MPlus Lifestyle exhibition in Chennai Trade Centre

Flash back - Trigger the time machine to go back a few years.

Some three-four years back, me and my wife visited one such exhibition. To my knowledge, that was the first one of this size in Chennai. The entry was free, parking was real cool and there were nice shuttles that transferred people from the parking lot to the exhibition hall entrance. There were good number of stalls, but not too many. Food court was just okay - if my memory serves right, there was only one Sangeetha food stall.

Cut to the present now - 1 June 2007.

Trying to make an intelligent guess that there'd be a huge crowd on weekends, we went on the first day of the exhibition itself - It was a Friday evening. Parking was done at partly on both sides of the halls and on the road. There was a hefty entry - Rs 50 per head and interestingly, the place was still crowded. Why would I be surprised if this entry cost becomes Rs 100 next time and this exhibition will still buzz with huge crowd. There'll still be queues at every stall, predominant Hindi-only speaking stall attendants, international collection food court, etc etc.

The collections were pretty up-market this time and the international section was pretty good. Food court had a stall for every tastebud. The only case that I didn't like was that some of the open space with trees were covered and makeshift a/c arrangement was made to accommodate extra stalls. his became a glass house. Had the trees been talking, they'd say the yearn for sunlight, water, humidity and some level of darkness every 24 hours.

Wondering if the event is successful due to the entry price or due to the volume of economics and business.

Besant Nagar Beach - One fine rainbow morning

These days everyone talks fitness. So do I, to keep up with the latest in-thing on the gossip-world of Chennai..or atleast I try to. No fitness talk is complete without talking about a walk/jog/gossip along the beach. I chose Besant Nagar beach, one closer to my home, not for walk or jog, just to take a few snaps of the sunrise. I prefer my gym for fitness (well, to be honest I don't make it to the gym more than 2-3 times a week and I'll talk about that later on a different context).

So I managed to get up at 5:15 and decided to take early morning snaps. It was a fine morning, cool breeze was there. The sky was partly cloudy. I had seen the sun rising from the Bay of Bengal on rare clear sky days, not today.

Being cloudy was one of the reason that made it a rainbow morning. Yes, the sky was coloured beautifully. How lucky he is, someone commented, looking at me taking an aim of the sky. I am, indeed. I was not alone, there were a couple of other camera holders too. I didn't know that some of the joggers kept camera in their cars. What's the need of a car on a fitness jogging morning? Well, that's a separate topic that I'll delve later.

The red clay walkway is always a great place for a beautiful snap and here is one.

Well, they say every beautiful thing has an ugly side. Why is that the beaches always turn a massive toilet on every morning? I could see about 50 folks taking pleasure in relieving their previous day junk-foods on the beach water line, making the place real nasty!

Nevertheless, the Elliots beach is always a pleasure mornings or evenings. The evening pleasure could mean different for different citizens, which we'll discuss later. That's for now

Besant Nagar Beach at dawn and dusk

They say that when a small crowd gathers, more people join just out of curiousity. So do I. Blame it on the 'social animal' tag that we humans got.

Hundreds and thosands of folks go for a walk along the beach at dawn and dusk, I thought why not me. So I decided to join the health conscious bandwagon (not the drive-to-beach-and-do-nothing-but-eat-variety-of-soups only group) and take a morning walk to the beach. It is peak of summer now and the peak temperature yesterday was pegged at 108 degrees F (that's 42.77777777 degress C). Inspite of that, the morning was still not bad. At 5:45 am, it was plesant indeed.

Except that as I walk along the beach and away from the Planet Yum, I see that there is an array of human folks that one could easily mistake for doing a team excercise of continuous squats. On closer look, you'll wish that you should not have taken a closer look. Yes, the beach begins to be a large scale toilet unfortunately. A very unpleasant sight, not to mention the air pollution.

Do we really like to have this scene long term?