::: Life in Chennai - Live :::



Saturday, September 10, 2005

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!

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Saturday, July 09, 2005

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.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2005

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.

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Chennai Live

I am a Chennaiite or Chennaivasi for more than an year now and the experience has been interesting, to say the least. Why not share it with the world! Also this part of the world, though pretty advanced is not web enabled fully. You can't know the timings of a concert in Naradha gana sabha or the weather prediction for the next couple of days online. And there are some subtle things from directions to interesting info about Chennai which one can get only by talking to a chennaiite.

I think thats pretty unfortunate.

This site is where I am planning to share my experiences in chennai, life here and you could probably get some HOW-TOs like how to haggle with a auto driver to what to expect when you stop on an about-to-become-red signal. But you are expected not to expect telephone directory like stuff, like where is Anna square or how far Postal colony is from ashok nagar etc (its on the same road 2 mins away and one of my friends used to claim Rs. 60 as travel allowance from his company for the 0.001 km distance)

So here we go. Welcome to the world of Chennai.

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