Chennai
is - as I observed to my colleagues today - a bit like the Singapore of the most distant depths of my memory. Roadside stalls, steaming heat, dust on everything, and malls that remind me of City Plaza back when it could legitimately be called a shopping centre.
Chennai was also - as I told someone else - sweltering, smelly, and splendid.
I'd never been so aware of my own racism as when I landed at the Chennai airport, cleared customs, and headed for the glass doors that slid open to reveal more Indians in one place than along Serangoon Road on a Sunday evening. Yes, okay, I'm extremely race-conscious - perhaps even bigoted, as the above-mentioned someone forced me to admit - but only when it comes to Indians. I don't really know why. And this doesn't apply to every single Indian, or even Indians on a personal level, but just Indians as a concept, as a sort of warped racial heuristic. I don't buy the arguments of people who insist on "racialism" instead of "racism" and who profess to be completely colour-blind. We all judge on superficialities to some extent; some of us are just better at hiding it than others.
Anyway I'm only racist in theory; I'd pour boiling oil on my new Furla bag before I ever put it in practice. Or so I thought until the whole Amsterdam flight debacle, when I realised that if I'd been on that flight, I'd probably have reacted the same way the other passengers did - alarmed by the antics of some dark-skinned kids to a degree that would never have been incited by white trash. Which also means I finally understood the other side of Arthur Miller's Crucible, the side that genuinely believed it would be better to eliminate all potential witches than run the risk of your chickens being cursed.
So, as is my usual conclusion - I don't know lah.
In any case, I have Chennai photos. 'Tis very possible that I'm worse at taking photos than I am at driving, and I can't photoshop because I don't have photoshop, but here they are anyway.
(Hmmm. For some reason the photos are much better on my computer. They look really awful on flickr. Oh well, whatever.)
Indian version of McEwan's Dead as They Come
Bollywood billboards
Silk shop
Awesomely sketchy roadside stalls
The only mall in Chennai worth the description, City Centre
Chennaian tuk tuk taxis = autos
Room service. Heehee.
posted by zyn ::
11:31 PM ::
1 Comments ::
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