namma mejura

Rock Temple 2, originally uploaded by daynee2003.

Yaanaimalai (Elephant hill) at the outskirts of Madurai has a unique shape & a treasure trove for archaeologists. It has jain caves at the top, numerous inscriptions all around the hills and also two carved temples at the bottom.

Lakshmi Narasimha temple is carved deep into the hill and the deity (carved in the hill) stands near the centre of the hillock at ground level.

It’s a wonder that some people thought it fit to propose cutting the hill, carve a sculpture in the middle & scoop the remaining rocks for granite exports. The effort was named as beautifying the place & to give Madurai a tourist place!

Well, Yaanai malai already earned it’s own merit over thousands of years (it’s even mentioned in very old tamil scripts) to become a tourist spot. And being a unique shape, it already have a striking pose, looking majestically at the approaching urbanization.

Rock Temple, originally uploaded by daynee2003.

Thankfully, protests were loud & that proposal was officially struck down last week by Government of Tamilnadu. Now it only needs beautification around the hillock & promoting it properly.

The tail end of the hillock still retains a lot of greenery and a nice picnic spot, untouched by urbanization.

Cart, from a Bus in Madurai, originally uploaded by Ganga108.

Though it’s not common, Horse carriages are still plying in Madurai. A nice way to entertain the kids and re-live the rustic charm of older days when you visit Madurai.

Areas like SS Colony, Chokkikulam – Krishnapuram Colony were slowly toting up with 4 – 5 floor apartments. In fact, most new constructions in these areas are only apartments.

Houses in these areas used to have ample space all around & invariably sport couple of coconut trees besides many flowering plants. Now many new apartments come up in just a single or 2 plots of old houses.

As a result, they have only about 3 feet space between the compound wall & the building. The ground floor in these buildings have space only for car parking slots, a lift & a ubiquitous power generator.

Advertisements by the builders usually show a trendy building standing tall amidst lush greenery. But a vast majority of them have no scope of greenery. The entire ground is covered end-to-end with cement leaving any greenery only to potted plants in some of the balconies.

It’s literally a concrete jungle.

Road medians in most narrow & busy streets were suddenly disappearing. After years of adding obstacles to make the public fall in line, the traffic police now seem to be trusting drivers to behave themselves. Are they trusting too much?

After years of lying staid & proposals on paper, Madurai airport renovation is slowly nearing completion.

photo by Athisaravanan

Official line is that new facilities will be ready by March 2010, but in reality, it may take couple of more months. With these new facilities the much awaited international flight services are expected to be started soon.

Going by the stats given in AAI, (http://www.aai.aero/traffic_news/aug2k9annex3.pdf) Madurai Airport handles about 30,000 passsengers per month. On the number of passengers, it stands 11th among domestic airports. Guess the figures were high during October (Deepavali time). Ticket rates went as high as Rs.11,000 during Deepavali season.

The regular flow as in August can easily cross 50K mark once flights to Singapore, Kualalumpur & Dubai starts from Madurai.

Here is a quick one.  Meenakshi temple can now be toured online with 360 degree view.

http://www.view360.in/virtualtour/madurai/

View360 is a chennai based service that creates virtual tours for hotels, showrooms, museums and the likes.

Ever heard of ‘nose cut‘?   It’s an English phrase that was not known to English!  (I checked, it drew a blank).

Well, it’s actually a Tamil phrase with no Tamil words!!  Sounds even more bizzare isn’t it?   It actually refers to giving back an insult (or retort) to a high sounding person.  Well used in Madurai & most parts of Tamilnadu.

Found a reference on ‘nose cut‘ in an unofficial ‘Dictionary of Indian English‘ http://snipurl.com/nosecut [www_vsubhash_com].

So how come such a unique phrase came into use?   It was attributed to the ‘Mysore – Madurai war‘ at the fag end of ‘Thirumalai Naick‘ period, which was finally won by Madurai with vital support from Sethu Nadu (Ramanathapuram).

In this war, the Mysore King ordered to cut the noses of enemies as they advance.  And the Madurai army retaliated in the same way!!   But it certainly was not funny as it sounds.  Read about the full history of the war here http://snipurl.com/nosewar [www_visvacomplex_com] .  It also has an interesting map of south India during 17th Century. (The article was written by Dr.S.Jayabarathi, a renowned scholar on Archeology & Tamil Literature)

The article had interesting points such as Mysore rulers ‘exhort southern rulers by holding back Kaveri waters‘ in 14th – 17th century period.  So River Cauvery’s part in politics have a long history.

When it comes to movies, Madurai used to have a special place. Actors usually get a large fan base here. It was said that every actor worth his name in tamil filmdom will have a fan club in Madurai!

With such a dubious distinction, film going in Madurai used to be a rough experience. Ticket booths used to be heavily barricaded & private guards stand around ticket booth to ward off storming youths. These youths were storming ticket booths not to capture it, but only to buy tickets!!

Well, those days are gone! Theatres now wear a desolate look, except for a few inaugural shows of established stars. Even acclaimed films do not draw a full house after first week. So theatre owners have the option of either converting the vital land for better usage .. or .. pamper the visitors with better experience.

Second rung theatres like Jeyaraj (near LadyDoak College) & Pandian (near Vilangudi) were converted into an Apartment-cum-Shopping complex.

Some other theatres were opting to pamper the visitors. Ganesh & Sundaram (kk nagar) theatres were taken over by Reliance’s Big cinemas, and these were now on par with other Big cinema theatres all over the country. The famed Regal theatre was revamped & now draw crowds mainly due to the facilities there.

An individual theatre on the outskirts – the Mani Impala (near Tirunagar) is now converted into a multiplex of 3 theatres and said to be on par with Big cinema group or Satyam multiplex.

Of the previous multiple theatres (not multiplexes), the Priya theatre complex seem to have the potential of becoming a multiplex, but it shows no sign of improvement.

Madurai Police Commissioner springs a surprise for Independence day. He announced two days earlier that two-wheeler riders must wear helmets and the rule will be strictly enforced (again) from Independence day.

The immediate provocation seems to be that recent road-accident deaths were mostly two-wheelers riders with head injuries. Traffic police have started imposing fines for riders without helmets at various points. But riders are not yet returning to helmet usage in large numbers. Earlier it will be 1 in 100, now it seems to be about 10 riders out of 100 use helmets.

Police have also took up a persuasive way from Independence day. They are now visiting schools to ask kids to remind their parents, elder brothers & sisters to wear helmets while riding two-wheelers. After all marketers are targeting kids to persuade their parents into buying consumer durables.

With the rains, the city roads were full of sand dust, which alone could force people to wear full mask helmets. With improved roads, and higher capacity bikes, the average speeds have actually increased in arterial roads (except in peak hours). But Maduraiites are still very defiant in using helmets, why?

This is an effort to list the colorful city buses plying / recently plied in Madurai. Dinesh and Kavi were nostalgic about the Silver painted city buses which were unique to Madurai two decades back.

Some of them like blue chequered buses were no longer available. The red bus with big yellow stripe in the middle is still around, however it is turning into blue with small white stripe during FC. Now new ordinary buses were blue with white stripes & city expresses in yellow.

City Buses, originally uploaded by Kamala L.

Low floor buses have striking colors and lines. The saffron color buses were 2 years old & the newer ones invariably comes in yellow. Thankfully the automatic doors are still working in almost all buses.

And then there are private mini-buses that were green with a small yellow band in the middle.