Ashokamitran’s Madras (and mine)

There was this unusual event at the Madras Book Club last month, featuring four books at one go. Of the four, a little book in Tamil by Ashokamitran, “Oru Parvaiyil Chennai,” was my favourite, for its brevity, its wry humour, and its understatement. It was a collection of short essays, each presenting a vignette of some part or aspect of old Madras, originally written as a series for a portal.

The speaker who introduced the book , B S Raghavan, IAS (retired), known for his ability to hold the interest of audiences of varying hues, was at his witty best while pretending to pooh-pooh the author’s unwitting claims to antiquity by reminding him he had seen Madras 70 years ago, while Ashokamitran had set foot in the city a mere 50 years ago. He effortlessly switched back and forth between Tamil and English, and created enough interest in the book amidst the audience to ensure a sellout that evening. When he began to list the book’s omissions, however, he gave the impression of expecting too much from the slim volume.

Raghavan’s remarks reminded me of a gem of a retort S R Madhu, my predecessor at a small advertising agency, delivered some years ago to a client who wanted a wealth of information to be made available in a brochure we were producing for him. “Mr Mehta”, he told him with the sweetest of smiles, “This is a brochure, not an encyclopaedia”. Today, Ashokamitran’s facial expression at every mention of personalities he had overlooked in his book, said it all.

The book event was still fresh in my mind as I drove past Tyagaraja and Jayanthi cinemas at Tiruvanmiyur on my way home. Memories of another day came in a rush as I recalled the ‘touring talkies’ days of these two theatres. They were both tent theatres of the type common in rural India, never staying at one place for more than a year at the most-to fulfil some licensing requirement, I’m sure. Watching movies at those makeshift venues could be great fun and full of surprises. An example was the possibility of a film being restarted from the beginning after it had run for a few minutes, to oblige some influential patron. Late for a show one evening, I found out that my companions, IIT students all, were such VIPs.

It was a weekend and we were offered a double delight, an English film followed by a Tamil one! It was a James Bond film, Casino Royale, and for a while, we were quite sure that the projector operator had got his reels mixed up, as the movie had many different James Bonds, including Peter Sellers and David Niven, and if I remember right, even a female Bond, until we realized it was all part of the script.

Another South Madras institution of the past was Eros cinema, which was first converted into a kalyana mandapam and later into a posh automobile showroom. (For a short while, the kalyana mandapam continued to display the Eros sign, and I was disappointed when it was replaced by a more respectable name)! My most unforgettable memory of Eros theatre was that of trying to walk out of a particularly bad Hindi film in the 1970s barely 15 minutes into the movie. I found the exit gate locked and the watchman refused to open it! When I cleverly started to scale the wall, he literally begged me to stay on, assuring me that the film would get quite exciting after the interval!

(First published on 4th June 2003 by the portal Chennai Online)