As my next destination is the Andaman Islands I need to do a stopover in Chennai (also known as Madras) in India and I thought it could be a good idea to find some more facts on this Indian city before I arrive. When I was digging up facts I could clearly see there is loads of interesting stuff for a visitor like me to pass time with, the main problem would be to get enough time to see it all. Please feel free to use the tips in this post if you should visit Chennai yourself.

Old-fashioned, orthodox, slow, insular… there are just some of the words that people throw at Chennai. Granted, it is the most low-profile of India’s metropolises, but dig a little deeper, and you will find that this southern city oozes with a charm of its own. It has tons of art and culture that go back thousands of years, an even pace of life, a size that’s small enough to make friends of strangers, and an easy lack of glamour that is at once amusing and reassuring. If this is your first visit to the city, let me give you 10 reasons why you’re about to fall in love.

1. Kapaleeswarar Temple
Chennai has many old and beautiful temples, but you must begin with a visit to the Kapaleeswarar Temple in Mylapore. This 1,500-year-old temple dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction, has beautiful carvings and lots of history. Soak in the atmosphere, watch devotees light dozens of oil lamps as they go about their ancient rituals of worship, or feed the colorful fish in the tank at the back of the temple.

When you are done, wander down the narrow lanes to pick up quaint souvenirs ranging from elegant brass lamps and bells to techni-colored gods in glitzy frames. or buy sweet-smelling jasmine, basil or roses from the flower sellers. The temple has a dozen quaint legends attached to it, so ask some Chennaite to tell you the tales.

2. IT Hub
Did you know that Chennai is India’s number two provider of software and other IT-related services? It is also India’s top stop for auto and auto component companies, commanding over 30% of both industries, and home to companies like Hyundai, Ford, BMW, Mitsubishi and Caterpillar.

Another industry that Chennai is homing in on is electronics manufacturing – Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, Cisco and Sony-Ericsson are just a few companies that has set up base here. The city assures good business process continuity – an educated work force, no labor problems, reliable power supply, adequate terabit bandwidth, a cooperative administration, and a good quality of urban life.

The influx of so many multinational and BPO companies has seen a sudden increase in the number of “outsiders” settlers, making Chennai a far more cosmopolitan city than it was five to seven years ago. Now, there are high-rises, fancy pubs, coffee bars, nightclubs, and the swankiest of shopping centers to cater to the rising population of young consumers with high spending power.

3. Movie-Mad Town
If you know anything about Chennai at all, you will know that the inhabitants are a little nutty about their movie stars. They admire them, worship them, emulate them – and when their “gods” die, they immolate themselves.

You can’t miss the fact that movies reign rampant over the public imagination – the Chennai skyline is dotted with colossal movie hoardings, often with special 3-D effects and a work of art in themselves. Although there’s never been a film festival here, movies and movie starts are always in your face in Chennai.

4. Crossroads of Two Eras
This is a city that easily spans two eras – one is the hi-tech world of modern business, and the second is a tradition-bound world that goes back thousands of years. The same man who heads an aggressive multinational bank will faithfully appear at the temple in his white dhoti every dawn, making flower offerings to the gods.

You will hear temple bells and the chants of slokas at every turn. Every house will have a son or daughter learning classical music or dance while quite happily swaying to Shakira or Beyonce with friends at school.

On the fastest motorbikes, you will find not a punk but a Brahmin priest with a bald head. Take a walk down Mylapore lanes and discover old Tamil tiled houses, with women in nine-yards saris drawing rice flour kolams on the steps outside, while inside, their sons discuss the merits of JavaFX Script on Skype with business partners in New Jersey.

5. Chettinad Cuisine
Did you know that Chettinad is actually a district tucked away in the deep interiors of Tamil Nadu? It is a hot, dry place that is home to the powerful and rich trading community of Chettiars, who at one time were the financial kingpins of the British Empire.

The cuisine of the hardy merchants of this region reflects both their history and geography – it’s rich, hot and most interesting. It has only recently become part of the public domain. Be warned, though – if you don’t order wisely, the food can set your mouth on fire.

6. The Finest Saris
Channai is famous for the gorgeous Kanjeevaram silk, named after Kanchipuram, a temple town that is about 70 kilometer from Chennai where the silk was born. Go shopping in one of the many sari shops in the city, and be bowled over by the sheer color and richness.

Kanjeevaram silk is fine and strong, and comes in rich colors. The saris are embellished with fine zari work or gold thread, which is interwoven with the silk to create intricate patterns. Some saris have fine silk thread embroidery. One sari can take 10 to 30 days of labor, depending on the complexity of the design. The price could range from INR 2,000 to 50,000.depending on workmanship and the amount of gold thread used. Many Westerners often buy the saris to use as drapes, wall hanging or simply as dress material.

7. Chennai Museum
Possibly the world’s finest bronze collection is housed in the Chennai Museum on Pantheon Road. Built in 1857, the building itself is beautifully built in the imposing IndoGothic style and the fabulous bronze sculptures are worth lingering over for hours.

The museum is especially proud of its fantastic collection of Buddhist statues dating back to the second century, which were excavated at Amravathi, an important Buddhist centre. The exquisite Chola bronzes (9th to 12th centuries) show clearly how far the art of metal casting had advanced in ancient India. The statue of the “Cosmic Nataraja” alone is worth a hundred visits. The museum is especially attractive after a recent makeover.

8. The Marina
The 4.5 kilometer long Marina is Chennai’s long and beautiful urban beach, but if you’re expecting Copa, think again. This is a different story all together. Take an evening walk to the beach, and you’ll find that it’s a daily carnival, with food stalls, flower sellers, ice-cream wagons and merry-go-rounds. Sit on the sand, paddle in the sea or just stroll endlessly and get aquatinted with the friendly Chennaites.

People here are not interested in the Western worship of sun-bathing, and neither will they get into swimsuits for a dip in the sea; they come in the evenings to enjoy the breeze and the waves, and sample the beach food. Don’t miss the local salad, called sundal, with peanuts, cucumber, raw mango, carrots and cilantro all diced up – you can customize it to your taste if you wish.

The delicious corn on the cob is roasted on an open brazier as you wait, and dressed with chili powder, salt and lime. Don’t miss the hot fried fish and vegetable fritters. A trip to the beach is actually just an excuse to pig out on street food.

9. St. Thomas Basilica
On a narrow street, crowded by buildings on both sides, look up and there, reaching straight up, white and pure towards the sky is the steeple of St. Thomas Basilica. There are only three churches in the world which are built on the remains of an apostle and this, first erected by the Portuguese in the 16th century, is one of them. St. Thomas or Doubting Thomas is credited with having brought Christianity to India in 53 AD, and he died in Chennai, lanced by a hostile chieftain.

Although the remains of the apostle has since been moved to Spain, the beautiful cathedral still hosts the lance and a piece f bone from his hand.

10. Mamallapuram
A short and pleasant drive south of Chennai along the Bay of Bengal will take you to what was once a thriving port city more than 2,000 years ago. This place is Mamallapuram, a place famous for both its rich architectural heritage and its luxurious beach resorts. This town saw the ancient Tamil dynasty of the Pallavas take monolithic stone work to its pinnacle.

There are imposed stone chariots, intricately carved stone temples and pavilions, and an exquisite bas relief that is said to be the largest in the world. Entire hillsides have been carved into wondrous shapes, and historians suspect that this could once have been a sprawling school of sculpture. Right at the water’s edge is the magnificent Shore Temple, whose elegant silhouette defines the town unmistakably.

An invaluable reference with writing this post was an article written by Vaishna Roy

There are things that most of human kind have in common. Family, friends, car, house, job. It’s the american way of life that Truman Burbank (geniously played by Jim Carrey) has adopted. That’s also what most of us have in our lives. How would you react when you discover that all of that is fake. Which means you have nothing in life. Except the fact that you are the most popular man in the universe. In other words, you’re a commercial product. That’s one of the visions of our society that The Truman Show wants us to see. The story begins at day 10909 of a live to the world broadcasting soap opera where the star, Truman, doesn’t know he is. We can see that everything (except him) is hollywood fake stuff. Then we discover two obsessions that are in the nature of Truman: His secret love for a high school girl who disappeared in Fiji island, and his passion for travelling and exploring. Unfortunately, that’s not what the creator of the show, Christof (Ed Harris) has planned for the show. That’s why he tries everything make Truman forget his passions. (Some of these scenes includes funny stuff). The fact is that the subtility of the creators is pretty poor. And they also do a lot of mistakes on the set.

This makes Truman starting to doubt about the world around him and developping paranoia (he couldn’t expect how right he is). Ans as the proofs continue to show off in front of him, Truman decides to get away and to go right where his obsessions are. The movie, wonderfully directed by Peter Weir (Death Poets Society) makes us laugh, cry, but most of all, think. Carrey’s character is similar to Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump. An honest man, with childish reactions and who doesn’t know anything about what’s going on around him. There are a lot of lessons of life in the flick. Maybe even more than the production team expected when they did it. First of all, when you are born to accomplish something and you really want it, nothing (even the biggest storms), nothing can stop you. It shows us also that you cannot control human emotions. Christof wanted Meryl(Laura Linney) to be Truman’s love and created the most similar character for Truman so he can love. Unfortunately, his heart was for another cast member called Sylvia (Natasha McLehone) which wasn’t expected by anyone. Another lesson is in the choice that Truman has to do at the end of the movie. It shows us that nothing (even fake perfection) is as good and exciting as reality…

All those 20th century inventions such as Virtual reality, video games, internet and most of all, television are just a way for people to hide their fear of real life. Why would you play baseball on a Nintendo when you can go with your friends in a field doing a real game? Because most of us are shy, of just don’t want to get up and try. Spending his life in front of a tv set makes you a nobody. It entertains, but you have no life, dude! Anyway, some people also see in The Truman Show a kind of myth where the Christof is a god and Truman his creation. Just like in such famous stories as Frankenstein, we see that when the creator loses the control of his creation (when no more cameras can get Truman), he will try to eleminate it (the weather options). Also the fact that the society are too hungry about other people’s private life. When you look at such publications as The National Enquier of tv’s Entertainment Tonight, you see how crazy we are to consume this. And I am sure there are a lot more meanings in Jim Carrey’s masterpiece, which is also one of the smartest movies that Hollywood ever made… (movie review by: Louis Plamondon )

Year: 1998
Opening week-end: 31,400,000$
Total Box-Office Gross: 109,000,000$
Produced by: Scott Rudin and Andrew Niccol
Co-Starring: Ed Harris, Laura Linney and Noah Emmerich
Directed by: Peter Weir
Studio/Video: Paramount Pictures
Role: Truman Burbank
Salary: 12,000,000$
Time Length: 109 minutes
Mins.Rated: PG

 
I am gradually developing a suspicion, or perhaps it is a fear, that Jim Carrey is growing on me. Am I becoming a fan? In “Liar Liar” he works tirelessly, inundating us with manic comic energy. Like the class clown who’ll do anything for a laugh, Carrey at one point actually pounds himself with a toilet seat. And gets a laugh.

The movie is a high-energy comeback from 1996′s dismal “The Cable Guy”, which made the mistake of giving Carrey an unpleasant and obnoxious character to play. Here Carrey is likable and sympathetic, in a movie that will play for the whole family, entertaining each member on a different level (he’s a master at combining slapstick for the kids with innuendo for the grownups).

Carrey plays a yuppie lawyer whose career is on the rise but whose wife (Maura Tierney) has divorced him and whose 5-year-old son (Justin Cooper) no longer believes a word he says. “My dad’s a liar”, the kid says in class. “You mean a *lawyer,*” the teacher says. The kid shrugs: whatever. Carrey is so wrapped up in cases that he even misses the kid’s birthday party. So the kid closes his eyes and blows out the candles on the cake and makes a wish: He hopes that for one day his dad won’t tell a lie.

The wish comes true. It is, of course, impossible to be a lawyer (or any other form of adult) if you are not prepared to lie, and so the day goes badly. He’s defending the respondent in a big-bucks divorce case; his client (Jennifer Tilly) is a buxom sex bomb who is charged with one count of adultery but insists, somewhat proudly, that the actual count is closer to seven. This is not the sort of information you want to give to an attorney who cannot lie.

The screenplay, by Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, takes this simple premise and applies it to the lawyer’s workday. I can imagine the idea getting old really fast with a lesser actor, but Carrey literally throws himself into the story. Struggling to force himself to tell a lie, he goes mano a mano with a blue felt-tip pen. He tries to say it’s red. He fails. His rubber face contorts itself in agony, but he *cannot* tell a lie.

There’s trouble in the courtroom. “How are you today, counselor?” asks the judge. “I’m a little upset about a bad sexual episode last night,” he replies. He can’t even plead his client’s case, since he knows it’s false. As the judge and courtroom look on, Carrey climbs the walls and rolls on the floor, and finally escapes to the men’s room, where in an astonishing display of comic energy he mugs himself, hoping to get the case continued.

The movie orchestrates one situation after another in which he has to tell the truth. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” a traffic cop asks. “That depends on how long you were following me”, Carrey says. In one of the best sequences, he disrupts a meeting at his firm by telling the complete truth about everyone present.

The movie has been directed by Tom Shadyac, who also did “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”, and it’s mostly content to plant the camera and watch as Carrey goes bananas. He’s a remarkable physical comedian. At one point, during a truth-telling session with his son, the kid twists his mouth out of shape and asks, “If I keep making this face, will it get stuck that way?”

“Absolutely not!”, says Carrey. “In fact, there are people who make a nice living doing that.” (movie review by: Roger Ebert)

Year: 1997
Opening week-end: ??,???,???$
Total Box-Office Gross: ??,???,???$
Produced by: Brian Grazer
Co-Starring: Maura Tierney, Jennifer Tilly and Cary Elwes
Directed by: Tom Shadyac
Studio/Video: Univesal Pictures
Role: Fletcher Reid
Salary: 21,000,000$
Time Length: ?? minutes
Mins.Rated: PG-13

As the title character of THE CABLE GUY (Columbia, PG-13), Jim Carrey thrusts out his jaw and speaks in a sulky, nagging lisp, as if he were Jay Leno’s infantile brother. Has any other performer derived this much joy from acting this undignified? Carrey plays a pathological leech, a cable-TV serviceman, the cable guy, who latches onto a yuppie customer (Matthew Broderick) and convinces himself that the poor sap is his new best buddy. Calling himself Chip Douglas (from My Three Sons, one of the shows that haunt his TV-addled brain), he invades Broderick’s home and office, leaving endless messages on his answering machine, crashing – and I mean crashing – his amateur basketball game, bombarding him with pop-psych homilies on how to win back his girlfriend, and, in general, turning his pursuit of “friendship” into a thinly disguised act of sadistic terrorism.

Some of this is amusing, if overly familiar, in the renegade-nuisance style of comedies like What About Bob? and Neighbors. Then comes a scene that may shock you into laughter (or out of it). The cable guy follows Broderick’s girlfriend (Leslie Mann) to a restaurant and, posing as a restroom attendant, proceeds to kick the living hell out of her unctuous date, smashing him onto the floor and sticking a live blow dryer in his mouth. For a few moments, Carrey blurs the line between comic dementia and real dementia. He’s funny and scary at the same time; his demons have come out to play.

Usually, we’re on Jim Carrey’s side, grooving on his mind warps, cracking up at his cracked-mirror happy face. But in The Cable Guy, our sympathies are divided between Broderick, the nice-guy hero, and Carrey, the deranged sociopathic imp. The star has never played this single-minded a pest before, and that may be one reason The Cable Guy lacks the exhilaration of his best work.

Reined in by the character’s evil lisp, his stunted camp hostility, Carrey can’t fling his imagination a thousand ways as he did in the second Ace Ventura movie (or, more recently, on Saturday Night Live). The director, Ben Stiller, works with craftsmanly precision, but too much control can dampen madness. When Carrey grabs the microphone of a karaoke machine and launches into a nerdy-ecstatic rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” part of the release is that the scene serves no real purpose. You feel that he couldn’t hold himself back; he had to sing that song (and sing it that magnificently badly). The Cable Guy needed more highs like that one. The movie flirts with a darker Carrey, but, ironically, most of it gives us a safer Carrey, an anarchist caught in routines too patterned to let him break loose. (movie review by: Entertainment Weekly)

Year: 1996
Opening week-end: 19,800,000$
Total Box-Office Gross: 65,700,000$
Produced by: Jeffrey Mueller, Andy Licht, and Judd Apatow
Co-Starring: Matthew Broderick and George Segal
Directed by: Ben Stiller
Studio/Video: Columbia TriStar
Role: Chip Douglas/Cable Guy
Salary: 20,000,000$
Time Length: 95 minutes
Mins.Rated: PG-13

From Jerry Lewis to Eddie Murphy, the bottom-line rule of thumb in contemporary American film comedy has been that the more control a performer has over his movies, the less funny – less daring, more self-indulgent – they become. Not so Jim Carrey, whose fourth starring role, in ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS (Warner Bros., PG-13), is his best yet. Unlike so many superstar comics before him, Carrey has retained a raw hunger for The Joke – the killer punchline, the ultimate sight gag – that seems insatiable, and this gives his work a furious, omnivorous energy. Even when the jokes are as corny as this movie’s subtitle is, Carrey regularly squeezes a laugh out of you through sheer force of will.

When Nature Calls finds pet detective Ace Ventura in Africa, where he’s in search of a rare white bat. Unlike his character in Dumb and Dumber, Carrey’s Ace is all coolness and confidence – he swaggers around the jungle with that hip-swiveling, John Wayne-on-joy juice walk, sassing everybody in sight. (Trust me: Kids all over America will be hitting you with Ace’s new wise-guy catchphrase “Spank you – spank you very much.”) As always, the verbal comedy is nonsensical and vulgar, and the physical humor is rigorously conceived and really vulgar.

Ian McNeice plays the English diplomat who accompanies Ace on his bat quest, and Carrey’s In Living Color cohort Tommy Davidson is terrific (and unrecognizable) as a battling member of the Wachootoo tribe. But mucus might just as well receive costar billing too, for all the gleefully gross screen time Carrey gives it. There’s also a scene in which a mechanical rhinoceros “gives birth” to a naked Ace (sorry, the context is impossible to explain here) that would do Laurel and Hardy – and Luis Buñuel – proud.

Carrey and his writer pal Steve Oedekerk, making his debut as a director, are fearless in their spoofs of African-jungle-movie stereotypes. They get away with potentially offensive stuff simply: None of the black characters are stupid, or mere figures of fun. (Carrey works in a sweetly silly romantic scene with the film’s only prominent woman, a tribal princess played by Sophie Okonedo.) To be sure, When Nature Calls is very uneven and pretty much falls apart in the last half hour, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun before that. Plus, Carrey is one of the few comedians I know of who, at the end of the 20th century, are resourceful enough to coin a fresh slang term for masturbation (for the record, it’s “practicing my mantra”). (movie review by: Entertainment Weekly)

Year: 1995
Opening week-end: 37,800,000$
Total Box-Office Gross: 107,000,000$
Produced by: James G. Robinson
Co-Starring: Ian McNeice, Simon Callow, Maynard Eziashi
Directed by: Steve Oedekerk
Studio/Video: Warner Bros./Warner Home Video
Role: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Salary: 12,000,000$
Time Length: 94 minutes
Mins.Rated: PG-13

Rubbery handsome, with a chipped front tooth, fashion-disaster bangs, and the eager dimples of a depraved gopher, Jim Carrey turns his face and body into a special effect – a human morph machine – in DUMB and DUMBER (New Line, PG-13). He’s playing a geek called Lloyd Christmas who thinks he’s hot stuff, and though we’ve seen this character before (Steve Martin practically invented it), Carrey, zigzagging between twinkly-eyed infomercial-pitchman bravado and sheer manic idiocy, does the postmodern smart-dumb clod with a new kind of whiplash abandon.

Dumb and Dumber, which features Carrey and Jeff Daniels as nitwits who journey cross-country to return a suitcase full of cash, is a pokey, hit-or-miss buddy comedy, a frayed string of gags posing as a movie. Carrey and Daniels squirt themselves with mustard and ketchup, perform a spaz rendition of “Mockingbird,” and ride into Aspen on a tiny moped.

Essentially, Dumb and Dumber is The Jerk with two jerks instead of one. Carrey, though, sustains a comic persona here in a way he couldn’t quite in Ace Ventura or The Mask. He does literal-minded doofdom with peerless enthusiasm – he’s like Robin Williams without the preciousness.

In one of the film’s highlights, he fantasizes himself at home with the woman of his dreams (Lauren Holly). As the Cowsills’ ’60s love-schlock ditty “The Rain, the Park & Other Things” bounces away on the soundtrack, we see the two caught in an angelic embrace-at which point Carrey flips up the back of her minidress, flashes a schoolboy leer, and then instantly returns to his “tender” romantic gaze.

Almost any other comic would have turned that moment into a full-fledged daffy routine. With Carrey, it’s just a grace note, but the look on his face lingers-wickedly. Unlike Jerry Lewis, he’s too quick to let you catch him acting dumb.

If Carrey is ever cast in a movie as witty as he is, it could be some sort of classic. But Dumb and Dumber, the best of his pictures so far, is still a middling vehicle. There may be limits to how much comic irony can be wrung out of the spectacle of two grown men acting like complete cretins. The funniest moment isn’t really a joke at all but an outrageous gross-out. Daniels, playing a character even stupider than Carrey’s, inadvertently drinks a cup of laxative and then, in a panic, rushes into the bathroom and… well, goes (complete with graphic sound effects). Comedy doesn’t get much lower than this, but I defy anyone not to erupt into giggles watching Jeff Daniels’ face enact the five stages of bowel emergency. (movie review by: Entertainment Weekly)

Year: 1994
Opening week-end: 16,300,000$
Total Box-Office Gross: 126,000,000$
Produced by: Charles B Wessler, Brad Krevoy and Steve Stabler
Co-Starring: Jeff Daniels and Lauren Holly
Directed by: Peter Farelly
Studio/Video: New Line Cinema/New Line Home Video
Role: Lloyd Christmas
Salary: 7,000,000$
Time Length: 110 minutes
Rated: PG-13

Jim Carrey pulls off yet another hit playing Stanley Ipkiss and the Mask. The star of the runaway hit Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is back, and he’s as hyperactive as ever – only as the Mask though. As the new accounts guy at a bank managed by a spoilt brat, Ipkiss is a mild-mannered blundering dodo, until he dons the mask where he is transformed into someone who doesn’t hold back from doing what his innermost desires want.

Ipkiss dons the mask (supposedly containing the imprisoned (by Odin) spirit of Loki, the Norse god of mischief), robs the bank he works at, and goes on to woo gangster Dorian’s moll with the help of the mask’s powers. Dorian, who has ambitions of his own, resents her affection and decides to get rid of the Mask. Meanwhile, the Mask isn’t too popular with the cops either since he robbed the bank and destroyed the floor of his apartment lobby to get even with his nagging landlady. So he becomes a target of both the cops and the gangsters. To make things works, Dorian gets a hold of the mask and becomes even more evil and ruthless.

All’s well in the end when Ipkiss regains the mask (thanks to his dog Milo) and sets things right—and, of course, Dorian’s moll now is in love with Ipkiss since he was the only guy who didn’t treat her like a plaything, and she accepts him even though he gets rid of the mask in the end. Carrey’s antics suit both characters and if you don’t get tired of seeing his teeth, it makes for great viewing; catch it on the large screen if you can. (movie review by: Ram Samudrala)

Year: 1994
Opening week-end: 21,300,000$
Total Box-Office Gross: 118,000,000$
Produced by: Bob Engelman
Co-Starring: Cameron Diaz and Richard Jeni
Directed by: Charles Russell
Studio/Video: New Line Cinema/New Line Home Video
Role: Stanley Ipkiss/The Mask
Salary: 3,000,000$
Time Length: 101 minutes
Rated: PG-13