Tale of a city, warts and all

The hospital is your best tourism option for efficiency, tourist trappings be damned

Chennai – A Biography

Author: V.Sriram

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 416

Price: Rs 899

I know who would have loved this book, heavy with historical detail and minutiae about Chennai’s past, its evolution among social, cultural, intellectual, and industrial upheavals and its timeworn present —my father, if he had been around today.

He considered himself a proud Madrasi, blithely ignoring the taunts implicit in the term, of being inward, boring and traditional. That’s because he thought those descriptions were lazy, superficial cliches and didn’t apply to him.  He felt like a true Chennaite, as we are called these days; modern yet traditional, curious yet shy, a firebrand