Rohit's nukkad

Saturday, December 22, 2007

A different India

During my recent trip to India I traveled for the first time to the southern part of India to places like Tirupati and Chennai.
Tirupati a temple town in Andra Pradesh is the home of Tirumala temple, one of the most famous and highly visited religious places. The location of the temple is simply beautiful surrounded by mountains on all sides. One needs to cross seven mountains to reach the temple which can be done through foot or one can drive to the mountain. The management of the place really amazed me. Everything was so beautifully managed. Surly a place one should in his or her lifetime.
Chennai, fomerly knows as Madras is one of the original four metropolitan cities of India. A smaller city as compared to Mumbai. I found the city much cleaner, with nice beaches (though I just visited one), but the traffic was as usual bad. The roads were narrow with tons of hoardings for sarees and jewelry all over the city. I found very few skyscrapers in Chennai.
In both these places I observed that language can be a barrier. Knowledge of local language is very helpful. Another thing I saw that southern part of India is much greener, less crowded and
with a lot of small lakes as compared to central part of India.