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Dear Madras: A Love Letter to a City on her Birthday

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22 August 2026 · Madras Day · the city turns 387 Dear Madras , Every August we do something slightly ridiculous. We wish a city happy birthday. This is not a history lesson — it's a love letter with some dates in it. சென்னை · மெட்ராஸ் Est. 22.viii.1639 Reading time ~7 min Marina Beach, about six in the evening. Original illustration. I — The founding The receipt for a city Here is the part that never stops being funny: Madras began as a property deal. On 22 August 1639 , two agents of the English East India Company — Francis Day and his superior Andrew Cogan — secured a grant of land from Damarla Venkatadri Nayak , a viceroy serving the last of the Vijayanagara line. What they got was not a kingdom. It was a strip of sand, roughly three miles long and a mile inland, pinned between the Cooum and the sea, with a fishing settlement called Madraspatnam on it and the village of Chennapatnam just beside....
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Freedom Is a Song We Keep Singing:15 August 2026 · India's 80th Independence Day

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Freedom Is a Song We Keep Singing 15 August 2026 · India's 80th Independence Day A song that was born before freedom was 12 January 1947. Independence was still seven months away. That week, a Tamil film opened in cinemas—Naam  Iruvar ("We Two"), directed by A. V. Meiyappan, and the very first film produced under the AVM banner. The story itself was modest. But the film did something that outlived it: it brought Bharati's poems into a movie hall. Aaduvome pallu paaduvome. Vetri ettu thikkum etta. Sung by D. K. Pattammal, set to music by R. Sudarsanam. The film opens at a Subramania Bharati memorial gathering. It ends at the celebration of Gandhi's 77th birthday. Freedom hadn't arrived yet—and people were already singing. In January 1947, months before the flag went up, a film put Bharati's verses on a cinema screen. India wasn't free yet. People sang anyway. That is the whole point of the song. The historian Randor Guy wrote that ...
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Why Vishwanath and Sons Is the Classy Suriya Family Drama We’ve Been Waiting For

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There is a specific brand of cinematic joy in watching Suriya put on a well-fitted suit, step into boardroom corridors, and balance suave authority with genuine emotional vulnerability. Years ago, Sanjay Ramaswamy in Ghajini set the benchmark for that effortless, sharp charm. With Vishwanath and Sons , watching Suriya step in as Sanjay Vishwanath felt like an overdue reunion with that polished, commanding screen presence. What makes the film instantly engaging is how it takes high-stakes corporate dynasty tropes and grounds them in genuine human emotion. At its core, the narrative navigates succession, family legacy, and the layered complexities of surrogacy. Instead of descending into melodrama, the writing treats these modern themes with nuance, warmth, and sharp humor.  What elevates Sanjay beyond the typical high-flying CEO archetype is his grounded moral compass. In one standout, quietly powerful scene that defines his stature as a responsible leader, Sanjay reflects on a su...
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Twenty Minutes That Fixed a Week of Frustration

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For about a week, my bicycle had been lying to me. Not dramatically. It still rode. But somewhere in the middle of the cassette there was a gear that refused to arrive—I would push the shifter, hear a dry clatter, and the chain would sit between two sprockets, undecided, complaining. On the climb near my house I found myself planning around it, avoiding that one gear the way you avoid a loose step on a staircase you know well. I did what most of us do. I ignored it. Then I looked at it, understood nothing, and ignored it again. Eventually I wheeled the bike down to SVN Cycles. Beasant nagar around akm from my home The shop I have been going to for years I have been walking into that shop for years without ever really looking at it. It smells of grease and rubber and the particular metallic sweetness of a place where things are opened up and put back together. Tubes hang from the ceiling. There are tyres stacked in a way that looks like chaos and clearly isn't, because he...
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They Kept the Spider. They Forgot the Man.(Review of Spiderman: Brand New Day)

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  I grew up watching the web-slinger strictly in English, chasing every line of dialogue. Somewhere along the way, this universe came closer to home — Hindi, Telugu, Tamil. Today I watched Spider-Man: Brand New Day in Tamil. The banter, the fear, the fracture in his voice — all of it in a language my heart thinks in. It stopped being a Hollywood superhero film. It became personal. So I'm not going to review it from the audience seat. I'm going to hand the mic to him. From Behind the Mask They tell you the job is the fights. And they're not wrong about the rush. Swinging the gap between two towers at three in the morning. Reading a punch half a second before it's thrown. Feeling my own body change under me — faster, sharper, stranger than it has any right to be — and holding on anyway. Out there, it's ferocious. It's chaos. It takes everything I have and then asks for a little more. But the fights aren't the hard part. The fights, I know how to do...
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The Bridge That Stopped Halfway

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  Chennai · Adyar Estuary The Bridge That Stopped Halfway Every city keeps one ruin it refuses to mourn. Mine is a single-lane road that walks into the Bay of Bengal and simply gives up. Words & photographs · Senthila The whole argument in one frame. The bridge sets out from the Besant Nagar side and simply stops. Beyond it: the sandbar the sea keeps rebuilding, an excavator cutting the river a way out to the Bay, the city's skyline holding the far bank, and — improbably, perfectly — a single blue-canopied boat moored in the shadow of the last standing pier. A bridge that leads to nowhere is still, technically, a place you can go. There is a particular ache that only a broken bridge can produce. A ruined temple is grand; a derelict house is sad. But a bridge that has lost its middle is something else entirely — it is an unfinished sentence. It is intention, interrupted. You can stand at one end and see exactly what somebody once meant, and see exactly where the world declined ...
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