Chennai Diaries...

To explore new lands… to go beyond the yonder hills where the Sun’s frame is wrought in fire and to sail beyond the Seas where he dies each day…

Isn’t that how all those famous Greek or Roman travelogues begin? The hero has a completely useless itch for finding out what weird people live beyond the “Pillars of Herackles” and he drags in his equally jobless buddies to take up a treime and sail pointlessly.

Of course the hero would come back, how else will we know of his exaggerated tales of slaying hydra-headed monsters (he squashed two tiny harmless green tree snakes), mastering Poseidon’s fury (the wind got rough, deal with it sailor!), defeating Medusa (a lady with a seriously bad hair day) and sleeping with a 5 handed nymph (let’s not get there)?

Well there were those and then there were people like Columbus and Vasco Da Gama who cause the real damage. Their girlfriends probably got really tired of these fellows drinking away at the local wench’s tavern (pardon my Spanish) and decided to, how to put it lightly… follow up on their goings on. Turns out they found no place to hide and had to take to the sea.

As our luck would have it, they ended up reaching somewhere. Imagine how simple our world would have been if Da Gama hadn’t ended up all washed up and drunk on the Calicut coast! The Brits would not have followed his frilled tail coats and no one in India would know what English is! On the flip side we wouldn’t have had awesome racist) movies like…ummm…. Indiana Jones.

But then Vasco’s pal Columbus would not have found the stupid Americas and we wouldn’t have had one financial crisis after another.

On the plus side however, Indians would never have invented our own version of English (it has nothing to do with the language the old English hag and her brat pack speak) and we would not have to slog away at outsourced nonsense in tiny claustrophobic cubicles.

Also, the British would never have bought a tiny speck on cow dung covered sandy little hamlet called Chennaipattinam and it would never have spawned into a great cultural and intellectual garbage dump called Chennai.

Which brings us to where we are going with this. Of all the (un)lucky morons who’ve ended up in Chennai, some of us are doomed to live here longer than the stipulated character-building (read “gas-chamber torturous”) few months. Over the next few posts, we’ll be discussing their plight, after all some people have to document how the wretched live!