Is Chennai a Nightmare for Non Tamilians ????

I cant say how many times exactly. or how frequently either!

what????

i mean we have these discussions like who wants to work in what kind of places in "Mera Bharat Mahan" .

i start the usual ramayan like " I love chennai. Chennai is Heaven" and more. what was till now going like a normal time pass discussion suddenly turns dead serious.

Is it with the name itself, I tend to think. For Chennai in hindi can be read as " Chen Nahi".

looks like i am doing a PJ or sth. But i am serious abt this issue atleast ( if not for any issue so far in my life). I wd never hate to hate anybody who attacks chennai.

okay lets get serious here.

the accusation against chennai starts now. in full flow. worst city to live for a non tamilian says one. yet another says he had frightful experiences in chennai. like, one was nearly robbed of his belongings by an auto guy here. two years back, yet another told me that he was robbed in a local train. a strange but irrelevant coincidence here. both were biharis. worse still, a kannadiga says his bangalorean friends had become tired of being prey to money fleecers and cheats. that, the moment a chennaite finds that a guy is from outside, he is gonna take him for a ride. I defend saying these things do happen everywhere. not so only with chennai. I have been to delhi and bbay. and found all these auto and taxi guys trying to fleece me. ofcourse i get experienced after that.

ofcourse we all know abt our own " extra ordinary aurorickshaws "! they never charge ordinary fare. (meter ku mela pottu kudunga ). meter a thaan mela podanum !!!! but the agony rarely ends here.

it is quite imaginable if some uneducated rogue tries to take adv of a helpless outsider. hope quite a few wd have read abt that unsavoury incident where am IIM L graduate was beaten up and manhandled at Bangalore Rly stn and robbed of his belongings. i am talking abt B'Lore RLY police. so what is it with chennai that they dont see elsewhere??

Hmmmm.

Now take for instance the case of chennai software companies . a young female friend, a mumbaite who got married recently and settled with her husband in chennai finds life painful at TCS there. She is shocked everybody talks only in tamil at office. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she was nearly in tears at the way her office ppl treat her. and she begs for a transfer to bombay.

One friend who worked in Infy, Chennai says all the project discussions take place in tamil. When the project leader was requested to conduct the meetings in english, he refused saying that he will lose grip over his team if he does not talk in tamil.

water problem, mourns other. as one puts it, in the infy campus, when young lovers discuss abt water problem during their lunch sessions, amidst thousand other topics, guess how trying it has been. atleast i think, the problem is sorted now. but, we now have a problem of plenty, though :)

One more friend starts arguing that the chennai population has never been to the likes of other major metros. the reason being, outsiders will never want to settle here at all!!!! boy, does he have a point?

If there has been some sortof uneasiness towards non tamils, this, by one of the thousand illiterate guys, it cd be understood. even bbay has its own spat with bihar. the one that happened recently at JJ hospital. Nitish dials Maharashtra CM to take care of biharis in bbay. Maharashtra has the issue with karnataka over Belgaum. With Shiv Sena threatening dire consequences if Karnataka is going to treat marathis badly in Belgaum. there is a already a movement going on for having a marathi recognition for that area. Why, Kannadigas manhandled Tamlis in bangalore, a decade back! all these things say that chennai may not be the only one at fault.

but wait.



the two instances with reputed software companies is not sth we can imagine. even if we say that they cd have been stray incidents, it still reflects how bad this attitude has been towards ppl who are mingling with chennaites as one among us.

I have worked in bbay and a few more places in gujarat. and can never cite such an instance that the guys working with me cd talk only gujarathi or marathi. they do sometimes, but ofcourse not in meetings or with issues of such importance to work as is a project discussion if i am not mistaken.

Personally, my own best friends have been a lot of non tamils both at college and at my work place. to this day back in college.

I dont know how many more chennaites will agree to this post. they wd have had their own experiences from their non tamil friends. or even others who work in comapnies with non tamil colleagues. they can sure come up with totally different responses.

But what I really wish to know is this.

whether Chennai is all that dreadful to scorn at outsiders. I wish I have operated so far purely on teh basis of Bounded Rationality theory.

I wish a fellow chennaite gives me an opposing point of view. that things are not really this bad. that more outsiders had really gud fun working / studying here. that chennai will remain in their list of best places to work and settle.

I wish to be contradicted without compromise. I wish chennai be spelt as Chen-hai !!!!

(and I wish I get the opportunity to return and settle in chennai:))