We may claim to be a world-class city but our experience with its infrastructure points otherwise. We may have the best laws in the world when it comes to town planning, but implementation does not seem to indicate that. When all else fails, what do we do? Take refuge in cinema, which is always popular and indulge in that most cosmetic of exercises – name change. Our city’s Corporation and its Councillors recently got going on just that, and it backfired. Time to get back to some solid groundwork boys, and girls.
Earlier in August, the Corporation council met. Among a plethora of more important issues that they should have focused on, the state of non-Metrorail roads and the ongoing sanitation mess being but two, they found time to pass a resolution that College Road in Nungambakkam be renamed after the late actor Jaishankar. This was ostensibly in response to a request from the family, the star having lived off the road for long. Now, anything connected with cinema is always a matter of top priority and so this made it in record time to the Council agenda and was also passed. Reliable sources have it that there was not even a debate on the issue.
It would be too much perhaps to expect that Corporation Councillors, busy as they are with tending to their respective wards, would have pondered over the reason that thoroughfare had the name College Road. But what is surprising is that officials, who should know better, did not do some background checks and place the history of the road for consideration. The blinding arc lights of cinema seem to have pushed every other thought into the recesses. Just imagine how popular the announcement would be – a principal road being named after a former superstar!
But what transpired was otherwise. Good old Madras Musings was watching. And it made sure that the history was made known on social media. It came as a shot in the arm that the College, (not WCC but the College of Fort St George) had in the 19th century done yeoman service for the cause of Tamil. This was duly highlighted, and boy, did the social media posts go wild! By evening, the response was overwhelming, and it reached the right ears, and eyes.
It is not often that we crow like this, and we may be pardoned for it. But every once in a while, when we see the years of archival material that we have built up and the tons of research done by people like the late S Muthiah, we are happy that they come of use. Our intention was never to point out some wrong but more to set a potential blunder right. We are glad that the Corporation issued a clarification – College Lane, and not College Road, will be renamed. That was sharp thinking. It is a win-win solution.
We do not wish to dwell on this issue anymore, other than thanking the Corporation for understanding the history of College Road. In future, as name change requests are bound to come up, the Corporation would do well to have a standing committee of officials who can research street and road histories and analyse the pros and cons of such changes. Ideally, there should be no such renaming exercises and given the way the city is expanding, there are plenty of new roads to be named. But if that is not possible, a proper documentation on why, or why not, a change was proposed/accepted would establish a good tradition.