On New Year's eve, many of the Hyundai Accents received by Chennai Police gratis from the Korean carmaker were at their screaming best. They were zipping along in some places, their lights flashing and sirens wailing or standing with metallic efficiency at other locations (what they achieved is not clear, though).
In 2007, Chennai is no different from what it was a year ago, when there were no freebie Hyundais for "patrolling." After the Northeast Monsoon and with a faceless Mayor at Ripon Building (M. Subramaniam, heard of him?), the metro's roads are a long trail of potholes.
Apparently, the somnolent occupants of the Corporation headquarters have decided to allocate money for road repairs, but the Zonal Officers (Assistant Commissioners) are in no hurry to do basic repair work to fill up the potholes. So in most places, you simply bump along and pay the automobile mechanic more.
This sort of indifference contrasts with the hype generated by globizens about the way this hypermetro is making waves. There are colourful advertisements in newspapers claiming to offer "English" gardens with "Spanish" villas in their midst, tall glass and steel marvels housing BPOs who are linked to international capitals. You only have to spend a fiver on the Mass Rapid Transit System that travels the length of the Cooum and Buckhingham Canal, which are nothing but open sewers, to see what a travesty of truth Chennapatnam is!
The enormous amounts of waste generated by the villa types gets carted to shanties lining these canals, where some of it is segregated for onward sale for crude recycling. The rest is simply dumped on the riverside. The waste plastic and white board dumped summarily in this fashion provides some weak relief to the black sewage-marked banks of the watercourses, while the shanties appear in the background, rusty reminders that there is a city that is invisible to the chatterati and which the media has stopped talking about because it is no longer fashionable to do so.
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