Reporting from Chennai...

After being within the oceanic boundaries of my dear motherland Sri Lanka, I finally got a chance to travel abroad since I had be part of a two man team to work onsite on a client engagement of Virtusa. Anyway, this was not far away. It was just Chennai, India which is so close to us, geographically speaking and the 4th largest city in India. By the time I type this is, it has been 11 days since we got here and there a loads of interesting stuff to talk about despite the fact that Chennai does not have many tourist attraction compared to most of the other main cities in India.

First of all, I must say that the stereotypical view of Chennai as a very dirty city is not totally true now. There have been some serious development projects that have taken place over the years and they seem to have really paid off. You can see gigantic buildings coming up in huge vacant lands in the city as well as in suburban areas. The development in the IT sector has happened big time here. Apart from the many BPO companies in the city (including Virtusa :) ), Chennai has also reserved a 25km stretch along one of their trunk roads as a complete IT park. Our client (Standard Chartered Software Solutions) is also located in this park, and this area has thousands of acres of free land and the sight is simply amazing!

However, Chennai is more famous for its automobile and mechanical industry. It is known as the ‘Detroit of Asia’ and produced 30% of India’s automobiles. Although we were expecting to see Ambassador, Maruti and Tata cars, about 50% of the vehicles comprised Chevrolette, Ford, Hyundai and Toyota vehicles. These are all produced in Indian plants.

Apart from that, Chennai has an impressive outlook towards public infrastructure. After landing on the 21^st September when we headed to the city, the first thing we came across was the giant butterfly flyover. This is an amazing piece of engineering and it gives a warm welcome to anyone who enters the country through the Chennai airport. This is known as the Kathipara flyover and earlier it has been just a huge roundabout which had been a major reason for the traffic build-up.

See how the old junction looked and how it looks now!

One more thing that overwhelmed me was the size of the city and the amount of free space they have in suburban areas even after doing mega constructions! The place is huge!!! No wonder India can house so many organizations and manufacturing plants.

Anyway, after I got to Chennai I started respecting the drivers in Sri Lanka. These guys here drive like insane!!! The traffic lights barely manage to keep them from messgin up the junctions. Even if two cars brush past each other, they would just yell “Ei!!!” and move on. Most cars do not have side mirrors, and even the cars that do have side mirrors have retracted them. On every commodity vehicle you can find the wording “sound horn” written on the rear of the vehicle. The simple interpretation for this is, “I will not give any signals, I will drive as I want. If you need to overtake me just blare the horn!”.

One great memory I am going to carry home is the scrumptiousness of the South Indian food. Still the food keeps surprising me daily and I am really enjoying the authentic biryani, parota, puri, chapathi and the list can go on! (Yummy!).

The people I met so far in Virtusa Chennai ATC, Standard Chartered and in the places where we stayed were very hospitable. It made my life very easy to move around with the little amount of Tamil I knew J

With all this said, I still cannot resist saying, “I love Sri Lanka and I miss it sooooo much!!!”