Chennai adventures - I

I dont have great love for Chennai. The city's autos, sights, smells and aggression turn me off. This is quite ironical, because most of my best buddies are Tamil (or Tamizh, if I pronounce it accurately)
However recent visits to this metropolis have begun to weaken the strong feelings I had for the city. 3 instances stand out for initiating this process -

1) I discovered Cherry Brandy while staying at the Trident Hilton last year. This drink had me floored - not only did it taste divine, it gave me a nice warm fuzzy buzz as well. In fact so enamoured was I that I began to ask for Cherry Brandy at all the pubs I went to. Sadly, no one seemed to have this exotic drink, till I got it at Goa Portuguesa, a fantastic place to have sea food. I wanted to buy the whole damn bottle from them, but the manager tempered my enthusiasm a bit and informed me that they had procured the bottle with great difficulty from a bootlegger. Attempts to get the bootlegger's contact details obviously proved futile for me :-)
I have since discovered that the cocktail Singapore Sling, if made properly, has a good portion of Cherry brandy (though of course the drink itself gets diluted).

2) I bought The Money Game from a roadside bookseller in Chennai for Rs 50/-. This is one of my all time favourite books, and I have been searching for this book every bookstore I've visited. I would gladly have paid about 20 times more for a copy. I love this book because my passion for the market finds an echo here. To quote - "The market … is like a beautiful woman – endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying...It is an art. Now we have computers and all sorts of statistics, but the market is still the same and understanding the market is still no easier. It is personal intuition, sensing patterns of behavior. There is always something unknown, undiscerned.”

3) Recently I noticed some really cool movie hoardings in Chennai. Though I didn't get the names (they were all in the Dravidian script), I thought they were quite innovative. All of them are REALLY huge, sometimes occupying as much as 20 mts of hoarding length. Some are quite funny, with guys in huge moustaches displayed prominently, and buxom women peeking out coquettishly.

All these things are associated with Chennai now in my mind. Therefore the mention of the city gives me a warm glow somewhere deep down, though on the surface I still balk at having to visit the city!!