, its public spaces are getting co-opted for development projects. Even the spaces that remain are losing their public nature, with restrictions being put on what they can be used for. There are less real meetings between individuals and more virtual meetings on social media.

When aspirations are not met – partially or wholly – there is frustration, anger and violence. In public spaces along water bodies, these negative energies can be dissipated constructively. Nuance will return to our understanding and articulation. Even an impatient nation needs time and space to contemplate.

[The idea for this story fermented during discussions with a group of experts during walks along the banks of the Waal, Emscher, Elbe and Spree rivers. In July we were part of an Indo-German visitors’ programme.]

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Pradeep John, who goes by the popular name of Tamil Nadu Weatherman (Picture by Dhruv Malhotra for CoB)

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The building from inside.

Chennai floods: Need to take the 2015 lesson into the coming years

Murugan cleans my car in the mornings, and also that of many others in my apartments. I see him only on Saturdays, when he collects the key for cleaning the inside of my car. When the big floods came early this December, Murugan did not report to work for many days. That was not unusual, because many in Chennai could not travel to work during those deluged days.

He appeared more than a week later. Like everybody else in Chennai, he also had a story to tell. On Wednesday, 2 December morning at 3 a.m. his cot felt wet. He woke up to rising waters in his room. He came out without having time to collect any of his belongings. He sent his wife and four-year old child to her village by bus, and stayed in a rescue centre for the remaining days of the week.

When he recalled how the water from the Chembarambakkam reservoir flowing through the Adayar river took away his belongings, he repeated about losing his supply of rice, dal and salt, underlining how the water swept away even the most basic of his needs.

The New Year eve is muted in Chennai because of the floods

The November-December Chennai flood was in some way a great leveller. Usually in cities it is the poor and marginal that occupy the most marginal lands. And this usually happens in the banks of neglected waterways. The banks of Adayar river, which flooded with rain water and also the water from Chembarambakam reservoir is both a priced real estate and marginal land at the same time. 

If Murugan rented a room near Adayar river because of lower rents, the floodplains of the river also houses the richest and most powerful in the city. The picture that went viral on social media was of a leading industrialist being rescued from his Kotturpuram estate in a boat. Also, among those affected badly were senior government officials living in Manapakkam.

At least this made the disaster an inclusive one. Needless to say there was certain subaltern glee in the comments that followed the social media pictures of elderly industrialist and his wife in a fishing boat, or of the private jets that dashed against structures in the flooded airport. But more important, there was the consolation that the floods did not spare anybody, rich or poor.

This is of great importance at a practical level. Everybody in Chennai had felt the pain in some way or the other, and in that sense has a responsibility to ensure that this does not happen again.

The theme that keeps returning in all conversations in post-flood Chennai is fact that the Adayar river rose almost without any warning. It was not as if a cloudburst or a dam breach that caused the deluge in the river, but heavy rains from a low pressure condition which the residents of the city were aware of days in advance. And it was also not as if this was an isolated event. There had been copious rains from the first week of November, with very heavy showers in middle and later part of the month, and the reservoirs were getting filled to the brim. If excess water was released through the river in the interim period between the two events then the deluge and the cost to life and property could have been avoided.

Nature contributed the rains, but human decisions caused the deluge. There were three weather events back-to-back in November-December. They were not caused by climate change, and were caused by a combination of the El Nino effect and an Indian Ocean-specific movement of warmer currents towards the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu. This kind of event has happened before, and will happen again in future.

The linkage to climate change comes with the prognosis that there can be more such events in the future. The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that there could be more extreme weather events in the future. The Tamil Nadu State Action Plan on Climate Change, on the other hand, predicts that though the number of cyclones may not increase they would increase in their intensity.

For those who went through the Chennai floods the linkage with climate change does not matter. For them the reality was that the water rose quickly, without warning, and in it they lost all their earnings and belongings. Some lost their family members to the rising waters. The insult to injury was when the administration opened the sluice gates of the reservoirs upstream of the city without adequate warning.

Weeks after the floods, the city is getting back to business as usual. A rather unusual advertisement was on the front page of newspapers a couple of days ago. A builder was making a mountain out of the molehill fact that his proposed apartments stood on ground that did not flood during the rains. We know how to make money out of every situation.

The city newspapers carry reports on the ongoing music festival. Even while we lose ourselves in the soulfully divine music of the Margazhi season, let us remember of the tens of thousands like Murugan for whom life changed that morning in early December. Move on we must, for that is what life is about, but let us at least ensure that we don’t walk into the same situation again.

Margazhi, Pongal and Deepavali, there will be enough reasons for us to celebrate. But let us not forget the lessons that this year’s rains taught us. If we do not put systems in place to ensure that what happened does not happen again, then we haven’t learnt from our lessons.

Let us not mistake our ability to cope with the floods as our resilience. That will be a costly mistake. We coped because we had to. Our lives, our livelihood is somehow linked to this city, and hence we coped. But building resilience is not about us as an individual or a community. It is about systems, protocols, delegation of authority and accountability. It is about being prepared, for the waters may rise again – when we have just about forgotten 2015.

Acceptance is the first step. Let us accept that we live in a flat, flood-prone city. Let us accept that we have not thought through our cleanliness and hygiene. Let us accept that we forget about our wastes as soon as we dump it in the bins, or around it, not realising that this itself comes back to cause diseases after the rains stop. Let us accept that we have messed up our tanks, lakes and marshlands, which could have otherwise served us as water balancing structures during heavy rains.

Let us also accept that we did not have a system to deal with the situation such as what happened a few weeks ago. And we never demanded that such a situation be put in place. Worse, if even after having lived through the floods we continue to avoid demanding for it, then let us accept that we are not willing to learn our lessons.

It will be a sufficient achievement if 2015 made us acknowledge and accept these inadequacies. When we hang new calendars on our flood-stained walls tomorrow, we can start with the process of ensuring that this does not happen again. Rains came in the past, and will come in the future. But at least we should avoid the impact of man-made consequences.

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Let go and live

I drive the highways often. It allows my body and mind to find spaces that I have lost in the city. It allows me to explore the fourth and the fifth gear in my car.

A bit more than a decade ago, the highways were outside my comfort zone. It is not as if I didn’t drive from City A to Town B then, but then that was only when I really needed to.

Those were the days when the highways belonged to the taxi, bus and truck drivers. In short, the terrain outside the city, then, belonged to the professional drivers – the guys who sat at an angle behind the wheel in Ambassador cars and drove with one foot on the accelerator and one finger on the horn. Those were the days when the highway dhabas were patronised by professional drivers, and they had not become travel destinations reviewed in Zomato and Burrp. Rocky and Mayur had not made their television presence.

The Golden Quadrilateral, along with the arteries connecting the north and south, east and west, changed it all. In September 2004 my Maruti 800 quivered with excitement as I raced her along the as yet incomplete arm of the Quadrilateral between Vijayawada and Chennai.

These new highways allow us to find space that we have lost in our cities

The neatly laid out four-lane roads have opened a new getaway opportunity for many like me. No booking train tickets in advance, or searching for the budget seat in a budget airline. No anxious wait facing the tatkal webpage. Just pack up and drive.

The divider separating the traffic flow gives wannabe rally drivers like me adequate protection. We don’t need to dodge the accelerating car heading straight for us before squeezing itself back into its lane. We don’t need to worry about the truck lights blinding us at night.

However, there is something that I worry about all the time driving on these four-lane roads. I check my rear-view mirror far too often. I feel more like a historian rather than a futurologist driving the highways nowadays. I am especially alert when going past a slow-moving vehicle in the adjacent lane. I check the mirror once, twice, to see if there is a smart driver trying to weave through the shrinking space between my car and the other vehicle.

On the highway I am reminded of the amusing title that Rama Bijapurkar gave to her book describing the choices of the Indian consumer – We are like that only. The smart driver does not want to slow down for those few seconds to allow me to pass. It is a dangerous game of get-ahead-at-any-cost. The cost, in this case, can be the lives of all of us in the three vehicles.

In today’s world we love not to wait. Waiting is for misfits, failures and laggards. We are impatient and successful. We want progress – here and now.

Bijapurkar’s book title may need some change if we are to describe our social behaviour in the recent years. It would be more appropriate to describe it by saying We have become like that only.

In 1987, I had moved to the metropolitan New Delhi from the sleepy, laid-back town (then) of Thrissur. The size, scale and intensity of the city hit me on arrival. The peppy Maruti 800 had started scampering on the Indian roads a few years ago and the agile squirrels were slowly replacing the staid Ambassadors and Premier Padminis. Every Kapoor, Thomas and Kidwai who could own one had one.

Having gone to Delhi from the quieter Thrissur, there was something that surprised me those days. And this was at the red light of the traffic signals. After the traffic had stopped and backed-up on the broad roads, there would invariably be at least one M-800 that would squeeze its way and go and stop ahead of everybody else.

What provoked this almost obsessive one-upmanship behaviour?, I used to wonder. Living the city and its social, cultural and economic environment for the next five years gave me an understanding to this question.

Those were the years when Delhi was breaking the boundaries of economic growth. It was building and consolidating on the kick-start of the development activities initiated for the 1982 Asian Games. Enterprise was oozing from every street.

Those who were driving this growth were men and women whose grandparents had been stripped of their property and dignity and had to move to Delhi as refugees. These families worked hard to survive and grow out of poverty. And in the process it was perfectly acceptable to get that one step ahead of the others. What if that business deal or contract that you have worked hard for is only for one person? You certainly would want to be ahead of everybody else. Yours had to be the lone M-800 ahead of the others at the traffic signal.

From metropolitan Delhi I moved to metropolitan Madras (it was not Chennai yet) in 1992. Change again. There were less M-800s in Chennai, which was still in the Ambassador, Bajaj Chetak and TVS 50 age. There was no upstart trying to get ahead of the others at red lights. In fact, the Chennai drivers wanted to be safer than safe and slowed down even as the light turned amber.

The highways I drive today are located south of Chennai. But the behaviour that I see on the roads is similar to that I had seen in Delhi decades ago. At tollgates all too often there would be a car who would come from the side and squeeze into the lane right in the front.

Delhi has spread to all parts of the country. In the past 25 years, the game of one-upmanship has been promoted. This is a result of the very premise on which economic liberalisation has been built on – promoting consumerism. The way to a person’s wallet, or credit card, has been by reaching to him as an individual. Exclusivity sells.

This premise has its benefits. When everybody in the country takes care of himself/herself then the country takes care of itself, is the argument in its favour. Growth and mobility brings in energy into people’s lives. Growth also brings a belief in being in control of one’s lives, adding impatience when something small goes away from the script. It also brings a sense of insecurity – will one be able to continue on a trajectory of growth, always.

So when the smart driver sees my car closing the space between the slow moving vehicle and me, he wants to squeeze through. I could slow him down. Or, I could reach before him at the tollgate. 

My rear-view mirror is my protection. I do not want to be a collateral damage in his impatience.

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Greener than we care to know

One evening on my street in Cotonou, Benin, I found four children playing under a table. The boy was pouting "brrruuuu", turning an imaginary steering wheel and shifting imaginary gears. The girls were passengers. 

The scene was similar, though a generation and a continent away. I have taken turns to be the driver and the passenger in imaginary cars in my childhood. I have had cordial as well as quarrelsome companions during my imaginary rides.

My primary ambition those days was to become a bus driver. It filled me with power thinking about it. On bus rides I would sit as close to the driver as possible, and keep his actions under constant surveillance. Back home I imitated his body language - reaching out with the left hand to shift gears or stretching with the right to press the bulb horn outside the door. I used to be particularly impressed with the power that his high position on the road gave him; he could look down at other erring motorists and shout.

My father worked with the then undivided Madhya Pradesh Government, and travel to Kerala on holidays involved long train rides. Steam engines had rhythm in their voice. In the early 1970s, in Bhilai steel township we could hear the engine coasting into the station over the sound of neighborhood gossip. The pistons clunked to a stop when the driver shut off steam. Clunk, clunk, clunk.

However, the diesel engine drivers impressed me more than their sweaty, black-with-soot, bandana-headed counterparts in the steam engines. Electric engines, which I saw only when we came close to Madras Central, were too quiet and smooth for my imagination. The diesel engine drivers were a picture of authority as the train came into the station, one hand on the window and other on the bright-blue control panel. The diesel engines embodied power, even when idling, when the silence was interspersed with ghud-ghud-ghud of turning motors.

I did not know, then, that more than the "authority" that a young boy saw in these occupations, these men did an environment-friendly job, transporting more humans and material spending minimal resource.

Imagine a long-haul train from Chennai to New Delhi - 25 coaches with 70 passengers on an average in each coach would mean transporting 1,750 men/women/children with one engine. There is one mouth to feed with fuel and one exhaust to take care of, i.e. if we assume that it is a diesel engine that is pulling the rakes. Since most of the main lines are electrified in India, the power to pull the train comes from a grid originating from a centralized power plant, thereby making it easier to deal with the exhaust.

We Indians take our rail and train network for granted. There may not be a man or woman of my generation who hasn't played train with friends in childhood – koo-chuk-chuk. Steam engines were mostly eased out by the time my son was growing up, but I did see him and friends snaking their way through our apartments. However, what we take for granted as a convenient and affordable means to move from point A to point B in our country does not exist as an option in many other parts of the world.

The rail line between Lome and Kpalime

in Togo disappears into the bush

Though the colonial masters laid the initial foundation for the rail network, Independent India systematically worked to strengthen and expand the infrastructure. In the past 30 months, I have lived in and traveled through four countries in West Africa. These countries too had gone through a colonial past – three under the French and one under the British. They too have had a few rail lines developed during the colonial period. The colonial motive was the same as in India – the railways were primarily designed for moving resources and troops that could be used for moving ordinary people. However, unlike in India, the rail system has not grown in these countries post-Independence.

Connecting urban centers and even villages with each other with a rail network is no more a challenge in India. The challenge is to see how the railways can be used to transport people within cities.

With the exception of Chandigarh, Lutyens Delhi and industrial townships such as Bhilai, most of the urban centers in India have grown organically from villages or cluster of villages. Laying rail lines through these unplanned urban centers and running trains through them is not an easy task – not only as an engineering exercise, but also as a political decision.

Trains for intra-city transport have the greatest advantage that any commuter can ask for in a city. They travel through secured passages and thereby have control over their running times.

During his three-year study in a college in Tambaram outside Chennai, my son knew exactly how many minutes his train travel from Kodambakkam would take. What he could never judge was the time needed to drive a scooter from Virugambakkam to Kodambakkam to catch the train. And since he knew there were trains every five minutes, it was something like stepping onto a conveyor belt at Kodambakkam and getting off at Tambaram.

Mumbai grew because of its suburban trains. So did the urban corridor between Guindy and Tambaram in Chennai. People bought property, built homes and offices along the rail corridors. The reverse challenge today is to create rail lines and run trains through areas where people have built homes and offices.

Delhi has done well with its Metro. Even in the late 1980s, a bus ride from Janakpuri to the Inter-State Bus Terminal would have taken hours. Today that travel time by Metro can be counted in minutes. Bengaluru took its first baby step recently. Kolkata, of course, prided itself for its Metro network since the 1980s.

Economic mobility in India has happened in the past two decades. Even as late as mid-1990s, there were not many families in the cities that owned cars. For most members of the generation that started their employment with the IT boom, a car (A-, B- or C-segment) has become their personal vehicle.

There is a historic and generational resistance against giving up the convenience of driving your car downtown. So if these young men and women are opting to take the metro or the suburban train, it means that they find it reliable, convenient and affordable; also environment friendly, though the commuter may not necessarily know it. The process has begun.

An urban rainforest

Death is a celebration in a rainforest. The nearby trees grow into the canopy space left by the dead one. Life grows from the dead trunk on the forest floor. Life disintegrates the dead trunk into the forest floor.

When I returned after two years to Chennai on a holiday this summer, the urban rainforest was thriving. New businesses had taken over old ones; malls had been constructed over iconic theaters; new flyovers had eased traffic at old junctions, but reassembled vehicles on different points on the same road.

I missed landmarks, since they were no longer there. I took wrong turns because I did not recognize the junctions.

It is not surprising that Chennai has grown, since in the last decade every city in India has been growing. Chennai is a late starter. Bangalore was the first to grow with the information technology boom, followed by Hyderabad. As a journalist and as an on-and-off resident of Chennai, I have seen the city change. But the change in the past two years was much more rapid than the earlier changes.

In the summer of 1992, when I had moved to Chennai, the bridge across the Cooum at Anna Nagar had just been constructed; at Jaffarkhanpet it was a causeway across the Adyar river; and the main road in Ashok Nagar passing to the airport was dimly lit and donkeys meditated Einstein-like for hours on the shoulder of this arterial passageway.

The next year was a drought year and I had worked on a story on water diviners. These are men and women who have the ability to detect the location of water underground and thereby predict at which point digging for a well will be most productive. I had seen them in action during my childhood in Kerala. In 1992, I interviewed the few remaining ones in Chennai. They said that their service was becoming less popular since apartment blocks were replacing independent houses. When you have 20 families occupying the land that earlier one family did, then it is not enough to know if there is water in the aquifer. You also need to know how much water the aquifer will yield. And this investigation needed a hydrogeologist. Chennai the overgrown town was turning into a city.

When I had moved into my apartment in Virugambakkam in 1997, it was the wild west of Chennai. Today, Nungambakkam has spread into Virugambakkam. Fair enough, since it is easier to have downtown at your door than to drive through the traffic.

We bought our monthly groceries from Joy Stores, and we had credit with him. Then Royal Shoppe, a supermarket, started. Joy Stores closed down. Now Food Bazar has come in our neighborhood. We have a line of credit with them – through Visa card. Food Bazar is part of Chandra Mall, which has in addition to the shopping complex a food court and a five-theater multiplex. All this stands on the ground where National Theater once was.

In the 1990s, the urban authority had a program called sustainable cities in Chennai. “Sustainable cities” is an oxymoron. No city can ever be sustainable, since these are centers of consumption. When a city draws its water needs from the far-off Krishna river, power from the national grid with power plants across the country, petroleum from Arabia, coal from Jharkhand, fruits and vegetables from the Nilgiris, and rice from Thanjavur and Nellore, it cannot call itself sustainable.

Cities are centers from where the economy moves. Cities are epicenters of power, the place from where policies are made and implemented in the hinterlands. Cities are insular – they consume without bothering to know where it comes from.

Chennai does not have the history of Madurai or Thanjavur. Located 75 km from Chennai, Kancheepuram has a far longer history than Chennai. It was the capital city of the Pallavas, one of the strongest kingdoms in peninsular India between the 6th and 9th Century AD. Hinduism’s Adi Sankara and Zen Buddhism’s Bodhidharma are said to have walked the dusty lanes of Kancheepuram in its glorious days.

Chennai’s history begins as the most important colonial base for the British in India in the 17th and 18th Centuries. In the scramble for power in the 50 years after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the British outsmarted everybody else. Robert Clive, the general who enlarged the British presence during that period started life as a writer at Fort St. George in Chennai.

After the First War of Independence in 1857, the British Crown took over the administration of India. They started to create through English education a class of Indians who could administer the country on behalf of the British. The great Indian middle class was born in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata, the centers of British power. Chennai grew with the political and military power supported by an educational system. Those who had education and through it access to employment and capital, did not want others to enter their club. Chennai was educated, middle class and conservative, the trait had become the hallmark of the city.

Chennai benefitted from administrative infrastructure, early industrialization, railways and urbanization. Over the decades it became an important base for the manufacturing sector. The oil refinery added a set of downstream petrochemical industries. New car plants capitalized on the existing auto ancillary industries around the city.

When I started reporting from Chennai in 1992, I realized that the city’s strength was its manufacturing base. It prided itself for its IIT and the ingenuity of its engineer-managers who found solutions to intractable problems. For instance, starved for water in the drought of 1992-93, the refinery and the fertilizer plant bought secondary treated sewage from the Sewerage Board and treated it further to use for industrial processes.

With the information technology boom of the more recent years, the engineer-manager base of the city changed track from manufacturing to developing software. There is a critical difference though. Employment opportunities in the IT sector turned out to be far more egalitarian than in the manufacturing sector. The jobs in the manufacturing sector were less in number, and after these had been taken up by graduates from IITs, regional engineering colleges and government engineering colleges, there was not much left for anybody else. The hundreds and thousands of job openings in the IT sector could absorb graduates from even the engineering and other colleges that had barely managed to get accreditation.

More people earn better today; from a younger age. There is more money in the market and there are more hands to grab that money. Express Avenue has pipped Spencer Plaza as the place to hang out. The supplements of the Hindu and the Times of India are filled with advertisements screaming for my attention. Along with Diwali and Pongal, we also celebrate Akshaya Tritiya, Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day and whomsoever-can-increase-business day. The restaurant at the junction has a new name, new management. It used to be Safari, Pandian and Amaravathi, in that order of reverse history. Shopper’s Stop, Megamart, Pantaloons have all moved closer – for my shopping convenience.

Like the trees racing to get to that hole in the canopy left by the dead tree in the rainforest, businesses are constantly vying to grab the consumer’s attention. Some businesses die. Others grow from the dead ones. This Phoenix rises from another bird’s ashes.