A day trip to Chennai

One fine day I woke up and I realized that I should try to visit Chennai and visit the IIT campus because I don't know when I might get the chance again. Unfortunately the day I woke up and decided to do this, the tickets that I could get my hands on left me with very little time in Chennai. I would have barely 8 hours in Chennai from the time the train arrives in Chennai to the time my return train would leave. Still, I had to do it.

As my luck would have it, my train arrived 30 mins late. However I used the shower facility in the train station and that saved me some time. (Although I must admit, I wasn't really planning on taking a shower elsewhere if the station's shower facility didn't work out!) I hired my favorite nemesis, the Chennai Auto, to get to the campus. It wasn't a nuisance since I took a prepaid auto. The original plan was to see if I could rent a two-wheeler for the duration of my stay there, but no one knew where to find those.

Immediately, almost unconsciously, I slipped into full Tamil mode and not a single person in Chennai asked me if I was really a native Tamil speaker, so points! There were quite a few changes in the city including a lot of high rises and flyovers, including a flyover right in front of the campus. Much more changes in the campus. The biggest was probably the construction of four high-rise hostels. On first inspection they looked like huge improvements over the older ones, but as I learned later, the corridors are extremely dark and poorly ventilated.

My own hostel looked as good as before. One change I noticed in the population was that I heard a LOT of Telugu. That fits with the reports that I heard earlier that AP now has a ton of IIT coaching centres that have effectively "cracked" the entrance exams for the IITs and are, therefore, mass producing IIT candidates. Ate at one of the new canteens on campus.

I wanted to meet my friend, who's now an IIT professor in my own department but he wasn't available. I did meet two of my own professors. Normally I dread meeting IIT professors because I'm always afraid they wouldn't remember me and it would be an awkward conversation from that point onwards. But while these two took a few mins of my prodding to place me, they did remember me and my classmates and the project I was working on etc. They talked very excitedly about changes on campus and in the department. It was surprisingly nice talking to them.

After that I managed to catch a bus and short auto ride to one of our favorite offcampus food joints, Shakes and Creams, famous for its icecreams. I was dreading going there because while I had been craving those icecream creations for about a decade, I was afraid of ruining my memories of the place if they changed management and suddenly their icecreams sucked. While the management did change, the icecreams were just as good as I remember them! Heavenly. My only regret was that I could eat only one before I had to rush to catch my train. I managed to catch another bus to the station, which meant that my overall interaction with the auto drivers in Chennai was very minimal.

Nice trip, I'm glad I got to do it before it got too hot or before I got too busy to go there again.