Ancient Light: On Public Archaeology, Stonehenge and Petrified Forests.
This post originally started on twitter, three tweets about the Stonehenge/Google-Under-the-Earth project. My tweets are here, on my tumblr blog.
Anyway, stone circles, cairns and dolmens are common across the world. We’ve all seen them, seemingly random boulders strewn across our landscapes. But they are in fact the result of human agency. For instance, here’s one.
(Photo credit: Pandiyan)
That’s in Thiruvakkarai, near Tindivanam, Tamil Nadu. Petrified, fossilised trees lie half buried in the ground, and dolmens, cairns and stone circles abound. There are many legends associated with this place: the trees-turned-to-stone are demon limbs, signs that a protective diety watches over the little village; while the stones are the hearth of other, less frightening demons.
The petrified trees and the surrounding land have been fenced off and put under the Geological Survey of India care. On my many visits there, a tired old man repeats the much-abused information+legend of the trees, and people go away barely interested. Instead, if archaeologists, historians, story tellers, documentary filmmakers were allowed to study and talk about this fascinating place, imagine what it could do, what it could tell us.
When did people first come here?
Why did they come here, what did they do?
What they ate and when, how did they cook their food?
Are the people of the villages nearby related to the people buried under the hills?
How old is the piece of rock, formerly a living tree? Where did this tree come from? Why did it land here?
When did this place flood up? When did this place dry out?
So many questions can be answered, if only people looked at their landscape as something more than just a maze to conquer on the way to work or play. Which is something I do, try and get people interested in their landscapes and city scapes. Because:
That was shot, to complete the loop, on another old site with a stone circle. Hawkcombe Head in Exmoor.
The Chennai PhotoWalk Community Edition
Hello folks,
I mentioned this on Facebook, but I thought I might stress the point here.
When I began the Chennai PhotoWalk, I had intended it to be a fairly regular event that showcased Chennai and help clear the city’s name somewhat. As you all know, the walks have managed that. For the good part of four years, we’ve had one walk everymonth, with the odd 3 walks in a month every so often.
Unfortunately I have been unable to keep that pace up through 2011. For professional, health and personal reasons I’ve had to abandon walks I’d planned, or have just not organised any. I don’t see this situation changing much. For one, I have very little time. And what little time I do have (nil) I have to spend chasing up doctors or that little elusive thing called money and personal glory.
So here’s what I propose we all do. The Chennai PhotoWalk community is rather large and quite well connected and well informed. So, why not let the community take charge of the very thing that brought the community together? So, from March 2012 onwards, I’d like one of you (or a lot of you in turns) organise walks every month.
Pick a route, read up/ask people about it, figure out historical and other significant information about the routes, the landmarks and the buildings, get in a word or two about the architectural merits and such and you’re in game. All you then have to do, of course, is turn up to your walk and lead the assembled masses to their goal. Deal?
For my part, I solemnly promise to pimp your route here on my blog, on flickr, facebook and twitter.
On things.
South Madras, once more. The Gopalakrishnan family has been disrupted, uprooted and moved. From Kelly’s to Mandavelli/Mylapore to KK Nagar to Velachery/Madipakkam to Virugambakkam/Saligramam/Vadapalani to Kelly’s to Saidapet. That’s about 15 pincodes within a city of about 200 sq. km. I am proud of my family.
Some really lovely old houses, art deco and earlier constructions, litter the tiny lanes of an Agraharam in this town of Sayyed/Said Khan. 3 streets from my new flat is a pretty old temple for the rest of the world that’s still an upstart young one for Tamil Nadu. Karneeswarar is about 400 years old; 40 odd years the city’s elder brother. From the gopuram of which, you could, if you wanted to, see the bridge Cojah Petrus Uscano built to help seekers of a legend about 1600 years old. Now, of course, Marmalong is long gone, Maraimalai connects Little Mount to Mount Road.
On to other things, then.
If you haven’t caught on yet, this blog has become an exercise in lethargy, procrastination and vanity. As it always has been. It also has become less of a blog and more of a place to announce the next Chennai PhotoWalk. Which’s cool, yes. But what this blog also is, is one of the few that’s survived almost entirely intact through all the heaving changes in the world of personal publishing since 2001.Which is cooler, I think.
Before I go on to the next thing, however, an apology. A big, heartfelt, sincere apology to all watchers of Tamil Cinema. You must have seen ‘Ko’, you must have seen ‘Mayakkam Enna’. Maybe not you individually, but some of you. You’d also have seen instances of ads on TV and elsewhere featuring Yuppies and Lalas pursuing a big of Hippie-ness in the form of photography.
I’d like to apologise for that. You see, barring Kamal Haasan (hello boss) in Tic Tic Tic, I can’t recall a single movie in which the protagonist was a photographer. But since I began the Chennai PhotoWalk (4 years old, people. We celebrate by ordering t-shirts.) we’ve had 2-3 films with photographers as heroes, and ads featuring wildlife photogs, portrait photogs, wedding photos, Deepika Padukone as Photog and more.
I know the world is a random stochastic nothing-makes-sense place. However, if you must blame some agency for this surfeit of films about photographers, blame me.
On to further things.
If you’ve been following this little blog for a while, or at least through 2011 the calendar year, you’ll know I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time with doctors and hospitals. Add one to that. I got beaten up, recently. A cut on the upper lip, some assorted bruises (not to my ego) needed fairly urgent medical attention. 3 sutures, 2 doctors and 3 nurses conspired to keep me in pain over the weekend. I now look and wheeze like Michaeol Corleone as rendered by Al Pacino.
A limit to joy
இன்பம், இன்பம், இன்பம்,
இன்பத் திற்கோ ரெல்லை காணில்
துன்பம், துன்பம், துன்பம்.
கூடல், கூடல், கூடல்,
கூடிப் பின்னே குமரன் போயில்,
வாடல், வாடல், வாடல்.
oh joy, oh bliss, a spanner in the works
oh woe, oh pain.
oh ecstacy, oh sweet love,
gone away to never come back
oh depression, oh death.
Patina
Time hangs heavily here. Great big ponderous sheets of time. Time lost to others, stolen moments from life. Time made of every instant of hesitation and doubt. I am in the old house. The house we should have lived in, but didn’t because one brother cheated another and my father and family had to go out of the city, out of civilisation and rebuild their lives. Some of that time is in the brick and mortar in that house, the house on the corner of an important crossroad in the city we do not expect greatness of anymore.
We were once great, just like the city. Our family was important and popular. Now we are the people, as important as the other, as anonymous.
Time hangs heavily in the air. Time lost in that other world, a world of people and places and moving. Here time is the guest who came for lunch and stayed for the wedding next year. Remembered fragments of life and wholy imaginary, vivid dreams of things that might, could, have happened flash by in the dark, as I move from room to room in an art-deco, white house with green trimmings. Now patina-ed, countless first rains impregnating mortar with that dank smell I now associate with Madras in November.
I am here, this place where time gathers for a late night smoke and a stroll in the weed-choked garden, because a family does not want to hang on to its legacy anymore and wishes me to sell out. But before I do that, a vicarious revisiting of the past. To see the children born and the parents die once more. To see deepavali lights and pongal food as good as they can only be in nostalgia.
A death-bed change of heart and a generation of bridge building later, the house and land came back to my father. Too late, for we had become a family spread over three continents and 15 opinions. And I, who had more time than the others for I chose to live in a city that wasn’t the pillar of an empire, a city that was a withered beldame brooding on ancient fame, was appointed agent and executor. So I walk here, hand in hand with the big blocks of time the living world forgot.
The LIC Building and Madras
I’d like to find out which dumbtard came up with the suggestion that no building in Madras should be taller than the LIC office on Mount Road. That person has singlehandedly condemned the city’s architecture and infrastructure. The decision meant that property developers couldn’t build up, and demand premium rents, therefore real estate within the city centre stayed fairly affordable. Affordable to the middle-class and the rich. The kind of people who could afford to buy cars. Because property within the city was/is cheap, the rich stayed here and not in the suburbs. All these cars on Mount Road, Nungambakkam High Road, Arcot Road and the constipation on Chetpet’s Guruswamy Bridge are due the LIC building.
Real estate prices within the city were affordable till recently (and are still cheap enough to deter the big builder who wants to build tall/big/great and extract a premium), allowing small shops to make money and survive in the central business districts, working out of makeshit stalls/rickety buildings. Cheap land meant that gentrification didn’t happen. Which’s why architecture in the city is a godforsaken mix of ugly facades, crumbling/unfinished structures and tasteless embellishments.
So, if property prices are low, why don’t the poor people live there? Well, they do. But it is not enough that property prices alone remain cheap. The cost of building ought to be cheap too. Material, labour, and upkeep. These aren’t cheap. So, slums.
(Ravikiran made a similar point on the Indian Economy blog much better and way before this one.)
There’s more. Including the lack of pedestrian zones, inefficient art/culture scene and lousy alcohol situation, blame for all of which can be laid at the dude who thought LIC should be the tallest building in the city. Some other time, perhaps.
Dear Dr. J Jayalalithaa
Please tell me that your latest idea came to you at the end of a 52 hour committee meeting chaired by drunk monkeys.
If the move from secretariat to hospital was bad IMO, the move from library to hospital is downright uninspired, silly and displays nothing more than spite from someone who should have matured in politics.
How will you keep up your promise of restoring the state’s fiscal position if you continue to remodel large buildings?
About
Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan is a copywriter, photographer and goofball from Chennai. He is also an archaeologist, historian and a city lover. He is currently a documentary film-maker and desk-monkey for a film production house.
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