Tag: humans of chennai
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Keeping the filter kaapi hot for 50 years
He pours a cup of tea from one of the hundreds of flasks in his shop and pushes it towards this journalist. “This is important for your story,” says M Balasubramanian, who runs the Sharadha Agencies Flask Hospital on Kutchery Road, Mylapore. The shop was started by his father in 1961 and is filled with…
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Raise a toast to ‘Royal’, the king of sandwiches
The year: 1999; Opening scene: Sheik Dawood hops onto his bicycle and pedals for about 14 km from his house in Maduravoyal all the way to TTK Road, to sell sandwiches from a bunk shop. It’s just bread and jam, vegetable sandwich and bread omelette at the time. Fast-forward to 2016. The bunk shop has…
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Tiruvallur: Haunted by the shadow of bonded labour
The same Cooum River that flows through Chennai snakes into Tiruvallur too along its 72-km journey. But unlike in Chennai, where Cooum is filthy, in Tiruvallur, it’s what outside the river that’s filthier – the shadow of bonded labour. The blight obliterates generations with back-breaking labour at rice mills or unending toil in the searing…