Trichy

Every time I travel out of Delhi NCR to far-flung cities and small towns, it is a pleasure to be relieved of my claustrophobic, Delhi-centric vision and be treated to the varied cultural experience that real India has to offer.

We (my friends DD, K and I) are just back from a week long business tour to Trichy in Tamilnadu, which I had earlier considered to be an inconsequential “Madrasi” town, mainly an industrial area. It is an industrial town, yes, but has other interesting facets too.

Trichy (or Tiruchirapalli) is the fourth largest city of Tamilnadu. Apart from being an important centre for industry (major energy sector related industry), it is a big religious tourism hub (many temples) and an education centre too (Dr. CV Raman and Dr. Kalam and some of the renowned “alumni” of the city).

The industry visits took my maximum time, which was why we were actually there. It has a dense concentration of BHEL ancillaries which are manufacturing varied equipments for the energy sector.

To complete the religious itinerary, we visited the two major temples - Shree Ranganathan Temple, which, as wikipedia informs, is the largest functioning Hindu (Vaisnava) temple in the world and Rockfort Temple, a Shiva temple on an 83mtrs high rock, which is a geographical anomaly in an otherwise flat landscape (see pic).

Both the temples are generally well-managed from a devotee’s point of view, as temples down South are known to be, but for a small anomaly - none of the important historical and mythological information is displayed in any language other than Tamil.

Owing to this, it was frustrating for me to not being able to decipher these markers and delve deeper in to so much history and culture and mythology right in front of me. Somebody needs to seriously look in to it.

We also visited an ancient Grand Anicut (dam) which is still functional (see pic) but did not seem to be very well promoted. With a little more effort, I am sure it could be developed in to a good resort.

There is a small army cantonment area which I suspect might be from the colonial times but it has remained completely unexplored by me.

Apart from this, we had a limited interaction with the city as a civic centre, but it was delightful to be treated to actual Tamilnadu, beyond the cosmopolitanism of Chennai. From what we could see, Trichy is a well maintained city with good civic services. Most notable for us Dilliwallahs was the extraordinarily large, well managed and sparklingly clean fleet of city buses.

The food is unapologetically south Indian, as is ought to be. To be fair, there are a lot of eateries “specializing” in different cuisines – Bombay Chappathy, North Indian dhall tharka, Chow mein and what not but everytime we deviated from the staple fare, it was an adventure best forgotten. Except the unfailingly excellent “kaapi” every time and the ubiquitous “paan”.

Trichy would remain with me as my first window to the mofussil Tamilnadu.