Shopping at Tnagar in Chennai one evening.

We had come to chennai all the way from Hyderabad via tirupati to do my wedding shopping. Named on the legendary poet Thyagaraja, Tnagar (Thyagaraja nagar) is a bustling locality where it seems whole chennai congregates to do some serious cloths shopping with almost all the rich and famous silk saree houses located in this area in a span of 1 km. After reaching my cousins house 1 hour from central railway station we had a lunch and a quick nap. We started to this place at around 4:00 in the evening reaching it one hour hence. As we got down the regional transport bus we were welcomed by a sea of people inundating the whole area where the tall buildings looked like some kind of ships docked to the shores floating on the sea. We then trudged along the forest of people like an army of cadets if not as agile, who were on a mission to save people kidnapped by Naxalites, only difference being that our mission was to buy some sarees. I say it as a mission because looking at the crowd made me feel as if buying a single saree there would dwarf even the triumph of conquring Mount Everest. As we passed shop after shop like shore after shore, I felt we were getting submerged under the incessant waves of people hitting us hard without respite. In between all this there were also some cars and two wheelers like hills and rocks in the sea changing our course of direction from time to time. It was hard to digest such an unprecedented crowd as we were struggling to even breath forget about staying together. With deepavali still three weeks away if this was the situation I would be scared to think what would it be during the festival days. My guess would be that we got to enter into some new avatars like spiderman or superman flying above everyone or walking over the ceiling upside down.

Out of a lot of diffulty we managed to find one shop which we chose to buy some sarees. But the queue to enter it with so many of them trying to out do each other made it look as holy as the abode of lord venkateshwara of tirupati which we visited a day before standing in queues for hours together even after paying hefty darshan fees of Rs 300. We also lost the same amount to a con jeep driver on the pretext of driving us to tirumala being a different story. The 5 floors huge shop looked small and spaceless with so many people occupying every inch of the space. Had it not been my wedding shopping I would never have entered the locality forget about the shop. There were several counters with different ranges of prices to different varieties of sarees. The mission that I had was to select three sarees to be given to my fiancée for three occasions while my parents's mission was to buy sarees which will be given to the near and far relatives who would visit. Muhurtham, Nagavalli and Reception were three of the occasions.

Finally we were out after buying just 3 Saree which took us about 4 hours. It was finally a relief as we were completely dehydrated but nevertheless it was a good experience.