I visited Chennai after many years to attend a function on Wednesday. My experiences from the past visits made me cringe at the thought of going there. However, I thought things may have changed in the first major British settlement of South India. But I was gravely desponded and disappointed.
The AC car which took us from the railway station was not imperviable to the odours I had so well come to connect with the city since childhood. In the evening, I and my hubby went in search of a bindi for me and believe it or not, walked for nearly two kms for a fancy store. But the story was yet to begin. None of the auto drivers we got knew any English. The next day we were to board the train to return home at 5 pm and had to get the train ticket which was in email inbox printed.
At 3 pm, we went in search of an internet cafe near Nalli Silks. We walked for nearly a kilometre, inquiring on the way. Nobody seemed to know what an internet cafe was and everybody pointed us either in the wrong direction or towards an STD booth. Frustrated and nowhere near an internet centre even at 3.45 pm, we went back to the room and packed up.
On coming to know that there were two cafes nearby, we went there, only to find that the girl in the first one did not know how to open the webpage! When we did and tried to print the ticket, power went off. Then again started our search for internet centre, which resulted in begging with travel agents, cafe operators, auto drivers who did not/ cared not to help us... Finally after a tension-filled hour of running here and there and trying to be amicable with an auto driver who simply did not understand our urgency, we managed to get a print-out and reached train station at 4.55 pm.
With 5 minutes left, we went in search of our platform and decided to hire a coolie who would invariably know it, or so we thought. But our coolie only succeeded in learning from us about the location of the platform! He then got lost in the crowd with our bags. I stood a harried five minutes being watched by men with hungry eyes and pickpockets behind me till my hubby successfully searched for the coolie and came to me. The train moved out of the city to our utter relief!
Now I fully realise the need for Indians to learn English or the national language like Hindi for practical purposes, even though we love our mother language. Or else, visitors or tourists to the city will invariably suffer from the lack of communicational skills of the localites. I wish our 'litterateurs' who send their children to English medium and ask poor kids to compulsorily learn in Govt. Kannada Medium Schools, learn a few lessons about the need for English learning in the present day.
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