The prodigal returns......The first impressions second time round.

Well not really very prodigal; but somewhat so. What I mean really is that I am back in namma Chennai after being away for 41 years, a lot of it in amchi Mumbai. I just thought "Prodigal" sounded quite "cool" as the young ones might say these days. I mean I didn't exactly squander my fortune and then return to the home of my father. I went outside to find a fortune and not having found one in 41 years I am back - not so much to seek the old man's forgiveness, as the biblical story has it, as to pitch tent here for the simple reason that a home here is so much more affordable than in Mumbai.
I left Madras as a teen, bound to explore the exotic world of quanta, Pi- and K- Mesons, space-time curvature, fields, strings and stuff like that; I returned to Chennai after 41 years, having never really understood any of that exotic stuff. Along the way I acquired a wife, two children, many expensive habits and few pounds. But the fortune continued to elude me.

I left a leafy, leisurely Madras to return after 41 years to a frenetic, dusty, noisy Chennai. Many things had changed in the intervening years, not all for the better. When I left, JJ was still a movie star and DMK a party newly come to power and learning how to wield that power. Have things changed since then! And how! As I said earlier, not all for the better. Perhaps that's the nature of change.....

I find some of these changes irksome, some very amusing, yet some others strange, even weird, some acceptable, some not so, and so on. In these pages I shall try to recount my impressions of Chennai and how they measure up as compared to my recollections of Madras. In doing so I fully acknowledge the fact that remembered places and events somehow look far better from the vantage of distance in time than the people places and events as they are now. The idea is also not to belittle the present as compared to the past nor to hold that the past somehow was better as most people of a certain age are known to do. Nor is my idea to denigrate anyone or anything; it is merely to cast a fresh eye on things around me and try to find as much humour in them as possible. A sort of coping mechanism perhaps?
Keep visiting these pages to find out more first impressions the second time around.