International Films in Chennai

There are three things I love about Chennai. The music season, the book fair and the film festival. Incidentally all these happen in december / january times. Hundreds of concerts happen in december and in my guess, it could be the largest assemblage of concerts in the world.

The film festival though not as much widely known as others that happen in India, is still good for the selection of movies. You can get the details of this year's film festival here

I dont have any link for the book fair, though it generally is hosted in Quaide Milleth College in Mount Road.

Music Season 2006

Its music season again, in Chennai. After the incessant rain, it would be raining mellifluous carnatic music now. Interestingly the number of concerts have been growing year after year, which affirms of the growth of Carnatic music per se.

I tried to make the plan for making it to the concerts by creating an excel sheet of concerts. You can download the sheet here. The information is collected from KutcheriBuzz.com. The sheet will be updated as more sabhas come up with the schedule. Hope you find it useful.

BMW plant in Chennai

Chennai is emerging as an automobile manufacturing hub in India with quite a few international automobile units present around the city. To add to it, BMW is setting up its plant importing CKD units from Germany and assembling it here.

Way to go, Chennai!

Flying? Choose the best deal

There are some good things you can learn from the west and one such is to have choices in everything. For example, if you want to fly in US, you try for the best deal thru something like Orbitz, Travelocity or Cheaptickets which gives you comparison of the deals available.

India has matured to have such comparison shopping in flight booking given that there are now quite a few airlines like Jet, Kingfisher, SpiceJet, Deccan etc. MakeMyTrip.com has come up with comparison shopping in flight booking now.

Way to go!

Wireless and Mobile Impact

Its old news that the Chennai central station is equipped with wifi network that you can go and browse Internet there! Don't ask me who will go there and browse, afterall. These things, I believe, are the stepping stones for the city to become technologically better.

The news now is that you can book your cinema tickets through SMS in Abirami theaters. And when you buy a ticket, you also can browse the Internet using their WiFi network for half an hour. This idea is the very same as McDonald's in US, which introduced getting free browsing time when you buy a happy meal. Not sure if it was successful or if it still exists.

Anyway, its interesting to note such things happening in Chennai.

Beautiful Cathedral

One oft mentioned place in many chennai guides is the Santhome church or St. Thomas Cathedral Basilica. Built more than 100 years ago, this place is architecturally wonderful.

Simply said, the Gothic architecture is marvellous and the interior stupendous. Pretty well maintained as well.

Thanks to one of my friends who was interested in visiting this church, and due to boredom of the dull weekend and curiosity to take some snaps, I joined in. I tried some pictures with my friend's recently bought digital camera and a couple of them turned out decent.



Being close to the well known Santhome beach, this church is worth a visit, even for non-christians like me.

Water, water, nowhere

If there is one precious thing in Chennai, thats Water. And that does test your patience to a very great extent.

You enter home after dark exhausted fighting with your Project Manager. Open the tap to take a fresh bath to get away from the humid and sultry weather for a while.

It drips drops and ... stops.

Know what? It happened to me today. The worst thing about me is that I dont save water even after facing the same problem for a year. It sucks when you save water for more than a day, coz' it becomes soft and kinda sticky which I hate.

Anyways, simply put, there is no solution to it. Ideas overflow, but not water. Ideas are ample: desalinating the sea water to nationalizing rivers, getting water from veeranam etc etc. No matter which political party comes, there wont be a good solution. After all there is no point blaming the politicians alone, though they have a significant part.

Think about the people. Once upon a time - actually not so long ago - there used to be a beautiful river called Cooum. Now the name translates to garbage.

And no body is bothered. Everyone is so accustomed to it. Who said necessity breeds invention? Necessity actually seems to breed adaptability.