EXCLUSIVE: THE INDIAN VOYAGE OF MICHAEL FIELD <<3>>

Sun, sea and saris…
The land that gave the world its first sex manual, the Karma Sutra, has an amusing prudishness when it comes to going to the beach.
This is Chennai, formally Madras and the hopelessly hot capital of Tamil Nadu in south India. Its not an overly attractive city as places go, even by Indian standards. Its strange to reflect that this country, which produced something as exquisite as the Taj Mahal, cannot seem to get basic street design right. Pavements, where they exist, have people living on them, or they are dug up or somebody has set up a stall. Pedestrians are forced onto the roads, to share them with a bewildering array of vehicles. Felt quite possible that death would come under the wheels of a tricycle turned into a pick up truck and driven by a bearded man who felt all destiny, and road sense, was in the control of another deity not currently with us. Survival for foreigners involves hanging close to little old ladies who have survived crossing many a street before.
Auto-rickshaw drivers regard with disbelief people such as me who insist on walking. Its not some environmental statement; in new places the only way to get the necessary sense of direction is to pace out the landscape first. Just across from the hotel, on the banks of a polluted river, is a long line of squatter settlements. My walk past produced some sensation for the children. They were not beggars at all, but intrigued at the sight of a white man with camera, up close. People across India love posing and they do it so naturally. It makes it easy to get close to people and it is not exploitative either. The whole momentary relationship is natural and pleasure for both sides.
My first destination was Higginbothams; Chennai’s finest bookshop. All I wanted was a map but the air conditioning and the impressive selection of books made it more than welcoming.
Later I am at the Asian School of Journalism, right in the middle of Chennai, and near the country’s top circulation English language Hindu newspaper. It has a solid, impressive feel about it and offers training that is balanced between the academic and the practical in journalism, rather than media studies. What they make of me is yet to be established; New Zealand accents plainly puzzle the average Tamil. Speak slowly.
Experience in India has taught that the best survival strategy on the streets is to find your own auto-rickshaw driver. It can be a bit hit-and-miss but once the connection is made, other drivers and touts tend not to bother you and the driver has the street smarts to know to take good care of his customer. So this afternoon I established my ties; inevitably he wanted to take me to one of the big craft emporiums India has. Drivers get a cut from whatever the customer buys. My man also wanted to take in a temple, but its too hot for all that currently.
No, my destination was Marina Beach, billed as the second longest beach in the world. On the train we passed through a station that billed itself as having “the longest platform in the world”. Once that honour was owned by Bulawayo station in Zimbabwe; but Mugabe has probably devalued that too. What is longer than Marina Beach, I don’t know but various people told me not to go. It was dirty and it was too hot, they said.
They were right on the latter, but it did not deter me or several thousand others. Perhaps the saddest part of it were the little shelters on its blazing sand under which lovers huddled. India makes it so hard for courting couples; authorities are quick to claim it is prostitution. Anybody who sits in the blazing heat of Marina Beach and looks lovingly into the eyes of the other is, in my view, passing one of the early tests on love’s long road!
Down at the sea hundreds gathered but it looked, not like a beach, but like some kind of ornate social function. Some women were wearing ornate and beautiful saris, complete with gold edgings and it was in this they were swimming. A madness of cotton and silk in the waves. The men, naturally, were more comfortably dressed in swimwear. But the poor women. You would think that given India’s size the world’s swimsuit manufacturers would come up with something for the women of a culture not given to swim wear… a kind of swimming sari perhaps. Just for safety’s sake surely. Marina Beach is a steeply sloping beach with dumping waves; one imagines more than a few women have been swept away … but suitably attired.