Trends

Trends! I don’t know if every other city has it, but Chennai sure has. I think it started while I was in college, first year I think. Internet cafes! They ruled the roost. Anyone who had money enough to buy 3-4 computers could set up an Internet café. Prices ranged from Rs 10 an hour - those centers providing cheap machines which had keyboards where you needed to double click each key, to get the desired output – to Rs 30 (that’s the maximum I have seen or heard. Let me know if you have heard a higher price) for the high end centers like Dishnet or Satyam i-Way that offered good speeds and reliability.  Every kid created a yahoo and id and chatted with girls with foreign names – Cathy, Macy, Linda and so on – at an age when most of these names were names of actual people and not bots pretending to be girls. (If you have not recently tried chat rooms, you are in for a big surprise)

Other reasons for people flocking to these www centers was for checking on college exam results.  I still remember the Dishnet Café (It had a wonderful offer at that time – browse from 6 AM to 9 AM for just Rs 10 flat. No fine print there, trust me) where my two friends (of whom I would refer to very frequently in this post) and I parked ourselves for three hours that fine weekday morning, and getting the dreaded news of our Arrears (Me in Math, one of them in Mechanics, I think) from that PC. One Mr. Desibaba also provided good incentive for people to log on. Many a time people paid just for the privacy and not for www time. Where else could you go out with a girlfriend and have an intimate time for just Rs. 20 an hour??? I still remember the way a friend of mine was boasting about this white girlfriend of his whose fancy he had caught over Yahoo! She ditched him the day the poor fellow responded in a technologically challenged fashion when she asked him if he (meaning his PC) had bluetooth. He replied, ‘Nope! Me got fresh white ones!’ No surprises as to why she ditched him. Slowly the fad faded away.

Then came along Billiards and pool! Everyone took the cue and went gaga about shiny little colored balls rolling over smooth, green surfaces. And boy, was happy hour effective in this sport! The reason why my marks dipped in my semester exams can totally be attributed to this. At any point of time, one among the three of us would think that we have done enough group studies and that we deserve a well-deserved break. That break usually came by pooling in money and offering it to the coffers of one particular pool parlour in Triplicane that had extended happy hours playing for one ridiculously low price. I remember the most posh of them all was Billiards Point somewhere in Egmore. The name caught on and soon every place where you could play the game was known as Billiards point, much like how every washing powder was surf or every pack of asafetida was LG.

The culture of Super Selector came at the time when internet centers were booming. So the fancy caught on. Suddenly everyone had a team. Believe it or not, amongst us friends we had a team each (three teams), a team with each of us pairing with each other (that is another three teams), and one team for all the three of us combined (This is the seventh team).  And we had chits of paper in our wallets with details of all the teams written down. Anywhere and everywhere we would be tracking scores or rather, performances. It was a heart break for my friend when Lara, in my team, scored heavily against the home side, Sri Lanka. But he took revenge soon as Muralitharan was on the field. He had the last laugh when Lara had to drop off the tour due to an injury. It hurt me as much as it hurt the great southpaw. And there were unverified stories of my college mates winning watches and cameras as prizes due to the high number of points they racked up. I won, this is a verified truth as I am telling you so myself, about Rs 500 in groceries from an online retailer. That was the first time I was ever able to buy something for my home using my money. Emotional moment indeed.

Then suddenly there seemed to be a pause in all these activities. It’s been almost seven years since I have been in Chennai for two months in a row, so maybe I am missing some trends. I know that there has been a spurt of tennis courts all around.  But other than that, nothing… nothing good at least. By this I mean that I have noticed quite a bit of ‘bad’ trends going around.

Let us begin with the Engineering college seats scams. I don’t know if the modus operandi is as I am going to describe, but this is what I figured after reading quite a bit on this topic. Considering that Tamil Nadu is the engineering college capital of the country (need not necessarily mean that we produce the best engineers, but we sure produce a lot of ordinary ones, yours truly being one of them), and Bihar being one of the most backward regions, bereft of many such colleges, Bihari youth one day got up to realise that it is not as difficult to do engineering as their elders thought. They realised that the difficulty stemmed not from the rigor of the course, but from the absence of colleges in their state. Hence they began migrating down south where they knew that it was more difficult to get admission into the temple at Tirupati than it was to get into an, any, engineering college. But there is this elite group that also knew that not all Bihari’s knew about this. So they ‘engineered’ (pun intended here) these money making nexuses with local college students in Chennai. Soon was born an almost Gujjjuish money making scheme. ‘Buy’ seats worth X lakhs per seat. Go back to Bihar, promise the other students.

And Voila! The students got their paved way into Microsoft (oh and by the way, engineering almost always means computer education, down south), the local and Bihari goons, err, students made their pocket money, rather pockets full of money, the engineering colleges got a cut, am sure the cops were not totally blind to this ripe scheme and so they got a portion of the profits..well if this is not a well-rounded business, I don’t know what is. If you thought this was bad, things get uglier than this too. How? What if there are other groups of elite youth that are competing for selling the same seats? They get into clashes, at times physical, which at times results in death of one party or the other. Some ignorant fools went to the extent of kidnapping a minister’s son. And soon realised that our cops can be pretty smart when kicked in their pillow sized butts, when they got busted within a day, courtesy, one angry minister! And these scenes happen a lot in the state. It is sad indeed.

And then there are the localites that do not have the means to do such high end scams and therefore pick someone quite not their size. Children! Suddenly every mid-20 year old on the road is swooping onto every Richie rich walking by. And suddenly it becomes alarmingly clear that the adage ‘Do not take biscuits from strangers’ is not quite being emphasized at home by parents. It is frightening how easily children are being kidnapped. With silly stories like ‘Your dad was unable to pick you up, so he asked us to do the job for him’, and ‘Will you eat this biscuit, it is a new variety and you will love it,’ giving highly profitable though short-term results, wannabe kidnappers with absolutely no prior kidnapping experience succeed in at least the first step – that of lifting the kid away and calling in for ransom. Bt the inexperience quickly shows up, as the cops are swooping in on them like guided missiles. The regularity with which these guys get caught makes you wonder whether the cops plant these people in the first place to make themselves look good. But to be fair to them, this trend is forcing them to use innovative ways of dealing with the criminals – tapping cell phones, using snipers, at times even letting the kidnappers get away with the ransom just so they could lead them to their other partners-in-crime. All heavy stuff!

One reason that it is important that we educate youth, and educate them in a way as to enable them to get jobs, is that they don’t resort to such desperate money making measures due to joblessness, which they are doing right now. But then, am sure many before me have said the same, and we have not seen much difference.

I have spoken about the trends that I noticed but I consider myself a pretty poor observer. What all did I miss that you noticed? This post is not just open to Madrasis, Othercitywallahs…bring it on!