Celebrating Madras Day!

Belated wishes and a look at a Tamil sleeper hit movie

Hey everyone!

Welcome to all the regulars and to the newcomers who joined us yesterday! Y’all are in for a treat.

Chennai—my home of 25 years

On Aug 22, 1639, the British East India Company purchased the village of Madraspatnam and Chennapatnam from Damarla Venkatadri Nayaka, the viceroy of the Vijayanagar Empire. It is believed that as the Company began developing its newly acquired territories, the identities of the villages were blurred and were soon to be viewed as a single town. The British bastardized the name and thus Madras was born. ¹

On July 17, 1996, the Tamil Nadu state government changed the name of the city to Chennai to distance itself from its colonial past. Although Chennai is the official name, many of us have grown up with Madras and we still endearingly call it that.

Although I’m in Toronto, I still have a bus ticket and my Chennai Metro card kept safely within the pages of my passport.

Photo by Roman Fox on Unsplash

Chennai is a city, but Madras is an emotion.

To celebrate belated Madras Day, I could link you to a very wholesome song that gives you the scenes of various parts of the city—the touristy stuff. But this is What’s Curation?; we do things differently around these here parts.

A Tamil sleeper hit

So I present to you Va Quarter Cutting, a black comedy movie from 2010. Sura (played by Shiva²) is a young man from the village who’s been offered a job in Saudi Arabia. He comes to Chennai and is picked up from the bus terminus by his portly, to-be-brother-in-law Marthandam (played by S.P.B. Charan).

All Sura wants to do is have several ‘quarters’ (90 mL) of rum and goad himself with meat³ before he boards his flight to Saudi Arabia the next day.

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Sura: Alcohol is banned in Saudi Arabia. If I could have just one last quarter in my Tamil homeland, I can hold my abstinence through the desert like the humble camel.

Marthandam wants none of it. He comes up with a wholesome non-alcoholic plan with vegetarian food that Sura shoots down immediately.

Marthandam: We head over to Marina Beach and eat a few chilli bajjis (fritters).
Sura: After that?
Marthandam: From there, we catch the breeze down to Triplicane…
Sura: When we get there?
Marthandam: We come to Ratna Cafe. We order idlis (rice cakes), drown them in sambhar (lentil stew) and that’ll ease the soul. On the way back, we’ll cut through Nungambakkam. We stop at the betel leaf store and have ourselves an ice paan before we come back home…
Sura: And you turn on the air conditioning and then we go to bed? What the hell kinda plan is that? I’ll tell you my plan!

And then Sura describes in hilarious detail how wickedly drunk he intends to get and all the meat he intends to tuck into.

The duo runs into trouble when they realize that an election is underway the next day and so the sale of alcohol is banned in the city. The rest of the movie is about the lengths Sura goes to through the night, with poor Marthandam in tow, to score that last quarter (illicitly) before he leaves for the airport the next day.

This song is a homage to their futile efforts to find one bottle of booze. It translates to “My eyes search for you!”

My eyes search for you
My body quivers
When I don’t see you
My body feels like it’s in flight

I know drinking destroys me
Yet, I like to drink
That intoxicating high…
I can’t seem to get that quarter though

See you all on Monday for a special guest post!

-Nikhil.

1. The Better India’s report on Why Madras Became Chennai.

2. The dude’s got no last name. It’s just Shiva, like Teller, or Jewel.

3. Brings to mind the line from Joyce’s Ulysses: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”